Run the Jewels: Killer Mike and EL-P's peaceful hip-hop coalition

Run the Jewels is a band, and it's also 2013's best hip-hop collaboration. Rapper Killer Mike and producer/MC El-P are Run the Jewels, and their new eponymous album is both teamwork and a project that asserts its own identity, without sacrificing lyrical excellence or their usual whack grooves.

Run the Jewels, the album, is not as seriously sociopolitical as El-P's Cancer 4 Cure, or Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music (which El-P produced). But with the exception of a fleeting few hard-line songs, Run the Jewels is a frank but funny friend-on-friend album - hip-hop's 2000 Year Old Man - that finds two of America's finest underground rappers convivially smack-talking.

But is Run the Jewels occasionally silly? Is it, to channel Seinfeld, all about nothing? "Shout out to Larry David," says Killer Mike with a laugh. "Look, it took a lot to make R.A.P. Music and its political outlook. It took a lot to make Cancer 4 Cure. Our vision for Run the Jewels, though, was that we were becoming a rap group. And when you become a group, you hopefully become a brotherhood of friends. And when that happens, you hang out and talk [Germanic expletive]."

In fact, there's a lot of hard-core personal and political commentary in Run the Jewels, with vividly harsh and violent lyrics. Take "Sea Legs," for example, a disorienting tale of a "misfit" who is "trying not to walk crooked while this anchor's dropped/ But I been out on them choppy waves/ And it's hard to say where this land begins and that water stops."

"These songs are social without standing on a soapbox," Killer Mike says. "But we wanted, beyond that, to do something that was more of a conversational dialogue than a monologue. We switched to another gear. It's barbershop talk. Rap is about braggadocio and swagger."

Killer Mike had long been a huge fan of El-P's breakthrough act, Company Flow, and had always wanted to work with the wonky music maker/producer.

"I badgered the hell out of him to produce my album," Killer Mike says. "El had so many deadlines and dates for his own new album, but I was persistent."

With an immediate creative synergy, the pair knocked out R.A.P. with pleasure and haste, and had so much fun doing so, they just kept on going. When "Banana Clips," their first co-written song for rapper Big Boi (from Outkast) didn't make it onto his album due to a deadline conflict, Killer Mike and El-P made it the leadoff track on Run the Jewels, and the rest is recent history.

"We're really lucky that it just didn't work out for Big Boi's album, but he liked the beat so much, he dropped a verse on our version," Killer Mike says.

During Run the Jewel's tour so far, the pair is getting great notices - not just for their music, but also for their calls for peace, love, understanding, and family vibes, especially in the face of the Trayvon Martin verdict.

"I don't know if there's a warm and fuzzy Run the Jewels, but we are a brotherhood," Killer Mike says. "El-P is a liberal man. I'm more conservative. We have a lot of contradictions, but there is a bond. We share that with our audience. The hip-hop crowd has lost sight of that sort of communion."

Killer Mike calls for divides to heal, and he expresses confidence that audiences are too smart to become irretrievably polarized.

Ask Killer Mike how long he and El-P can keep up Run the Jewel's joyful noise, and he kids around: "We're going to keep making records together until we hate each other and break up."