If Margo Price focused on one particular issue with “Pay Gap,” Run the Jewels offers a culture-wide survey on “Walking in the Snow,” and it’s a damning one. The hip-hop duo’s entire fourth album, descriptively titled “RTJ4,” is a masterpiece of scathing social commentary, but Killer Mike and El-P outdo themselves on “Walking in the Snow.” (Marcus J. Moore’s review of the album for The Nation offers some additional context and analysis.) Run the Jewels roams through Black Lives Matter and police brutality, economic inequality, the prison-industrial complex, the empathy vacuum of mass-media, religious hypocrisy and the cruelty of an (anti-)immigration policy that puts little kids in pens, and they cram all of that into less than four minutes.
An ominous, overdriven guitar part opens the song before El-P jumps in with tongue-twisting wordplay on the first verse. Not to be outdone, Killer Mike keeps the flow fast-paced on the second verse, with one insightful lyrical jab after another. Somehow, the pair ratchets up the intensity even further as they swap lines with dizzying dexterity on the third verse.
All of the lyrics are absorbing and well worth a read, which you can do here. A few stanzas in particular stand out. In the first verse, El-P observes, “Funny fact about a cage, they’re never built for just one group / So when that cage is done with them and you still poor, it come for you,” and it’s as searing and succinct a summary of the effects of essentially criminalizing poverty as you’ll ever find.
In the second verse, Killer Mike describes an educational structure that often fails children of color, and a police and judicial system all too eager to embrace them, before offering a thought-provoking take on class solidarity with an allegory about the ruthless determination of the ruling class to retain power at all costs. He raps, “All of us serve the same masters, all of us nothin’ but slaves / Never forget in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state.”
Speaking of those determined to retain power, Election Day is Nov. 3. If you haven’t yet, be sure to register to vote.