Killer Mike is in Atlanta showing me his guns. In the next Zoom window over, his musical partner El-P is in New York holding forth about the hypocrisies of America’s founding fathers. To paraphrase Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski: sometimes there’s a band, and they’re the band for their time and place. Run The Jewels fit right in here.
The two men – real names Michael Render and Jaime Meline, both a lot closer to 50 than they look – have become an indispensable part of the soundtrack to this moment in history. Within hours of their new record ‘Run The Jewels 4’ dropping in June, it was already being played loud at Black Live Matter protests, echoing out over cities all around the globe. In particular, Mike’s lines on the track ‘walking in the snow’, written about the 2014 death of Eric Garner, took on a horrific resonance: “And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me / Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe’.”
The fact that those words were also repeated over and over again by a dying George Floyd, a Black man whose killing by a white police officer inspired the renewed BLM movement, is of course no coincidence. “You start to realise that it’s not happenstance,” says Mike. “These things didn’t just happen to be the same. That move that [Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin] did is a move used by police all over the world. We’re setting up a system to repeatedly murder. I’m glad that it resonated with people, and I’m glad that in the moment it resonated with people they were in the streets burning down police stations.”
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 