One of the more left-field verses on Run The Jewels‘ new album comes courtesy of Pharrell Williams, who delivers a politically charged chorus on the project’s seventh song, “JU$T.” Produced by Wilder Zoby, Little Shalimar, and El-P, the song addresses the conflux of racism and capitalism, and also features Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha. In a recent Uproxx interview, Killer Mike and El-P explained how Pharrell came to appear on the song.
On the track, Pharrell raps about black capitalism and whether anyone can be “free” if they’re still slaves to a capitalistic system. He underscores this point by referencing the slave-owners who still adorn US currency:
Master of these politics, you swear that you got options
Master of opinion ‘cause you vote with the white collar
The Thirteenth Amendment says that slavery’s abolished
Look at all these slave masters posin’ on yo' dollar
Killer Mike broke down how the themes Pharrell brought to the track line up with his own life experiences:
Pharrell understood the perspective that Run the Jewels has and he added to it with that hook, because two things can exist or are existing simultaneously. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I grew up with a Black political class. You have the cultural class. Black money. And that Black class figured out a way not to oppress, hurt, harm. Sometimes it’s debatable, arguable, but to work with the Black middle-working class and even the poor, to make sure that the city is one where a child who was raised by two grandparents gets to live his dream of being a rapper, but then gets to enter the business class to ownership and entrepreneurship… He came into the world of Run the Jewels and he added to help make it doper because he’s Pharrell.
El-P noted that the overtly raw, political nature of the feature even caught him by surprise.
“There’s a reason why artists present themselves in multiple different ways or multiple different songs. And it’s because artists are more complex than one song,” he said. “I’m going to be real with you. I thought that we were going to get some f-cking big commercial hook and sh-t, and this dude came back with the rawest hook of all time. And I was just like, ‘Yo, this sh-t is ill.’ And so I just want to appreciate him for that, because for us it felt like he really gave something to us.”
RTJ4 dropped on June 3, two days ahead of its scheduled release. The album also features 2 Chainz, DJ Premier, Greg Nice, Mavis Staples, and Josh Homme.
Listen to the song above and read all the lyrics to Killer Mike & El-P’s “JU$T” featuring Pharrell & Zack de la Rocha on Genius now.
