DJ Shadow (feat. Run the Jewels) – "Nobody Speak" (2016)

I am crack, I ain't lyin’

Kick a lion in his crack

2 or 3 lines learned a new word when he was researching today’s featured record.

“Chiasmus” is defined as “a figure of speech in which the grammar of one phrase is inverted in the following phrase, such that two key concepts from the original phrase reappear in the second phrase in inverted order.”

Here’s an example of chiasmus from Milton’s Paradise Lost:  “Adam, first of men/To first of women, Eve.”  

Here’s an example of a particular variety of chiasmus called “antimetabole”: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”  (If the two inverted phrases use the same words, it’s antimetabole.  If the two inverted phrases use different words, it’s chiasmus.)

The two lines from today’s featured record that are quoted above are another example of chiasmus.

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The featured records in each year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” – a/k/a/ “28 Posts in 28 Days” in non-leap years – used to share a certain characteristic.  For example, each one might have had a title with a number in it.  Or each one might have been a cover record.

But these days I have far too much on my mind to bother with such trifles.

This year’s featured records have nothing in common – except each of them is a record I heard for the first time only recently.

Some of those records might have been originally recorded in the sixties or seventies.  But if 2 or 3 lines never heard them until recently, then they are new records as far as I’m concerned.

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DJ Shadow was born Joshua Paul Davis in 1972.  “Nobody Speak” – which was released in 2016 on his fifth studio album, The Mountain Will Fall – features El-P and Killer Mike, the two rappers who joined forces to form Run the Jewels in 2012.

I first heard “Nobody Speak” a couple of weeks ago when I was watching “Prague,” which is the title of the eighth episode of the first season of Succession, WHICH IS ONLY THE GREATEST TV SERIES IN HISTORY!  (I find a lot of great music on the soundtracks of the TV series I watch.)

Click here to watch the very provocative music video for “Nobody Speak.”  (Be prepared: the lyrics are extremely explicit!)

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Run the Jewels – "Close Your Eyes (And Count to F*ck)" (2014)

And even if some good ones die

F*ck it, the lord’ll sort ‘em

In 1209, Pope Innocent III sent a crusader army to southern France to stamp out the Catharist heresy.  

Pope Innocent III

Catharists believed . . . but do you really care what Catharists believed?  Suffice it to say that some of their beliefs were antithetical to the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

You can question whether the Catharists’ beliefs were any crazier than those of the Church, but I’m not certainly not going to do that.  (The last thing I need is for the Pope to order a crusader army to go medieval all over my ass.)

Béziers is one of the oldest cities in France

Soon after the crusaders arrived at the French city of Béziers, a stronghold of Catharism, a group of mercenaries being paid by the Pope broke through the city’s defenses.

Not everyone in the city was a Catharist heretic – in fact, there were many good Catholics living in Béziers.  The crusaders asked the Abbot of Citeaux, who had been given command of the army by the Pope, how they could distinguish heretics from believers.  

The Abbot replied by saying “Kill them all, and let God sort them out.”  He described what happened next in a letter he subsequently wrote to the Pope:

Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people.  After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt, as divine vengeance miraculously raged against it.  

I'm surprised Quentin Tarantino hasn’t made a movie about the massacre at Béziers.

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Run the Jewels is a hip-hop duo that consists of Killer Mike (a black rapper who made his debut on OutKast’s 2000 album, Stankonia) and El-P (a white rapper, producer, and record company executive).  

RTJ’s music is intense, angry, and paranoid.  It’s reminiscent of N.W.A. and Public Enemy and other early-day gangsta rappers, which is high praise indeed in my book.

Killer Mike and El-P

Run the Jewels might be too violent and profane for your taste.  But I believe that the best rap music – like the best rock music – is loud, aggressive, and unapologetically hostile to the powers that be . . . parents, teachers, the police, and the government.  It is designed to be disturbing to all of those who live decorous and polite lives. 

“Close Your Eyes (And Count to F*ck)” – which is a fantasy about starting a prison riot, among other things – features Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha (who knows a little about being intense, angry, and paranoid).  

"Run the Jewels 2" album cover

It’s from the second Run the Jewels album, Run the Jewels 2, which Pitchfork called “the most viciously realized rap album of 2014 and many other years.”

Here’s the official music video for “Close Your Eyes (And Count to F*ck)”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: