Kill Your Masters - (Music of the American South) by Jaap Van Der Doelen

About the Book

"In Kill Your Masters Dutch music journalist Jaap van der Doelen tells the story of two rappers in the twilight of their careers who suddenly find themselves ascending to the heights of pop culture icons while fighting for change in a world about to fall prey to fascism. "It shouldn't have happened," van der Doelen writes. "Hiphop has long been considered a young man's game...and yet two rappers well into their forties have managed to find cross-generational success." This book starts with the stories of how Killer Mike and El-p got their starts as solo artists (in Atlanta and Brooklyn, respectively) and culminates with "Holy Calamavote" in October 2020-a live televised event where Run the Jewels performed their fourth album in its entirety in an effort to motivate as many people as possible to register to vote in the 2020 presidential elections. Van der Doelen relies on multiple interviews he has conducted with RTJ along with conversations Mike and Jamie have had with other music journalists over the years"--

Book Synopsis

All the unwritten rules of rap say it doesn't happen like this. Yet Killer Mike, a Black man from Atlanta, Georgia, and El-P, a white man from Brooklyn, New York, have transformed what should have been the twilight of their careers as rappers into their biggest spotlight yet. Known as the hip-hop duo Run The Jewels, they have headlined festivals worldwide, become action figures and Marvel comic book characters, spearheaded a worldwide countercultural movement, and played a significant role in the last two presidential elections.

This is the buddy-movie-like story of how they got there. It is a tale that parallels the incredible changes the music industry has gone through over the past twenty-five years--charting a course from the highs around the turn of the century to the collapse of the CD format and the eventual rise of streaming media--while also mapping the evolution of both pop culture and its sociopolitical climate. From the surging popularity of afrofuturism and the fall of the Twin Towers to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the kneeling of Colin Kaepernick, such events all tie into how their budding bromance transformed Killer Mike and El-P from solo artists in underground hip-hop to pop cultural icons recognized all over the globe.

Review Quotes

As a genre that requires a specialized knowledge, hip-hop books have a special audience. They tend to be passionate, smart, curious, and open. Kill Your Masters--enthusiastic and discerning--meets them right where they are. Telling a complex story such as the history of Run The Jewels is not an easy task, and Jaap van der Doelen handles it with depth and breadth, interweaving digressions into the group's politics and their historical context, the events that shape the music as it's made.--Roy Christopher "author of Dead Precedents"

Kill Your Masters admirably engages with the historical and cultural contexts of Run The Jewels and their moment as they blend distinctive styles together in a cacophonous-yet-harmonic soundtrack to an equally polyphonic/rhythmic world.--Charles L. Hughes "author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South"

About the Author

JAAP VAN DER DOELEN is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Wax Poetics, Mass Appeal, Complex, DJBooth, Passion of the Weiss, SAM (Street and More), and Hiphop in je Smoel. He also reports on culture and sports in Dutch newspapers like Algemeen Dagblad, Eindhovens Dagblad, and Brabants Dagblad. He lives in the Netherlands.