American Carnage
Run the Jewels’ latest could not be more urgent.
run the jewels is like Double Dragon or Smash TV. The premise is simple: The world is demented, and the path to peace is beset on all sides by villains whose agenda is to divide and conquer. The way out is straight through the middle. Killer Mike and El-P are the classic rap duo in that they come from different worlds but their respective strengths combine to make a more formidable unit. Divergent perspectives align to paint a fuller picture. Where Flavor Flav tempered Chuck D’s academic outrage with accessible humor, and No Malice played remorseful angel opposite Pusha T’s devilish snarl, Run the Jewels balances out Killer Mike’s pointed, personal politics with El-P’s pragmatic nihilism, gallows humor, and apocalyptic beat-making. The world their music depicts is gruesome and hyperreal, dramatic but also not far off from where we’re headed. Each album is a two-player journey through the dark depths of American carnage.
Run the Jewels 4 bursts in with guns blazing as “Yankee and the Brave (Ep. 4)” sees Mike taking on the role of an armed assailant surrounded by police and pondering who gets to have the kill shot, mirroring the 2013 story of ex-cop and spree killer Christopher Dorner, whose death after a manhunt sparked criticism of the LAPD, which shot at bystanders during the search and which has long been accused of having a hand in the fire that destroyed the house where Dorner’s body was found. RTJ4 is an album of prickly, prescient conversations and explosive noise. The best songs recall scabrous documents of the unrest of 1989–90, like Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, and edgy political screeds drafted in the years since, like Dead Prez’s Let’s Get Free.
RTJ4 is a bone for hip-hop’s middle children, the generation that arrived just as the early rappers and DJs fashioned a new style for themselves out of fabric borrowed from funk and post-disco records. The set doesn’t necessarily feel chronologically tethered to that era, or to those who have favorite golden-age albums but
keep tabs on the latest drill and trap joints, who don’t feel seen in the ongoing battle between the oldheads and Gen Z, because the kids are right about the elders being stuffy and stubborn, and the elders have a point about the value of the classics. Jewels is the only popular rap group that would schedule back-to-back songs with 2 Chainz and Nice & Smooth’s Greg Nice, that would think to find space for Pharrell Williams and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha in the same song, and then play Mavis Staples vocals over guitar notes from Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. That RTJ4 never feels rudderless is a testament to El-P and co-producers Little Shalimar and Wilder Zoby’s wide-ranging tastes and knack for closing space between disparate sounds inside a boom-bap beat and to El-P and Killer Mike’s directness as partners in rhyme.
As much as El-P has always been writing verses about death and destruction and Killer Mike has written about civil disobedience and armed resistance in the same space, RTJ4 feels like the moment when the two doomsayers finally confront the world they’ve been warning us about. (RTJ3 spoke to a darkness in the world on the cusp of 2017, it must be noted, but at the time we hadn’t quite seen the bottom of it yet.) The single “Ooh La La” sees Mike sour on Batman and embrace the chaotic pitch of the Caped Crusader’s chortling foil while El-P paints a grisly picture of the endgame of a worldwide push toward authoritarianism: “Warmongers are dumping, they’ll point and click at your pumpkin/Your suffering is scrumptious, they’ll put your kids in the oven.” “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation)” is a list of both rappers’ dreams and regrets and a promise to keep soldiering: “For the holders of a shred of heart, even when you wanna fall apart/When you’re surrounded by the fog, treading water in the ice-cold dark / When they got you feeling like a fox running from another pack of dogs / Put the pistol and the fist up in the air, we are there, swear to God.”
On “Walking in the Snow,” the eerie prescience of El-P and Killer Mike’s back catalogue strikes again as the pair lands on the pulse of the spring of 2020 with verses written late in 2019. “Snow” is a gut check for liberals and right-wing conspiracy wonks who feel shielded, by wealth or by whiteness, from the most vile aspects of the current political climate. El-P warns that everyone is in danger when fascism seizes the day: “Funny fact about a cage, they’re never built for just one group / So when that cage is done with them and you’re still poor, it come for you.” Mike delivers a devastating verse about what happens when state violence and public complacency hold hands: “Every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free/And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me / And till my voice goes from a shriek to whisper ‘I can’t breathe’ / And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV.”
It’s not that Run the Jewels is blessed with clairvoyance the rest of us lack. They’ve been galvanized by the clarity and wisdom that comes with self-aware American adulthood. Mike grew up in Atlanta as the city’s vicious late-’70s child murders widened the rift between the Black community and the police force, which had, a decade earlier, been at odds as rioting broke out in the Summerhill neighborhood in the wake of the shooting death of a Black suspect by police. El-P hails from New York City, where Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins died after being beaten by angry mobs for being in the wrong neighborhood at night. To see that as a youth and then to watch what has happened to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the hundreds of American citizens dying in ways they didn’t have to is a cleansing fire for one’s priorities. How could your blood not boil for retribution after that? It’s no wonder the last words the group utters on this album are, “Fuck you, too.” That’s been the feeling in the streets as long as any of us has lived. ■
into a wreckage of songs, self-referential late-night bits, and a suicide scare. No one can ever be fully prepared for the stresses of modern celebrity, but Davidson has seemed uniquely unsuited to it, so lacking in armor and impulse control that some of his “Weekend Update” appearances took on a tightrope-walk uncertainty.
It makes some sense, then, that in trying to get at the essence of its star, The King of Staten Island feels the need to return him to anonymity. The film, which Davidson co-wrote with former SNL writer Dave Sirus and director Judd Apatow, is semi-autobiographical in that its protagonist shares a lot of Davidson’s qualities and formative experiences—his childhood in the forgotten borough, the loss of his father at age 7, his fondness for tattoos and pot, and his mental-health struggles. But the character, whose name is Scott Carlin, also represents a kind of thought experiment about what Davidson’s life might be like if he never stumbled into comedy as a teenager. Scott lives in Staten Island with his mother, spending his aimless days getting high with friends, one of whom he occasionally has sex with. In its efforts to scale this version of Davidson down, the film changes the details of his firefighter father’s death. Unlike the comedian, whose dad died working during the 9/11 attacks, Scott’s father died during a local fire. The character’s life has been disentangled from the national cataclysm, which doesn’t make his grief any less debilitating.
Apatow has a nuanced understanding of his collaborator but doesn’t know what to do with him anymore than SNL really does. As in the Amy Schumer–led Trainwreck, the director can’t help but bend what begins as a more chaotic portrayal into the kind of story he loves best—that of arrested development. The King of Staten Island acknowledges Scott’s inner turmoil in its opening scene, in which the character turns up the radio while he’s driving and then closes his eyes, flirting with death and almost getting in an accident. After that, his trauma and his mental disorders become more abstract, things that are spoken about rather than put onscreen. During a dalliance with his reluctant fuck buddy Kelsey (Bel Powley), he discusses his inability to orgasm owing to his meds, then begs off telling their friends about their non-relationship: “I’m scared of myself and I don’t want to, like, scare you or me or like hurt anyone, so I think it’d just be best and really responsible of me if I just backed off.”
The development that nudges Scott, an aspiring tattoo artist, toward his delayed coming of age involves his mother’s love life. He’s unknowingly responsible for Margie (Marisa Tomei) having an acerbic meet-cute with Ray (Bill Burr) that blossoms into her first real relationship since the death of her husband 17 years before. Scott’s supportive until he learns that Ray’s also a firefighter, a fact that triggers all sorts of repressed emotions that emerge as self-centered protests. But Margie and Ray’s matter-of-fact romance is solid—the warm, unfussy chemistry Tomei and Burr share makes their scenes the best parts of the movie— and they aren’t budging. And so Scott finds himself staying for a stint at Ray’s firehouse, where he’s hazed and toughloved back into the world by a group of firefighters led by Papa (Steve Buscemi). Before he gets there, though, there are long stretches involving his sister (Maude Apatow) heading off to college, and his getting tasked with stopping by Ray’s exwife’s (Pamela Adlon) house to walk their kids to school, and the plan his dirtbag buddies (Moises Arias, Ricky Velez, and Lou Wilson) cook up to rob a pharmacy.
Apatow’s not afraid of a luxuriant run time, and these story lines all seem like they’re meant to express the teeming messiness of life. But there’s a slack inconclusiveness to each that makes them instead feel vestigial, especially the swerve into crime, snipped into something almost incoherent. The result is that, while we spend a lot of time in Scott’s company, he’s tiresomely static for most of it, a childish dick to his mom and sister, unrelentingly hostile to Ray, opportunistic toward Kelsey, and shockingly careless with his only pals. The King of Staten Island shrinks Davidson down a little too much to the point where his pathos and humor don’t blend with but actively get obscured by his immaturity. By the time Scott takes some faltering steps toward responsibility, the movie looks too much like one we’ve seen before—from Apatow, especially, who often sends his heroes staggering like toddlers toward the long-suffering women in their lives. It hardly feels like it addresses what’s most interesting about Davidson, who’s playing a character but still mostly playing himself. What’s most interesting about Davidson may just be a sense of promise—the sense that something, eventually, is coming that will fit just right. ■