Run the Jewels have a lot to celebrate this year. Their first album, the genesis of RTJ, turns 10 this week. Plus, they’ve decided to mark the occasion with blowout anniversary runs in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles come fall. It’s a victory lap in a story full of victory laps. But as everyone involved is quick to admit, the beginning of RTJ was far humbler. Nobody expected it to go this way. In a series of Zoom conversations with Complex—Killer Mike from his home in Atlanta, El-P from his home in Brooklyn—the duo looked back on how it all started.
“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to recapture that moment,” El-P admits. “It’s really unique—the lack of expectations, the magic of us hooking up and making something for no audience. There was no history. It was just a moment of feeling refreshed, having fun.”
“There’s never been a time where I didn’t understand this is what I’m supposed to be doing, and this is who I’m supposed to be doing it with,” Killer Mike says, reflecting on the immediate bond Run the Jewels created for him. He adds, laughing: “Sometimes it was just waiting for him to come around.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever be able to recapture that moment... the magic of us hooking up and making something for no audience. There was no history. It was just a moment of feeling refreshed, having fun.”
Run the Jewels’ origin story comes with a prologue, in the shape of Killer Mike’s 2012 solo album, R.A.P. Music. That collection was produced entirely by El-P, the New York producer Mike had only recently just met thanks to their mutual acquaintance, Adult Swim creative director Jason DeMarco. DeMarco had known and worked with both rappers, and he found himself conversing with Killer Mike at a crossroads—his solo career wasn’t going where he wanted it to, and he was wrestling with continuing to use the Killer Mike name.
In the years leading up to their introduction, El-P and Killer Mike had both been through the wringer. El had already been in the game for nearly 20 years, dating back to his late teens. Along the way, he got started in the group Company Flow, spearheaded the label Definitive Jux, and released a handful of acclaimed solo albums. He was renowned in New York’s backpack scene, but had a crisis of faith in his mid-30s, amidst the collapse of Def Jux.
“I didn’t even know if people would want to hear from me again,” El remembers. “It was the first time I was having some major doubts about my future. I was scared.” Exiting an era of frustration and anxiety about his future as an artist, El knew all he had left was his ability to make a new solo album. That’s where his focus was.
Mike, too, had an arc that hadn’t quite gone as hoped. After making his recording debut on OutKast’s Stankonia, he rejoined the ATL legends for “The Whole World,” which nabbed them (and him) a Grammy. But his solo run through the 2000s hadn’t elevated him to stardom, and he wondered what to do next. Still, he was perhaps in a less jaded place than his soon-to-be producer. “Man, I’m eternally optimistic,” he says. “If you put a pile of horseshit in one room, I’m the kid who’s going to come in and say, ‘With all this shit in here, there’s gotta be a goddamn pony somewhere for me to ride.’” His hopeful outlook was finally about to pay off.
“I had a particular interest at that time in the idea of mashing up ‘indie’- or ‘alternative’-style rap music with what was the more prevalent style of Southern rap music,” DeMarco recalls. “I asked Mike what his favorite album was and he said Amerikkka’s Most Wanted. I knew there was only one artist that made sense to bring to him to produce.”
Just as Ice Cube’s classic debut has long signified a union between East and West Coasts thanks to its Bomb Squad production, so, too, would El-P and Killer Mike’s partnership cross territorial lines geographically and stylistically. They were both students of rap history, and fans of the same music from their childhoods. Neither of them was coming to this marriage ignorant of the other’s background, and they soon found common ground. Realizing they were a mere month apart in age, they connected over the music that made them: formative ‘90s rap. Of course, the premise still looked wild from the outside.
“The first reaction [from fans] was exactly what we knew it would be: ‘What the fuck?’” El-P says. “How does this make any sense on paper? For a new audience, this was completely demented. No one thought that would work.”
When El first got down to Atlanta, he and Mike spent an hour talking. They hit it off fast. Then El played him a few beats, leading with what would become R.A.P. Music’s head-crushing opener, “Big Beast.” Mike “flipped” right away. He played him a few more beats.
“Then it got weird,” El says. “By the end of the session, whatever plans I felt I had for my life seemed to be questionable.” He’d felt something different with Mike than other collaborators—the vibe between them as people and artists was palpable, and he tentatively considered that maybe there was more than one track for them here.
Still, El was fixated on finishing his solo album. It took a bunch of calls from both DeMarco and Mike—“immediately aggravating the shit out of him,” knowing this had to be the producer for the entire album—to coax El back for the rest of the project. Once he was convinced, Mike decamped from Atlanta for El-P’s Brooklyn apartment, and R.A.P. Music came together.
It was already a turning point for Mike, getting to dig deep by bouncing off one producer for an entire project. “I had been continually misunderstood, even with some dope producers,” he remembers. “I had never had someone whose music understood me, and where my words fit so instantaneously. To me it was common sense: Don’t get in the way of what the universe is telling you.”
But beyond that, there was also freedom. They weren’t making this within a major label system. “All that mattered was what we thought,” Mike recalls. “Then we became [like] two 15-year-olds in the studio fucking around.” There was a lot of foreshadowing in that moment.
After completing R.A.P. Music, El did go back and finish his own album, which ended up being Cancer 4 Cure. Fate aligned to keep El and Mike together, though: When they found out their albums were dropping a week apart, they decided to go on tour. Both of them found a new wave of critical interest, and both albums were warmly received by fans. At the same time, the two strengthened their friendship on the road; they were riding high on goodwill. While the story often goes that they hatched the idea of Run the Jewels on this tour, there were still a few more steps. El-P, feeling a sense of momentum he’d rarely gotten in his solo career, wanted to get right back in the studio. He wanted to make something fast—maybe a mixtape he’d give away for free. Mike, already convinced he and El were meant to work together as much as possible, told him he’d come up to lay down some tracks if El wanted.
El-P found a house in upstate New York and rented it for two weeks. Initially, he was making some beats to submit to Eminem, but soon he found he was just in the throes of making new music for himself. Those beats were the early basis for Run the Jewels—the tracks “Banana Clipper” and “A Christmas Fucking Miracle” began life as potential ideas for Eminem, but El-P never submitted them. Alongside his right-hand man and multi-instrumentalist collaborator Little Shalimar (a.k.a. Torbitt Schwartz), the music came flowing. At the end, he booked another two weeks upstate and called Killer Mike. They linked back up for a retreat of sorts, though one with as much chaos, drugs, and goofiness as a Run the Jewels album.
"It’s not in the woods, but if you’re from Brooklyn and there’s five trees, it’s the woods,” El-P deadpans.
“I remember the water was fucking brown—it was cold as shit [there],” Killer Mike quips. “It was one of those places where the guy probably bought it thinking he was gonna become Ernest Hemingway, and then he was like, ‘Fuck that, I’ll rent it out. I’m going back to my penthouse in New York.’”
The isolation was by design. What began as El-P trying to escape the distractions of his hometown led to a zany, productive getaway for everyone. Armed with a ton of shrooms and “barrelfuls” of weed, El and Mike started going in on the beats El had made. There were drunken cookouts and a fierce competition between El and Mike of who could make the best tuna salad. One day Mike, who was used to going to his favorite Atlanta restaurants or strip clubs when he left the studio, got a bit burnt out on the remote camp vibe. They ran out of weed and he hopped in the rental car and drove back to New York City, leaving the others wondering where he’d gone. Nevertheless, soon there were already four, five, six songs completed.
“There was just this great chemistry and everything felt like some sort of bonus round,” Schwartz remembers. “Nobody had any expectations so it was easier just to relax and be a little bit more—dare I say—silly?”
“There was something about it that was hilarious and fun,” El says. “I think that’s why the record sounds the way it does.”
"Nobody had any expectations so it was easier just to relax and be a little bit more—dare I say—silly?"
Those songs already had the energy we associate with early Run the Jewels now. El came equipped with corroded beats that, inspired by his time working on R.A.P. Music, incorporated a new level of bounce and swagger. Just as the two engaged in friendly warfare over tuna recipes, having each other as a foil strengthened them as rappers. “Steel sharpens steel,” Killer Mike puts it simply. Throughout, the songs made it obvious that both of them were having fun, shit-talking and cracking jokes and firing off each other’s energy. For a moment they thought they were done. They had an EP’s worth of material. Both DeMarco and Schwartz told them they’d be crazy to stop—this was too good. So they kept going, and within two weeks they had laid down the vocals for Run the Jewels.
The phrase “run the jewels,” taken from the LL Cool J track “Cheesy Rat Blues,” had been on El’s mind as a potential title for some time. He mentioned it to Mike when he first arrived upstate, who said he’d think on it for a night. But Mike had actually already reached his conclusion: “This is the illest shit in the fucking world.” At the time, it was still more of a project than an established group. The two of them were making some music without pressure. There was no business plan; there was no “grand design.”
“Because it was so low stakes, I don’t think we were ready for it to be really good,” El-P says. It turned into something that they decided deserved to be presented to people as an album. For both Mike and El, there were certain songs that started to give the whole project that sort of depth: “DDFH,” “Sea Legs.” “We weren’t worried about how it would be received,” El says. “That’s a rare place to be when you are 35, 36. We just got to be better friends.” Yet while that atmosphere gave Run the Jewels its freewheeling energy, there were those moments of seriousness that crept in. When you got to the surprisingly heavy emotional landscape of “A Christmas Fucking Miracle,” you were getting the whole portrait of both men. You were watching a proper duo come into focus.
“We already knew they could kill all the shit-talking jams,” Schwartz says. “But there was something special about their juxtaposition on those more heartfelt tunes that showed me the breadth of what they could achieve.”
“I’m born to rap over El-P. It’s just that simple. The universe just makes certain people for you. I was made for him and he was made for me.”
Though they still dropped RTJ for free as planned, they also decided to put a proper push behind the release. El contacted his old friend A-Trak, the DJ, producer, and Fool’s Gold record exec; Fool’s Gold soon partnered with RTJ on the release. “To be perfectly honest, that Run The Jewels album fell in our lap,” A-Trak remembers. “Don’t get me wrong, we were super excited to get behind it.” In the early ‘10s, Fool’s Gold was one of those nimble labels trying to navigate a rapidly changing internet landscape. Music was finding its way to people in new ways, and the label’s penchant for bridging indie crowds and rap heads aligned with how RTJ’s success would soon develop. “I loved the contrast between their histories,” A-Trak continues. “And the idea that both were survivors of a record industry that tries to chew up artists and spit them out after a certain amount of years.”
Run the Jewels arrived on June 26, 2013. El and Mike decided to get back on the road together, but not as Run the Jewels quite yet. They figured their individual monikers had more cachet at this point. “It wasn’t like, ‘Run the Jewels is coming!’” El says. “No one cared. No one thought that was coming.” So they structured it similarly to their previous tour behind R.A.P. Music and Cancer 4 Cure. Killer Mike did a solo set of his own material. El-P did a solo set of his own material. Then they came back out together for an encore where they’d perform about half of Run the Jewels.
But they began to notice some strange trends at those shows. The rooms were full, with some of each artist’s respective fans coming out. But Killer Mike was also spotting a lot of x’s on hands—kids not yet old enough to drink. Those kids didn’t seem to know their music, but soon they realized these were new fans, here for Run the Jewels’ music.
"All that mattered was what we thought."
“We came back out as Run the Jewels and these motherfuckers go crazy,” Mike says. “Like they hadn’t seen us 30 minutes prior.”
“I’ve been in a lot of rooms, man,” El adds. “I’ve performed a long time. I’ve had successful groups and solo stuff. But nothing compared to the explosion that was happening when Run the Jewels dropped.”
Here was a duo that was so easy to root for, thanks not only to their own past work but the feel-good story of their camaraderie—two guys finding each other as they approached middle age and making the most vital, most popular music of their careers. Run the Jewels stands as the document of that time, that early spark between El-P and Killer Mike. From the moment the album hit the ground running with “Run the Jewels” to “Banana Clipper” to “36” Chain” to “DDFH,” the duo’s music was lean, urgent, grabbing you by the throat and pulling you along for El and Mike’s joyride. Like what they had made on R.A.P. Music, Run The Jewels might nod to classic stylings, but it also didn’t sound like anyone else on the map in 2013. Beats sputtered and squelched as much as they slapped, but never lost the take-no-prisoners propulsion necessary for Mike and El to rap furiously around each other. This was the product of two guys just hanging out and chasing the muse, and you could hear it. Run the Jewels came out of nowhere, which made it somehow more exhilarating—you had no idea where the hell it came from, but you wanted to follow them wherever they were headed.
You know what happened next. The snowball effect of Run the Jewels kept going. They would soon make their music bolder, more muscular, and more topical. They were able to provide party bangers for late-night festival goers, but also brash, intense rap music grappling with societal ills. They carved out a strange lane, not attaining traditional rap stardom but an elusive, idiosyncratic fame that was broader. Run the Jewels became a group that could open arena shows for Lorde but also build a song around a Greg Nice sample.
“I think one thing that ended up becoming key to their success is that they reached an audience beyond the typical rap fan base,” A-Trak reflects. “They found older fans that can afford to buy concert tickets! And general music fans, curious listeners. They toured and grew it steadily year after year. And it became an institution.”
“Watching these two brilliant artists get a second crack at major success…has been one of the joys of my life,” DeMarco says. “I get to be a proud papa and a piece of rap history. There is no better feeling than watching two of your friends succeed beyond their wildest dreams and knowing you played a part.”
"I’ve been in a lot of rooms, man. I’ve performed a long time. I’ve had successful groups and solo stuff. But nothing compared to the explosion that was happening when Run the Jewels dropped."
Now El-P and Killer Mike are taking a moment to look back on the wild ride of the last 10 years with the anniversary shows. But that’s clearing out the past for the future. “To be a real rap group, you got to drop four classics,” Mike says, clearly satisfied that RTJ has. Whatever happens next will be the beginning of a new era.
Mike talks about a recent studio session when he and El began work on ideas for a fifth album saying, “He played a beat that was absolutely insane, and to me this should be the cornerstone of what Run the Jewels 5 should be. It’s radically different than Run the Jewels 1, 2, 3, and 4.” He has some ideas to share with El soon, and he hopes a movie’s going to accompany the album. “I think it’s going to be unlike anything anyone’s ever heard,” he concludes.
You don’t get any of that without Run the Jewels 1. There, after an unlikely meeting and before a whole lot of implausible outcomes, El and Mike solidified their partnership at a crucial pivot in each of their lives. “I’m born to rap over El-P. It’s just that simple,” Mike says. “The universe just makes certain people for you. I was made for him and he was made for me.”
For El-P, there are ways Run the Jewels will always be the most important album in their catalog. It could’ve been a tossed-off thing, but instead it opened the most unexpected chapter in both their careers. “Is it the pinnacle in my mind?” El-P asks. “No, of course not. Thank God it’s not. Thank God we had somewhere else to go.”
It was around the end of that first Run the Jewels tour when El-P realized that, yes, maybe this really is a group. That there was in fact somewhere else to go. That maybe there was another album. He asked Killer Mike if they should do it again. His response was simple: “Let’s go.”
