New book chronicles the origins and politics of rap duo Run The Jewels

Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The rap duo Run The Jewels began as a one-off collaboration between Atlanta's Killer Mike and Brooklyn-born El-P more than a decade ago. Four albums and dozens of remixes later, Run The Jewels has built a cult following by capturing the discontent of the poor and the oppressed. A new book looks at the music the duo has created and the political landscape from which it emerged. It's called Kill Your Masters: Run The Jewels and the World That Made Them. Author Jaap van der Doelen spoke with GPB's Peter Biello.

Peter Biello: Michael Render, also known as Killer Mike and Jaime Meline, aka El-P — they kind of formed an unlikely partnership. Can you talk a little bit about how these two guys came together to form Run The Jewels?

Jaap van der Doelen: They met through Jason DeMarco, who was an executive at Adult Swim, [which was] at the time the nightly programing of Cartoon Network, and ran a music label which grew out of reaching out to musicians that he respected to create various bumpers in between the programing slots and commercial slots on the television station. They brought a sense of cool to the television station, and he gave them a bigger platform than they had through music alone. Out of that grew a music label. And he wanted to publish a new solo record by Killer Mike. And he wanted to do something big. And he thought that Mike and El-P would be a great fit, stylistically, and also usher in something that hadn't been done before, at least not in that way, and introduced them to each other. And he was 100% right and they immediately hit it off. And initially El-P was only supposed to produce two or three tracks on the Killer — the upcoming Killer Mike solo album. But they had such strong chemistry that Killer Mike just wanted to use only his beats on the album and basically badgered him into producing the entire album.

Peter Biello: Well, let me ask you a little bit about some of the things that fans of Run The Jewels really like about them. One is that they don't dumb down their music, and although some of the lyrics can be on the nose, generally speaking, they aren't spoon-feeding you the interpretation they want you to have. Can you tell us a little bit about a song that exemplifies this?

Jaap van der Doelen: I think a great song that exemplifies that is "Early" from Run The Jewels 2, which is still my personal favorite of theirs. In its first verse, Mike tells a first-person story about a man being arrested for a minor infraction. It's weed usage.

(MUSIC from "Early")

Jaap van der Doelen: And I think the smart thing about the way that Killer Mike tells this story is that nobody in the story wants this thing to happen. These are all people in a pressure cooker that — that society has put them in.

Peter Biello: Each Run The Jewels album is responsive in its own way to the mood of the country. Can you give an example of how Run The Jewels has captured that mood?

Jaap van der Doelen: I think the greatest example of this is also a very tragic one. It's "Walking in the Snow" on — on Run The Jewels' fourth album, and there's a moment in there where Killer Mike raps about being choked by a police officer.

(MUSIC from "Walking in the Snow")

And that song came out very shortly after the murder of George Floyd, but it was actually recorded in response to the murder of Eric Garner. They're tragedies in themselves, but there's an even bigger tragedy in the fact that they keep on repeating — that they made this song in response to a tragedy and then around the time that it comes out, another extremely similar tragedy has happened again. And I think that underscores how necessary it is to keep on responding and grappling with these instances and not turn a blind eye towards them.

Peter Biello: One testament to the group's strength was the choice to put Killer Mike at the podium when Atlantans were rioting in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Wearing a shirt that says "Kill Your Masters," Killer Mike went on camera and told Atlantans to stop destroying their own home and start organizing.

Killer Mike: And it is the responsibility of us to make this better, right now. We don't want to see one officer charged. We want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced. We don't want to see Targets burning. We want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground.

Peter Biello: You started your book describing this speech. What does this say about the impact of Run the Jewels' music that the government turned to Killer Mike to try to calm things down?

Jaap van der Doelen: I think it resonated with so many people, maybe also because of the juxtaposition of the T-shirt and what he was saying. This isn't a man that's saying, "Don't riot" or "Don't express your pain." He's acknowledging the pain that people are feeling. He is acknowledging that their anger is just. But he is also explaining to them in a very honest and down-to-earth way that there are better ways to express this anger; to use this anger as fuel to organize and yet not burn down your own fortress, that you need to organize. ... He has also referenced the riots that happened in Ferguson.

Peter Biello: You're talking about Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed in 2014.

Jaap van der Doelen: Which had a direct result for the people in Ferguson to the betterment of their community. Riots there worked. They got results. But he's saying, "Don't burn down your own economy." He gave them a very direct way of how to ... use those emotions in a more constructive manner to the betterment of their community.

Listen to the Jan. 14, 2025 episode of GPB's Narrative Edge, a podcast about books with Georgia connections, in which Peter and co-host Orlando Montoya discuss Jaap van der Doelen's book.