Killer Mike and El-P's raps remain aggressive, but the sometimes sludgy remixes drag the energy down, most glaringly on the previously exhilarating Zach de la Rocha explosion "Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)," which is chopped and screwed with hilarious cat meowing. Including remixes by an impressive roster of the new and the legendary ( El-P, Just Blaze, Zola Jesus, Prince Paul, Geoff Barrow, Boots, Blood Diamonds, Dan the Automator, and 3D of Massive Attack), Meow is also injected with a little extra humor by ostensible enemy of cats, Snoop Dogg, and famous Internet cutie Lil Bub. Meow the Jewels is a fuzzed-out, madcap, woozy reimagination of an otherwise thrilling banger of an album. ![]() ![]() Run the Jewels' 2014 critically acclaimed sequel to their debut is not completely cat-ified here (as some fans hoped/expected), but there are enough feline samples (and playful kitty lyrics) to sate fans with a sense of humor. Salutes to AG Rojas for his unique take on the subject matter and to Shea and Keith for giving us their all and bringing it to life.It started as a Kickstarter joke, but there now exists in this world a remix album cobbled together with adorable cat sounds. However, there is an opportunity to dialogue and change the way communities are policed in this country. There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world. Killer Mike: This video represents the futile and exhausting existence of a purgatory-like law enforcement system. Our goal was to highlight the futility of the violence, not celebrate it.Įl-P: This is a vision of a seemingly never-ending struggle whose participants are pitted against each other by forces originating outside of themselves. They’ve already fought their way past their judgments and learned hatred toward one another. The film begins and it feels like they have been fighting for days, they’re exhausted, not a single punch is thrown, their violence is communicated through clumsy, raw emotion. They’re people – complex, real people and, as such, the power had to shift between them at certain points throughout the story. For me, it was important to write a story that didn’t paint a simplistic portrait of the characters of the Cop and Kid. It’s provocative, and we all knew this, so we were tasked with making something that expressed the intensity of senseless violence without eclipsing our humanity. We had to exploit the lyrics and aggression and emotion of the track, and translate that into a film that would ignite a valuable and productive conversation about racially motivated violence in this country. I felt a sense of responsibility to do just that. Rojas: When Run The Jewels sent me this track, I knew we had the opportunity to create a film that means something. ![]() ![]() Read the full statement from the director and RTJ: It’s an apt depiction of both the very real violence we’ve been seeing in the streets and in grainy YouTube videos, and the complex emotional and social aftermath of trying to process that violence and it implications. Killer Mike himself, though sharply critical of police militarization, has given interviews about the tension in being both a black man in America and the son of a policeman raised in a pro-cop environment, and that sort of conflict is brought to life in the video. Both the kid and the cop are portrayed as nuanced human beings, the struggle is desperate, and there is no glorified payoff, only weariness and futility. As Rojas says in a statement accompanying the video, “it feels like they have been fighting for days, they’re exhausted, not a single punch is thrown, their violence is communicated through clumsy, raw emotion.” As a track, “Close Your Eyes” is aggressive and playful, full of trademark bravado and performative catharsis (Killer Mike’s opening verse calls for a prison riot, deadpanning “We killin’ them for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom / And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord’ll sort ’em”)-but where the song is emotionally straightforward, the video is extremely emotionally complex. Rojas, depicts an unarmed young black man and a white cop fighting in the middle of an empty street. Louis show immediately following the Ferguson Grand Jury verdict, so it’s no surprise that the video for “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” (featuring Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine) is a total mic-drop moment. Run the Jewels were among last year’s most visible artists to speak out about police brutality, whether in songs like “Early” on Run the Jewels 2, or in Killer Mike’s impassioned speech at the St.
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