KILL YOUR MASTERS | A book about Run The Jewels

Praise for KILL YOUR MASTERS:

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

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

While it is enjoyable for those who aren't fans of Run the Jewels, this was written by a fan of Run the Jewels. Clearly, Jaap van der Doelen loves these guys. He's also good at reminding people of the context.
Peter Biello, host of Narrative Edge (NPR)

Doelen supplements his story of their rise from online phenomenon to festival stages with observations about how ongoing sociopolitical turmoil fuels standout tracks like 'DDFH', or "do dope fuck hope"; not forgetting '2100', which mirrored the grief many felt in the weeks after Donald Trump ascended to The White House.
Mosi Reeves, The Wire

Everybody go and check out 'Kill Your Masters: Run The Jewels and The World That Made Them' by Jaap Van Der Doelen, who put a lot of work into this. I think he probably began writing it before even he knew he was writing it, because he was talking to the guys when their press availability came up years before this. I love that as a story.
Demone Carter (DEM ONE), host of the Dad Bod Rap Pod

In van der Doelen’s telling, the story of RTJ often feels like the story of the political decade between 2013 and 2023, largely due to Render’s commitment to community activism. Kill Your Masters spends a great deal of space revisiting that period of U.S. politics, particularly in Georgia, contextualizing Render’s activist influence on RTJ’s music and decision making. (...) In the end, the book depicts RTJ as a musical act that tells its audience, above all else, to live through hard political times with their head held high and their arms around their friends — a message perhaps timelier now than ever.
Rachel Wright, Arts ATL

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.

The book is written by Jaap van der Doelen, and published by UGA Press.