7 Prescient Lyrics From Run the Jewels' RTJ4

Once once more, they've released an album in the eye of a movement against police brutality. Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for DIRECTV

Run the Jewels released their 2nd album, Run the Jewels 2, in October 2014 every bit the state awaited charges for the police force officeholder who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed blackness 18-year-sometime, in Ferguson, Missouri. The rail "Early," which imagines member Killer Mike being killed by a police officer during a traffic end, felt all too relevant afterwards its release — non to mention a calendar month later, when a 1000 jury declined to indict officer Darren Wilson for killing Brown. Over one-half a decade afterwards, nothing has changed, as Run the Jewels release their fourth album with people beyond the country and effectually the earth protesting the contempo police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and countless others.

The duo of Killer Mike and El-P address police brutality, racism, corruption, and protestation head-on on this album, which El-P described to Vulture equally "a completely relentless, savage fucking punch in the face." Afterwards pushing the album upwardly from June 5 to Wednesday, June 3, Run the Jewels wrote to fans, "The world is infested with bullshit so hither's something raw to listen to while you deal with it all." These vii lyrics feel particularly apt today.

"I got one round left, a hunnid cops exterior
I could shoot at them or put one betwixt my eyes
Chose the latter, it don't matter, it own't suicide
And if the news say it was that's a goddamn lie
I tin can't allow the pigs kill me, I got too much pride
And I meant it when I said information technology, never accept me alive."
— Killer Mike

Mike opens the album thinking about police violence, setting up a scenario where he kills himself knowing that the cops would've instead. Suicide returns as a motif on "pulling the pin," when Mike raps about the pressure level of staying truthful to himself: "So picture show me red equally I sit on the bed / With my hands on my head and this pistol too."

"Now I empathize that woke folk be playin'
Ain't no revolution is televised and digitized
You've been hypnotized and Twitter-ized past silly guys
Cues to the evenin' news, brand sure you sick-advised
Got you celebratin' the generators of genocide
Whatever proficient act is pummeled, punished and penalized"
— Killer Mike

June 2's Coma Tuesday confusion, along with the "few bad apples" narrative effectually policing that gets circulated on social media, makes these lines from Mike hitting shut equally many watch protests online due to social distancing. They also come on i of Mike's hardest verses on the album.

"And every day on evening news they feed you fearfulness for free
And you and so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me
And 'til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, 'I can't breathe'
And you sit there in the business firm on couch and watch it on TV
The nigh you give'south a Twitter bluster and telephone call it a tragedy
Just truly the travesty, you've been robbed of your empathy"
— Killer Mike

El-P had to clarify on Twitter that Mike recorded these lines last fall, non terminal week, that's how prescient they are. Mike'southward really referencing the 2014 police force killing of Eric Garner, who said "I can't breathe" eleven times after an officer put him in a chokehold while attempting to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes.

"And your land gettin' ran by a casino possessor
Pedophiles sponsor all these fuckin' racist bastards
And I told you once befo' that yous should impale your master
At present that's the line that'southward probably gon' get my ass assassinated"
— Killer Mike

On this song comparing current economic struggles to slavery, Mike revisits his rallying cry to "impale your masters" from the end of Run the Jewels 3. "We spend so much time mortally wounding each other when we should do like Lucy Parsons says: Every lousy tramp in the gutters should do abroad with the class of people who would make us slaves," he recently told Entertainment Weekly. "That's what I believe in my eye of hearts, just I as well believe it'south never gonna happen, because human beings look for leadership, and that'south why evil men seem to rule."

"Beep beep, Richie, this is New York City
The X on the map where the pain go along hitting
Just us ducks here sitting
Where murderous chokehold cops nonetheless earnin' a livin'
Funny how some say money don't matter
That'due south rich now, isn't it, get it? Comedy
Endeavour to sell a pack a smokes to get food
Get killed and it'south not an anamoly
Only hey, it'due south merely money"
— El-P

Later in the song, longtime Brooklynite El-P returns to Eric Garner's killing, merely across the Narrows in Staten Island. He sees it equally part of a larger trend of tearing policing in New York City. "New York is merely this noise, and you're just erecting these illusions around yourself that sometimes don't final longer than hours," he told Vulture. "It's just jumping from illusion to illusion, just to protect yourself."

"Hate to sound contemptuous merely shit is pitiful, times is just critical
Like Jimmy Savile, they cheerfully impale kids in a ritual
I'll murder the miserables, I'll get in all biblical
I'll cut off their heads, they'll beg for their lives and I'll put it up, digital
Fuck the political, the mission is spiritual
Our murder is miracle, that was sent here to just punish through terror"
— Killer Mike

Mike compares corrupt people in power to English Tv set and radio host Jimmy Savile, revealed later on his 2011 death to have sexually abused hundreds, including children. He calls his mission "spiritual" on the aforementioned runway that features a haunting chorus by gospel singer Mavis Staples, who has been an activist for civil rights since the 1960s, when her male parent and Staple Singers collaborator Roebuck "Pops" Staples was close with Martin Luther King Jr.

"This is for the do-gooders that the no-gooders used and then abused
For the truth tellers tied to the whippin' mail, left browbeaten, battered, bruised
For the ones whose body hung from a tree similar a piece of strange fruit
Go difficult, last words to the firing squad was, 'Fuck you lot as well'"
— Killer Mike

Mike grapples with his female parent'south June 2017 death after a struggle with addiction on the album's final track. "Black child in America, the fact that I fabricated information technology was magic," he raps earlier in this poesy, before concluding by dedicating the album to protestors and activists fighting for their rights — along with those who died along the style.

7 Prescient Lyrics From Run the Jewels' RTJ4