Governors Ball: Run The Jewels (Photos & Review)

Run The Jewels hits hard. In other news: the Governors Ball sky is blue, and bears shit in the woods. Bears also smile, as it turns out, and rap their asses off. Husky El-P and his Grizzly-sized partner, Killer Mike strode onto the festival stage wearing all black and two fang-bearing smirks. They were accompanied by “We Are The Champions,” which they “conducted” as DJ Trackstar held up the universal hand signals for RTJ: gun and fist. Done, for the moment, with playing nice, the boys broke into a rendition of their LP’s title track that could do the day’s work of a wrecking crew in three minutes. They weren’t entirely on point word-by-word, slurring through the occasional line (El especially) but the energy sure was there. Few things are more enjoyable than watching Mike enjoy the sweet, destructive sound of their music. In fact, Mike’s joy as a whole was much of what made the Jewels set so special. From his big, “aw shucks”-meets-“damn right” smile, to his commanding and often vogue-like rhyme-miming, to his wild and incredibly sure-footed dancing, Mike couldn’t help but command the crowd. “You nimble bastard,” El-P called him during a special segment near the end of the show (El’s self-declared favorite), set aside for Mike to boogie uninterrupted by spit duties.

The rhyming was in full, multi-syllabic perfection by the show’s body, as the duo barreled through perfect runs of “Sea Legs,” “Job Well Done,” and “DDFH,” the title of which Mike repped on his shirt. All the while, Mike and El’s coordination, from verse to verse and step to step across the stage, was loose and accurate, almost sibling-like. And like siblings, they clearly were both there to play and to win.

They even gambled to perform their LP’s tight and complex bonus track, “Pew Pew Pew,” and, after a brief stumble, it payed off and then some. (Also: just before the drop, they promised a Run The Jewels sequel soon.) Respectably, the Fool’s Gold golden boys put as much trust in their audience as they did themselves and each other: though they were far from the biggest name at Governor’s Ball, they left it up to the crowd to shout their hooks at them on the very first go-around, often not issuing a lyrical reminder and, instead, inviting the mix of recital from the die-hards and chaos from the newcomers that fit the show perfectly.

That mix of smirking tomfoolery and killer precision continued until the show’s closing moments, when El brought the axe down. He apologized for ruining the fun (“Fuck you, El, you break my heart,” said Mike) before tearing into a brief, wrenching rant about a friend that he’d lost six years ago exactly, revealing some of the chip on his shoulder that fuels so much of his comedy and menace. He followed this up, of course, with his haunting, triumphant verse from the album-closing, “A Christmas Fucking Miracle,” which gave way to Mike’s verse–a more sneering brand of triumph–to conclude the show. The gravity of the ending came seemingly out of nowhere, but giving a good hard look at Run The Jewels, you see that with every self-effacing joke followed by a haymaker punchline and goliath bass drop, the tongues of Killer Mike and El-P have always been so firmly in cheek that they were ready to draw blood.