Run The Jewels, consisting of Killer Mike and El-P, have made a lot of noise since they paired up in 2013. Many call their two albums Run The Jewels and Run The Jewels 2 the best albums of the respective years they have been released. The duo may have dropped the best video of 2015, at least the most important anyway. With lyrics on the song “Close Your Eyes (And Count to F*ck)” like
Bout to turn this mothafucka up like Riker’s Island, bruh
Where my thuggers and my crippers and my blooders and my brothers?
When you niggas gon’ unite and kill the police, mothafuckas?
You had to expect a video on police brutality, and what we got was actually better. Director of the video had this to say on his YouTube page description about the music video.
“When Run The Jewels sent me this track, I knew we had the opportunity to create a film that means something. I felt a sense of responsibility to do just that. 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. 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. For me, it was important to write a story that didn’t paint a simplistic portrait of the characters of the Cop and Kid. They’re not stereotypes. They’re people – complex, real people and, as such, the power had to shift between them at certain points throughout the story. 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’ve already fought their way past their judgments and learned hatred toward one another. Our goal was to highlight the futility of the violence, not celebrate it.”
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