Interview: Run The Jewels

Run The Jewels are Atlanta’s top spitter Killer Mike and NYC underground icon El-P. After being introduced by their common friend Jason Demarco of Adult Swim, El and Mike joined forces on Mike’s politically charged R.A.P. Music. A year later they gave away the first Run The Jewels album for free, and embarked on an extensive tour around the globe. Surely influenced by the massive response to their gripping live shows, Jaime and Mike allowed Run The Jewels to grow from a fun side hustle into a proper band, culminating in what was arguably the best loved rap album of 2014. In their late 30s, Run The Jewels have found a formula that can last for a long time: loud, obnoxious, genuinely pissed-off, and laugh-out loud funny. Says El-P: “It’s the shit talk that flows naturally injected with the heart of two men who have experiences and social conscience.”

In this edited and condensed excerpt from their recent RBMA Radio interview, the duo talk about Ferguson, late night TV, and stand-up comedy.

El-P

...I’m telling you man, anytime you wanna compliment me, I’m hitting you with some crazy shit...

Killer Mike

But I MEAN my compliments, you’re just saying some crazy shit…

El-P

I mean, I love you man…

Killer Mike

You’re like my white Jesus... I’d put a picture of you on my wall before I would [hang one of] white Jesus... Actually, there is a picture of you on my wall.

El-P

… Imagine me on that cross hanging, not at all skinny… I’ll be your fat white Jesus.

Killer Mike

Technically, that would make you my Buddha.

El-P

I wanna be your fat white Buddha Jesus.

Killer Mike

[laughs]

I just saw I’m actually recording already.

El-P

[laughs] Hi everybody!

Killer Mike

Hello, welcome to “Religion with Run The Jewels”

El-P

Tonight we have Fat White Buddha Jesus here...

Killer Mike

Black Messiah on his left, let’s go!

First up, congrats on all these #1 & #2’s on everyone’s year-end lists! Seems like the record of the year debate is pretty much decided...

El-P

Thank you man, it is crazy. We’re rich now!

Killer Mike

That’s true...

El-P

Literally, I checked my bank account today, I don’t know where the money came from but I am now legitimately wealthy. [laughs] I set up a PayPal account and said: Donate! And that’s all I’m about now, collecting money from strangers.

I guess part of this newfound celebrity is doing live television... which of the late night shows you guys performed on is the most fun?

El-P

Letterman is the most fun of the late night shows that I’ve done. Maybe it’s partially because I am a New Yorker and I grew up watching Letterman. I’ve done it three times: solo as El-P, backing up and helping conduct Mike’s band, and obviously with Run The Jewels. That’s where I feel I have given the best performances. Letterman has had the same staff there for 30-40 years, whatever it’s been. They’re old school New Yorkers, and you can tell they all really love their job. Also, they’re pretty much all music people: you’ve got Paul Shaffer and the whole band and they’re all amped about the music. I’ve done Conan, Kimmel, Letterman, and they’re all different experiences. But my personal preference would be Letterman.

Killer Mike

I’ve done Letterman twice, and Letterman is probably my favorite experience, too. Just because my grandpa used to let me stay up late and watch Letterman with him. I imagine my grandfather somewhere out in the universe, in the ancestral plane, watching and laughing, like: “That little fucker did it. That’s my boy down there, pass me my fucking whisky.” [laughs]

Mike, you also appeared on The Eric Andre Show recently, right?

Killer Mike

Yes, I love Eric Andre!

El-P

I’m mad that Eric Andre hasn’t brought me on the show, that’s ridiculous.

Killer Mike

I’m gonna hit him. I’m gonna ask him to bring us out as a crew. The dopest part about Eric Andre’s show is that his booker never contacts me – Eric or Hannibal [Buress] will shoot me a text or hit me on twitter. And if I’m like, “Yeah, I got some time,” then the booker will hit my manager. That’s some old school entertainment shit. Now, the problem is I never know what the fuck I’m going to do until I get there. He never tells you. You just show up like, “Yo, what am I doing today?” “Oh, we gonna put you on a treadmill with Action Bronson.” “Oh shit, I didn’t bring jogging pants.” [laughs]

I think TV entertainment is a good starting point to talk about the trajectory of Run The Jewels. Can you explain the role of Adult Swim’s Jason Demarco for the formation of the band?

Killer Mike

First of all, he is a friend of both of us, and he thought we would make cool music together, and also make good friends. Thank God his suspicions were right. Let me give you a peek into Jason’s personality: We were both invited to his wedding. El and his girl came and stayed with me and my wife, we drove down to the wedding together. So, Jason’s wife walks down the aisle to Aaliyah’s “One in a Million.” I’m the biggest Aaliyah fan in the world, so naturally, me and my wife are going crazy. Then Jay walks down the aisle to a Dilla beat! To me, that just shows so much about his dedication to dope music. Rest in peace to great Dilla.

When Mike’s R.A.P. Music came out, everyone seemed psyched to hear Southern rappers like Bun B and T.I. on an El-P beat. Yet you’d already remixed Young Jeezy for Adult Swim before that, right?

Killer Mike

That’s also Jason.

El-P

Jason stepped to me when he was doing this ATL Remix compilation. He approached me and I said, “Man, I love all this stuff, I listen to all of it and no one ever steps to me, even if I think I’d be perfect to make beats for some of these guys.” So the Jeezy remix was one of the first things that got Mike thinking, “This is nasty.”

Killer Mike

I honestly wondered, “Why isn’t Jeezy getting this guy for a whole album?” I mean, music is moving. And heavy music moves ME. Nobody makes heavy music as dope as El-P. I say this, he blushes: I think I’m with the dopest producer in the world. I honestly believe that. I don’t know why these other motherfuckers in the South don’t see it, but I see it and there’s no way I will get this lightning get out of this bottle. For example, to me there has never been a better sonic rap album by Dr. Dre than EFIL4ZAGGIN. Everybody loves The Chronic, and that’s cool – but I like dark. I like Sabbath, I like Zeppelin 1, I like heavy-ass, blues-infused rock, the same way I like dark, heavy-assed, melodic, driving, relentless rap music. So I thought, if Jeezy hadn’t done it, I’m gonna beat him to the punch and do it.

El-P

I am YOUR white producer…

Killer Mike

[laughs] He is MY white producer. I felt like we could make a soundscape that was more – excuse the cliché – like a movie. When El and I make music together, it feels like an illustrated novel to me. It feels like going on a dangerous adventure, even if it comes out light and hopeful. And that’s what I always wanted to make and replicate in music.

From a lyricists perspective, the undercurrent tone of El’s productions might be menacing. So how – for example – do you pick a beat for a deeply personal song such as “Willie Burke Sherwood”?

Killer Mike

You only find the right beat when you rap the words to it. That’s why I don’t write. The emotions are here [points to chest]. What I have found in our relationship is almost a spigot of emotion. Depending on the beat that plays, the spigot gets turned on. Now, my first instinct is always aggression, that’s what I’m the most free in.

“Willie Burke Sherwood” was gonna be a very gangster record at first! I started about four to six bars in and El would spin in his little chair and say, “Just trust me on this: We got a lot of those kind of records already. I think you need to say something personal. People need to know Mike on this record.” In that instance I thought of my grandfather who let me watch Letterman. He raised me. My parents were too young, they were kids when I was born. There is a dynamic growing up with your grandparents that you don’t get, being raised by parents. A parent is figuring out who the fuck they are, and a grandparent knows. My grandfather was 54 years old when I was born, he knew who he was, and what was important to be a man. And he knew he had to put this in me before he left. I needed to tell my story, so that even if I never could build a monument that says Willie Burke Sherwood, my grandfather’s name would still live eternally, even passing me.

A kid hit me today online about that one line where I talk about my cousin Jimmy. He’s a schizophrenic. If you follow me on twitter, there’s a light-skin dude with eye-brows just like mine with my arm around him – that’s my cousin. I’ll never take that picture down because I love him and I miss him. I still see him, but mentally he’s not the same. But that record gave me the opportunity to immortalize my grandfather, my cousin, my upbringing, and pay tribute to the type of men that I respect and I adore. And the type of men I respect and adore have been a type that has been ridiculed by American media. I grew up with people who hunt, fish, brew their own whisky, carry a knife… In America we consider ourselves more cosmopolitan these days, so we laugh at that, but these are really the characteristics that made me. When you make a hillbilly joke, it’s funny, but you’re really talking about the black guys that I grew up with. The guys I grew up with were old men, they didn’t give a shit about rap music, they gave a shit about whether you could fish or farm. As for this record, the beat told me what to say. When El plays me music, I sit there waiting for the beat to tell me what to do.

El-P

The score of the film is coming before the scene is written, y’know. [To Mike] But there’s another element to that story that you forget sometimes, which I just remembered. When we did that song, we had just happened to be drinking gin on the day before your grandfather’s birthday. We were driving around in your car and you told me that your grandfather used to drink gin and it was his birthday the next day. What I love about working with Mike is that he sees the emotion in the music in the same way that I do. A lot of people listen to a beat like “Willie Burke” and don’t see how it’s essentially a soul song. I love the fact that Mike actually saw that.

Once that conversation happened, it went quick – all he had to do was look at it from this direction and he saw it. As a producer, if you find someone that gets you musically, that’s something rare. Usually you have to really explain, overexplain even, and quite frankly, if you have to explain it’s not gonna come out the way it is supposed to come out. We don’t talk that much about it. Mike goes instinctively towards an aggressive thing because that is the first thing that comes out. We were both raised as aggressive rappers, we both battled people in our schools… the first thing that comes out of your head – just to get the words flowing and get warmed up – is shit talk. In a lot of ways, that’s what Run The Jewels is: It’s the shit talk that flows naturally, injected with the hearts of two men who have experiences and conscience.

I would like to briefly talk about the pre-concert speech that you gave recently in St. Louis, near Ferguson. Did you guys discuss this before going on stage?

Killer Mike

Yes, in fact Jaime [El-P] told me he thought it was best that I say something, and that we shouldn’t go out to the regular introduction music. I had no idea what I was gonna say. I felt defeated, I felt I had been kicked on my ass, I felt hopeless. I cried in the arms of my wife and she agreed with Jaime that I should say something, and if it wasn’t for those very important people in my life, I probably wouldn’t have said nothing. I just had buried the pain and rage during the show. I’m very glad that my friend not only asked me to say something, but stood there in solidarity with me as I said it. Because, it’s easy to tell someone, “I think you should do it,” and it’s very difficult to stand there and make sure that they know someone is with them in one of their weakest times they ever felt in their adult lives. [to El-P] Thank you. Real G shit, thank you.

It’s just a horrible synchronicity that “Don’t Die,” one of the first songs that you two recorded together, is a perfectly accurate description of what has happened throughout the year, with Michael Brown and Eric Garner just being the most recent examples. El, you’ve made numerous tracks about police brutality, and on the new RTJ album, “Early” with Boots deals with the topic as well… Do you guys feel comfortable with how your peers reacted over the past weeks?

Killer Mike

First of all, let me state out that of every American music, soul music in particular was very vocal in the ‘60s and ‘70s. You had two types of soul. You had Motown soul, which was pretty and safe, and you had Stax soul, which was dirty and grimy – and social. If rap is soul music in a spectrum, we lend ourselves to the side of Stax music. Rap has been the only American music where virtually every artist has a social thing to say: from your very top-tier Outkast, Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem and even your Nelly’s, to your very underground, whether it’s ASAP or El-P, UGK or 8ball & MJG. All have said very socially conscious things. I expected that of rappers, and I’m very happy that rap doesn’t let me down.

For a lot of kids that get into the game of rap, just them existing and escaping some of the conditions they escaped is a social statement within itself. Because a lot of them get an opportunity to change their personal circumstances, change the circumstances of their family, and change the circumstances of their greater community. I am an advocate for people who know what they want to say, to say it. And if you don’t know what to say: Be quiet. So I’m very happy that the rappers who appeared in Ferguson appeared, I’m very happy the guys who knew what to say and were tactful about it, said it, and I’m more happy that people who had nothing to say shut the fuck up.

On a lighter note, I would like to talk about comedy with you.

Killer Mike

Yeah, WHY hasn’t anyone given us a movie yet? It’s time! [laughs]

We already discussed the underlying morality and depth of the trash talking that’s characteristic of Run The Jewels. A shared, obnoxious sense of humor seems equally important. Are there any stand-ups or comedy writers that inspire you?

El-P

Oh yeah, absolutely! I grew up on Eddie Murphy, Bill Hicks, George Carlin… I grew up on Bill Cosby, as much as that was okay to say a month ago [laughs] and not as good to say now...

Killer Mike

[mimics Eddie Murphy’s Richard Pryor impression] “Tell Bill to have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.” [laughs]

El-P

…Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx… Yes, we share a love of comedy and a love for humor in general. I think that both me and Mike are intense enough in our music that we lean towards gallows humour. We lean towards the absurd, the tragic humor in the face of your own execution. As a form of empowerment, too, y’know – there’s nothing more powerful than spitting in the face of a king. Humor is a weapon and a protection and a shield, and if used correctly it is impenetrable. I really believe that no one is so powerful that they can take away my power to bring them down a notch with the right disrespect. [laughs] That’s what me and Mike are doing, representing characters that are very much based on ourselves but magnify who we wanna be. It’s who we are, but in a distilled version of that, which is: Two dudes who honestly don’t have shit, come from fucking nothing, and are still looking like at you like YOU’RE fucking nothing. [laughs]

Killer Mike

You hear repeat references in my rhymes about how I absolutely detest the idea of royalty. “I catch the Prince of England slipping, he gon’ run me the jewels.” I meant that shit, in the most gregarious and laughable way I can. Because comedy allows you the opportunity to say incredible truths and get people to laugh at it. El introduced me to Bill Hicks, I already was a huge Carlin fan, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor… You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry like, “This motherfucker is going through something on stage...” But all these were records I was sneak listening to at my dad’s mom’s house. I just sneaked in and listened to them, because they just said these real world things that I was seeing. I remember when my Dad took me to see [Richaed Pryor’s] Jo Jo Dancer and when we walked out of the theater we realized, “Fuck, that was an intense movie.” My dad looked at me and said, “You don’t tell your mom we saw this movie.” [laughs]

El-P

That’s it. If truth is represented with the right timing, truth is comedy. Because truth presented eloquently in the face of a lie makes a lie laughable. That is a form of comedy, and a weapon as well. You laugh because things are true. It’s not all slipping on a banana peel, fart noise and honk-honk. [laughs] That’s one way to do comedy. There’s comedy and there’s humorists, and I think both me and Mike we’d like to follow the tradition of humorists. In the sense that we’re not here to make you laugh, we’re here to laugh in the face of pain and present truth in the grimiest, grittiest, clearest way, so you have no choice but to laugh.

Killer Mike

My grandmother was a big fan of saying, “You gotta laugh when you wanna cry.” So much of this has been true in my adulthood. I wanna thank honest comedians like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, I gotta thank them because it’s difficult a lotta times being a black guy in America, but it got easier at times because I’ve had some wonderful comedians. Jon Stewart…

El-P

Jon Stewart is a perfect example of someone who’s bringing laughter out of truth.

Killer Mike

He recently had that line concerning Ferguson, where he went something like, “If you’re tired of hearing about oppression and oppressed people in America, imagine what it feels like being the oppressed.” I saw that shit on my computer and walked out with my hands up by my goddamn self. [laughs] I just walked around the room like, “Yes! Yes, motherfucker! You figured out how to say it!” As a black person I get so fucking tired of living, knowing I’m black. Imagine how I feel if you get tired of hearing this shit. So if you wanna get rid of us complaining, get rid of the problem. He was the first and bravest person to say it in that way, and I appreciate Jon for that shit. And: it was even better on weed. [laughs]

El-P

That’s what Run The Jewels is: Comedy and intelligence, and we reserve the right to be serious, and that is the deal. If you’re fucking with us, we completely reserve the right to be ridiculous and serious and mean both of them, and we’re not asking if it’s okay. We will make a fart joke, gladly, we will make the most glorious fart joke we can come up with. [laughs] And at the same time we demand the respect for our perception of the reality of what’s going on around us. It’s not up for debate. We’re not asking permission as to whether or not we’re allowed to have the perspective that we have. We have it, we’re adults, we’re fully formed intellects and I think people feel empowered listening to it because they get that. Hopefully there is a well-roundedness and an attitude there that could be latched onto, that could be positive even for kids listening to it.

Is that the same sort of formative empowerment that you guys got out of rap music at an early age?

El-P

Yeah, when I was a kid, I got a lot of my attitude about power and self-power and respect and humor from rappers! Straight up. I mean, Run-D.M.C... sometimes you see the finish line before you know how they got there and what route they took, but Run-D.M.C. had a swagger, and a badass perspective. You could tell Run-D.M.C. were like, “Fuck you, I’m the shit, no debate here. And, I dress like a regular motherfucker. And, I’m a man of the people. And, I don’t take myself all that serious, I WILL do a motherfucking Christmas song.” [laughs]

Killer Mike

They made rap as an art form instantly equal. Because “King of Rock,” on some level, was a protest record. Rap was looked at as this secondary thing. When that motherfucker said [raps] “I’m the king of rock, there is none higher, sucker MCs will call me Sire / To burn my kingdom you must use fire, and I won’t stop rocking til I retire.” I was like, “Yeah, fuck you! We’re important, too!” That was as significant as any record I fell in love with in my dad’s rock collection. I don’t think Run-D.M.C. get the credit they deserve as equalizers of a musical genre. But they instantly brought rap to a national platform. And they were pretty fucking funny.