Photos by Mitch Kline
The Scene: Hipsters and Hip-Hop kids alike quickly filled The Gothic last Tuesday night, and the room was mostly full for openers Despot (please release your album!) and Ratking. This crowd skewed closer to early twenties than the late thirties ages of headliner Run The Jewels‘ El-P and Mike. This crowd was firedup, and well aware that they were about to witness one of the best shows of the year, Hip-Hop or otherwise.
Run The Jewels: Brooklyn based rapper Jaime Meline, better known by his stage name, El-P, has been blowing minds since his days with Company Flow and has built a devout following throughout his solo career. Killer Mike, a hulk of a man, with his own unique style rooted in the Atlanta Hip-Hop scene, kickstarted his career when he was featured on “Snappin’ and Trappin’,” from fellow Atlanta duo Outkast’s 2000 album Stankonia.
Both successful in their own right, El-P and Killer Mike might seem like possibly the two most unlikely artists to collaborate on a Hip-Hop project. But that’s just what happened, when in 2012, El-P produced Killer Mike’s critically acclaimed, R.A.P. Music, an album that was in heavy rotation for months for me and was high on the list of my personal top five albums that year. In 2013, it happened. El-P and Killer Mike came together as Run the Jewels and released their first album (album of the year for me!), an unbelievably perfect mash-up of both artists’ personalities. Last month, they released their anxiously awaited follow up, Run the Jewels 2, which was again greeted with high praises (album of the year for me!). With the bar set about as high as possible, could RTJ’s live performance match their studio efforts?
El-P and Killer Mike strutted onto stage at 10:15 to Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” and were greeted with a deafening roar from the crowd before dropping right into the bone rattling opener, “Run the Jewels.”
At one point, early in Run the Jewels’ set, just before a mosh pit erupted, El-P apologized to the entire middle section of the crowd jammed into main floor for the “shitstorm” that they were about to be caught up in. He knew damn well that this crowd was about to lose their shit. And they did. The energy from both stage and audience remained high all night as each song seemed to be an anthem for everyone in the room.
With just the right amount of banter between songs, RTJ plowed through an even mix of songs from each of their two albums, only swerving once from RTJ material, when they pulled Despot out for El-P’s “Tougher Colder Killer” (which features both Killer Mike and Despot on the album version).
El-P and Killer Mike bring all of the energy from their albums to their live performance and their obvious chemistry comes across as they effortlessly play off of each other on stage. Did this show match their impossibly good albums? Hell yes! This was one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t wait to hear what these two guys come up with next.
Energy: A+
Musicianship: A
Sound: A
Stage Presence: A
Set/Light Show: C
Overall: A
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