After I finished writing this, when I went to create a featured image, I found that I already had one for RTJ4. Which means I already did a review. Apparently I did it over a year ago, but I failed to set the category to “Albums” when I posted it, so, I missed it when trying to decide what album to review. Since I spent significant time on this, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of my thought on the album, I’m keeping both, it’s my blog. You can read the other one here: RTJ4 [confusion.cc] and compare if you are so inclined.
I first became aware of Run the Jewels [wikipeida.org], or RTJ, as the MCs on the DJ Shadow song “Nobody Speak”. “Nobody Speak” is an amazing track and it has one of the best music videos ever! Go watch it now [youtube.com] if you’ve never seen it. After hearing “Nobody Speak” I went and found the RTJ back catalog. “Nobody Speak” was released a few months before RTJ’s third album in 2016.
So I was familiar with RTJ, and had songs from their first three albums in heavy rotation, when RTJ4 dropped in mid 2020. RTJ4 was released, a couple of days early, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests triggered by the death of George Floyd [wikipedia.org], at the hands of the police because police brutality, especially against the black community in America is a major, in fact the major, theme of the album.
There is a lot of commentary on police brutality on the album. I’m going to refrain from turning this post into a discussion of the politics of Black Lives Matter, or Blue Lives Matter or De-fund the Police or whatever social media convenient slogan you may or may not personally agree with. But… I do want to talk about a few of the lyrics that hit hard, especially hard given the real world situation that the albums was released into.
First off, in the song “goonies vs E.T.” Mike delivers these lines:
Now I understand that woke folk be playin'
Ain't no revolution is televised and digitized
You've been hypnotized and Twitter-ized by silly guys
Cues to the evenin' news, make sure you ill-advised
Which references Gil Scott-Heron’s, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” [wikipeida.org]. By adding “digitized” and referencing Twitter I think this is encouraging people to channel their anger into action, not just posting on social media.
Mike comes back to this sentiment in the very next song, the most powerful song on the album, “walking in the snow”, when he raps:
And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
But truly the travesty, you've been robbed of your empathy
Replaced it with apathy [...]
The most shocking thing about this particular verse by Mike is the lines that immediately proceed the bit on Twitter rants:
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
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"
This album was dropped in the middle of the George Floyd Protests, protests sparked by the death of a man caused by a cop kneeling on his throat while he repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. So how can Mike reference that so quickly?
He’s not.
It’s not George Floyd he’s quoting.
It’s Eric Garner [wikipeida.org] who was choked out by NYC police in 2014. While complaining I can’t breathe.
You can see why “Walking in the Snow” became such a big song during the protests. (as an aside: there are no Wikipedia articles on any of the individual songs on this album, for most albums I look at there are at least a couple of the more popular songs that have individual articles.)
Now, I want to go back to the line The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
. And ignoring the irony, I want to use social media to back up Mike’s point that social media is the opiate of the masses and a false outlet for empathy and poor stand in for true action for change.
Hank Green once posted on Threads [threads.com]; “It would take a lot to convince me that the problem with America is that we’re not angry enough.” And another guy, Jason Pargin responded with a video on Facebook/Instagram [fb.watch] where he said something relevant here:
[…] With every strong emotion you can feel, there’s two versions of it and most people don’t recognize this.
There’s a fun version of the emotion and there’s a real version […]
[…] When he says the problem is not a lack of anger it sounds ridiculous because for some of you your social media feeds are nothing but outrage all the time.
But for 99.99% of us, it is not the kind of outrage that would motivate us to go attend a boring city council meeting every single week. That other kind of anger is the fun anger. It is its own reward. It is fun to sit around and imagine one day there being a revolution or imagining terrible things happening to the powerful people you hate. The system does not fear that kind of anger at all.
The system is terrified of the kind of anger that will motivate you to tolerate boredom and tedium. The kind of anger that motivates you to spend the rest of your life studying and becoming an expert and making yourself valuable in society so that you have power to effect change. The kind of anger that motivates you to sacrifice fun for discipline.
This is why Mike is talking about. That posting your outrage or support for action on social media will not help. That going out and working to affect change requires you to put down the phone and do something. To protest. To vote. To get involved.
The George Floyd Protests were action by a lot of people around the world. Unfortunately that action didn’t result in the right changes and it faded too quickly. Maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it was the feel good dopamine hit of watching people protest on social media. Maybe it was just defeatism in the face of a massive system and the backlash. Yes the fascist were defeated at the ballot box. But not for long. Four years on they stormed back, with a republican winning the presidential popular vote for the first time since I was in elementary school. And apathy is a big reason why, more eligible people didn’t vote than voted for any actual candidate, including Trump or Harris. So the pendulum seems to have swung firmly back in the other direction, towards apathy if we want to be generous, towards fascism and the politics of hate if we want to be realistic.
Anyway. I said I would not get too much into politics. So let me end this post now as every song I look at is filled with more politics. RTJ4 is a great album, like most great rap it’s highly contextual to its time and place. But it’s still relevant and hard hitting. One day, maybe the context will be lost on most listeners but it’s still fresh enough and, unfortunately, still relevant enough that it should leave an impression on you. If you haven’t heard it, take a listen.
On iTunes:
Or on Spotify: