RUN THE JEWELS

Before their thunderous sold-out London debut, Crack initially struggles to get a word in edgeways, their ability to seamlessly flit between seriousness and silliness proving a little disarming at first. Although tired, they’re in good spirits, constantly chipping away at one another: Mike goading El-P over being a sell-out, El-P later returning the favour by loudly professing his love for carving “figurines out of large bars of industrial soap” as Mike slips into autopilot mode, speaking ambitiously about dreams to expand his SWAG barbershop franchise nationally. As a buddy comedy with no moral compass, that the Mike & El Show plans to run for years to come is undoubtedly a very good thing indeed.

So first up: Do you guys wrestle each other? And if so, who wins?

Mike: He’d win, because he’s fucking mean and he’s a ginger and half-Irish. He’s a tough motherfucker.

El-P: There’s no way I would win. You know it, I know it, science knows it. I’m not stupid enough to wrestle him. We mind wrestle – then it’s anybody’s victory.

When it actually came round to recording material, how does it get done? Most of it sounds like two kids in a basement, gassed off each other’s energy. There must have been a few one-liners where you had to pull back, just high- five and laugh?

E: God yeah, several times. Most of them were spontaneous, like one or two takes maximum.

M: That’s just it. Often as soon as we’d finish the first take, right away we’d just explode with laughter. You can’t laugh during the take or it fucks up, so it’s tough.

E: It’s hard to make the record we made and not laugh throughout the whole thing. But it’s not a laugh, it’s more a diabolical, evil cackle.

M: I rap about shooting a fucking poodle, just like: FUCK poodles, motherfucker. When my wife heard it for the first time she was like, “damn, you shot a dog?” “Nope: shot a baby and a dog.”

E: [Shakes head in mock horror] In the first verse. He laughed, I just got on my knees and said a prayer.

Is comedy a natural foil to evil or is partly an escape mechanism from the grit around you?

E: Personally I’ve always kept that maniacal, drunk on the edge of the cliff laughter in the back of my head, not only in my music but in the way I look at life. To me, that’s the only way to deal with it. I think natural humour in a dangerous situation is a powerful thing. There’s a lot of obvious over-the-top shit where we’re really enjoying saying the words, that aspect of just invoking the humour. I think it happens when you’ve got a certain type of intellect – that’s just the way me and Mike are, for sure. We really made this record for ourselves, and found a lot of common ground in that sinister humour.

Are the heavy references purely for your own entertainment too, or did you want to ramp up sales of Twin Hype 12”s and Mike Tyson- endorsed Nintendo games as well?

E: [Laughs] We were just pumped and that happens when you get two people like me and Mike in the same room – we’d be already making the same jokes anyway even if we weren’t rapping.

M: Rap is about braggadocio, first and foremost. Everybody learns how to rap talking about themselves. As a movement right now, we’re kind of stuck in a certain place where things define who we are. We wanted our first record to be traditionally what any first good record would be like: talking about how we’re the shit. But it’s less about the shit we have, but who we are, how we think and what we can do. I think the only way you do that is to get dark and outrageous. I like a lot of British action movies – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, shit like that. Those movies are packed with a lot of raw action and darkness, but there’s also a sense of humour about them that’s amazing. I wanted to replicate that experience, and the ill shit about Run The Jewels, for me, is it does.

When you’re out on tour, watching people shout back to you about soothing suicide booths or still spelling America with the triple K, do you feel you’re getting through? That they’ll leave the concert considering a different outlook?

M: I think they do. I did a show here in London in January, and while I was playing Reagan a chant went up … as an American, I’m familiar with who Margaret Thatcher was, but I wasn’t familiar with the sentiment of the people towards her. So a chant arose from the crowd going, “Die Maggie Die!”. I didn’t know what the fuck to do.

Oh shit.

M: Yeah! That’s exactly what I thought: “Oh. Shit. What the fuck is going on?” Later on – God bless the dead – she passed and when I got the word, it really sent a chill to my spine. I was wondering the same thing: “are kids getting this?” For me that song’s not about Ronald Reagan the man. We have the Martin Luther King holiday – a national holiday celebrating one of the greatest American orators and African Americans ever – because he conceded to that. But as a policy, Reaganism was evil. His regime was evil. To lionise that type of evil, and even compare yourself to that in the present day, is foolhardy, it’s dangerous and it sends us back down the course of that road, potentially. That’s what I rally against. But for those kids to internalise that message, and say the same set of circumstances happened based on this politician, shows the audience gets it, and that they’re smart. Rap is the reason I began to study harder in school; how I gained a certain consciousness about what was really going on in the matrix we call the world versus what what we were being fed by intelligence. I don’t doubt the ability of my audience to get higher things in rap records.

Do you find your worldview softening at all? Especially when coming off tour, experiencing firsthand that connection, does life look less harsh than when you’re in a chamber making a record?

E: Life is not as harsh as when I’m in a chamber making a record. I mean, the type of records I make are exorcisms, and they’re necessary for me as a person. If I didn’t, I’d be naked in the street with a pistol – which would be not only weird-looking but dangerous for everybody. But we really do have a great time, and I think sometimes people are really taken back. They expect me to be this sullen, evil motherfucker who’s just constantly thinking about just the darkest shit … and, y’know, that’s not the guy you’re going to see all the time. But he could take over. He has tried – luckily I’ve been able to figure out how to rap.

M: I’m from the DMX school: the studio shit is cool, let’s get it done, cause I wanna be on stage. That’s it. Ever since I was a little fat boy who dreamed of being a breakdancer, that’s what I’ve wanted to do. The worst part of the years between leaving a major label, dropping the PLEDGE series and getting to R.A.P Music was the marginalised touring that I was able to do. I thank God for the last two records as they’ve enabled me to go back on tour. I don’t know the perspective of, “oh man, can’t wait get these endorsements so I have enough money that I don’t have to tour!” The rapper I dreamed of was one who toured, six to nine months a year. You just have to laugh at least once or twice a day. Although some days you don’t laugh.

E: I always laugh at you.

M: You laugh at me, but I laugh with you. When you fall, I laugh with you.

E: When you sleep, I stand over you.

M: I fart on your bed when you’re asleep, and you don’t know.

E: That’s why I always wake up crying. What if I went through your bag and found a little can of fake smell of shit spray?

M: You will! Have you been going through my bag?

E: You’re going to die on tour, you know that?

M: I pray that it’s not this tour, and I pray that it’s not some Willie Nelson age. I want to start taking some barber classes.

E: Technically I should get mine because I’ll probably be there when you die.

M: I’ve only just gotten to the point before we came here where I told my wife that I was glad it’s merely a few dates on this run. I just wanna go home, sleep next to her, wake up and kick it with my children; but it took 23 months for me to get that way. I’m built for this shit. If I can tour till I die, that’s what I’m gonna do.

You guys realise you might have to put those ambitions on hold given that you’ve just announced Run The Jewels 2?

M: [Pause; exchanges pained glance with a shrugging El] Aww fuck. [Both laugh]

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Words: Gabriel Szatan

Photo: Dexter Lander

Run The Jewels is available January 13th via Big Dada