Run The Jewels, Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha Debut New "JU$T" Visualizer
“Look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar.”
Run The Jewels delivered RTJ4 days early to align with the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country, making it free for everyone to listen through their website. Killer Mike and El-P have long-since echoed protest’s importance to hip-hop, music and society at-large since they joined forces in 2012 and their fourth collaborative effort came at the perfect moment when music fans the world over needed it most. No other song better exemplified those themes than “JU$T” featuring Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha. Earlier today, the collective released a new animated visualizer for the track.
Directed by Pulse Films’ Winston Hackling with type animation by Drew Tyndell, the collage aesthetic brings memories of Quelle Chris‘s own endeavors in the animated realm. The lyric video combines copies of xeroxed money to match the chorus of “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar.” Pharrell joins in with “mastered economics ’cause you took yourself from squalor/ Mastered academics ’cause your grades say you a scholar/ Mastered Instagram ’cause you can instigate a follow.”
Hackling detailed the collaboration in a recent press release. “I worked closely with Run The Jewels to create a satirical time-capsule of 2020 thus far, capturing the sentiment of their song using collage animation. Drawing on the influence of Public Enemy’s classic ‘Shut ‘Em Down’ video, we combined cut up images from contemporary and historical events into a psychedelic protest vignette, a visual fuck you to systemic racism.”
Leading up to the launch of RTJ4, The Jewels celebrated the death of income inequality in the not-so-distant future in their “Ooh La La” music video and delivered “The Yankee and the Brave”. The group has since rescheduled their “Public Service Announcement” Tour alongside Rage Against The Machine.
Watch Run The Jewels’ latest visual above and stream the duo’s new album below. In more music news, JPEGMAFIA sampled Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” on his new track “living single.”
