Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 2

I’m hip hop ‘till I die, it’s my foundation. But for me a hip hop album has to be the complete package. I’m not a guy who sits down and just listens to lyrics, or just listens to beats. I want to be mesmerized by the rhyme flow, it has to keep me entertained and educated and the beats have to blow me away. If I can work out a hip hop track in five minutes I’ll move on to something else, but when I heard Run The Jewels - they’re just like these rhyme assassins, killing it one track after another. And the beats on this album I was like… ‘WHAT are these guys smoking?’ It was on repeat on my phone, in the car, I just couldn’t get enough of it. Street culture, which is what hip hop is, can be elevated to these lofty places with no limit.

Do you think for a lot of Run The Jewels fans they bought something back to hip hop that people felt was missing?

What hip hop represents is this sort of unbridled ideology of human potential, musically and lyrically. It’s like when the iPhone first dropped or the internet first started - you see these little pockets of the explosion of human potential from those moments and I think hip hop was a musical moment like that. When you hear something really tapping into hip hop ideology - like when I first watched Wildstyle - in that moment you look for the breadcrumb trails that lead to it. As producers we are always on the hunt - and in our early days even though we were broke we were developing the ability to sniff out that hip hop spirit. Run The Jewels, at a time when hip hop was in danger of just becoming a set of habits, were ambassadors for hip hop really pushing forward the culture, the codes, the information, twisting up the tragedy, the comedy, the pleasure and the pain of life into these amazing narratives. I love this album because it nourishes me but by extension the whole hip hop nation.