Tomorrow night, Thursday August 8th, we’ve got an awesome show for you hip hop aficionados: Atlanta emcee Killer Mike backed by producer and beats-maker, El-P.
The Killer Mike and El-P connection stretches much further back than their new, collaborative project Run the Jewels. Both artists have had a significant impact on the underground and alternative hip hop scene. They’ve been working together off and on for years, notably with El-P producing Mike’s 2012 critical smash R.A.P. Music and Mike showing up to guest on El-P’s solo material. The current tour featuring the pair performing together has been characterized by one Nashville blogger as, “a sort of underground hip hop Watch the Throne.”
Speaking of their album, they are giving it away for free, here: http://pitchfork.com/
Despot and Kool A.D. open the show.
How many times have you heard someone complain that contemporary rap music lacks its modern day Public Enemy equivalent? You’ve probably said it yourself. We all have. But we need to stop. Yeah, Public Enemy is inviolate and irreplaceable, but Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music is the closest we’re going to get to an ideal soundtrack for a Do the Right Thing remake.
It’s no surprise that the beats come from Brooklyn, courtesy of El-P, a hip hop artist, producer and entrepreneur who is the borough’s resident laureate of urban apocalypse. Snares crash like abandoned buildings being blown up. Synthesizers ooze with a diseased glow of something dying in a toxic water supply. The effect is like a futuristic junkyard come to life. In the midst of the decay of post-industrial New York, Killer Mike, hip-hop inferno, pours fuel on the already inflamed.