After a killer Laneway set last year, Run the Jewels made a triumphant return to New Zealand over the weekend, playing Wellington's James Cabaret on Friday and Auckland's Studio yesterday.
Both venues were a sweatbox, The Studio suffering the most, to the point where El-P declared it a tour record:
that might have been a tour record for temperature on stage tonight. my sweat was sweating.
— el-p (@therealelp) January 10, 2015
But what both shows proved is what we've all been reading in album and tour reviews – Run the Jewels have hit their stride. The fusion of two respected rap artists, El-P and Killer Mike, is the best we could have ever hoped for.
It's a relationship the two men have been fostering for years, the appropriately named El-P producing Killer Mike's 2013's R.A.P. Music. The two then made guest appearances on each other's records, and then Run the Jewels came along, producing two albums' worth of great music.
I sat down with the pair before their New Zealand shows, and what struck me is how alert, excited and kind the two men are. We saw it at their Auckland show, as both handed out water to a parched, sweaty audience, Killer Mike briefly stopping his performance to stop someone getting hurt in the front row.
On the first time they met each other:
El-P: We actually tell people they're not allowed to ask that.
Killer Mike: Yeah, that's one of the five questions you can't ask.
On the tensions back home and touring abroad:
Killer Mike: Borders are imaginary. We're all just human beings. At some point we all walked out of Africa and we went to South Central Asia, we went to Europe, we adapted, we looked different. But at the end of the day we're just human beings. So it's a human problem. The most endearing thing that's happened to me on the road, being a man from America, and coming from a country with such tension, has been in London and in France, [where] kids were protesting Ferguson – kids who weren't at our show, kids that weren't aware of Run the Jewels. They just cared about people who didn't look like them, who had different passports. So I would say for me the experience has shown me that the problems that I endure in my country, and the tension that my country has, other people care about in a bigger way than even I thought of. And it really is a humanity problem. And I really think that as walls get broken down, through social media, through music, through art, that people are going to be less married to the affiliation of nation, pridefully or shamefully, and more into, 'How do we make this a fair and equal place for everyone?' So that the few short years we spend on Earth – 70 or 80 or 90 years – are ones filled with joy and serenity versus a global tension and war.
Oh their sense of humour:
El-P: We have a form of gallows humour I think. I think me and Mike have decided a long time ago in our lives that we were standing on the edge of the abyss and that we were going to laugh at it a little bit. Because there was nothing we could do. That's one of the things I love about writing with Mike is I can exercise that dark, cynical human that is natural to me. And Mike has the same kind of humour. It makes us smile, man. At the end of the day, with all of the horror and doom and the truth about how disturbing this all is, we're all also just arseholes and that's kind of funny to me.
Killer Mike: And at the end of the race everybody dies.
El-P: 'Yo, you are out of here! You're outta here!' If we didn't make jokes we'd be running in the streets naked with a brick in our hand screaming at passers-by. Next thing you know you're making a cat sounds record.
On Meow The Jewels (proceeds going to the families of the victims of police brutality):
Killer Mike: A stupid idea that ended up being a really good cause. El put it together as a joke for our packages.
El-P: Just like the album dropping and people downloading the album, the Meow the Jewels thing really felt like another really big sort of signifier of our relationship right now with the people that are supporting our music. That felt equally as big to me because it was a community of kids who made something happen that was ridiculous, but was also for a really good cause. And it's crowdsourcing a decent and hopeful morality. It's cool to me.
On hip-hop:
Killer Mike: Hip-hop may be the only genre that's as aware of every other genre.
On what RTJ is:
Killer Mike: This is a rap group, not a collaboration. A collaboration is a girlfriend relationship. You can break up if you decide you don't like each other tomorrow. This is like a marriage. This is a rap group.
On their solo careers:
El-P: I think we both worked in our own ways for a long time, and had really good careers in their own right, and we made records we really cared about. That was the focus of my life until Run the Jewels. But this Run the Jewels is the culmination of those two things. Run the Jewels seemed like it just sort of happened, but it's built on the backs of about 10 years of work for each of us. That being said, yeah we're going to do solo stuff. The easy answer is 'of course'. That's what we are; we are that. We are still the same people. And that's why we tried to bring a bit more of our heart to RTJ2. I think you can hear Killer Mike and EL-P a little better on this record.
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source: newshub archive
