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Run The Jewels ft/ Zack de la Rocha | Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)
Fantastic new video from Killer Mike and El-P taken from the Run the Jewels 2 LP for their joint Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck) featuring Rage Against The Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha. The video starring Keith Stanfield (who a quick IMDB search tells me is playing Snoop in the forthcoming NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton) alongside star of Boardwalk Empire (amongst plenty of other things) Shea Wigham puts a different spin on the issue of racial violence in law enforcement. Thought provoking.
• Koaste
“When Run The Jewels sent me this track, I knew we had the opportunity to create a film that means something. I felt a sense of responsibility to do just that. We had to exploit the lyrics and aggression and emotion of the track, and translate that into a film that would ignite a valuable and productive conversation about racially motivated violence in this country. It’s provocative, and we all knew this, so we were tasked with making something that expressed the intensity of senseless violence without eclipsing our humanity. For me, it was important to write a story that didn’t paint a simplistic portrait of the characters of the Cop and Kid. They’re not stereotypes. They’re people – complex, real people and, as such, the power had to shift between them at certain points throughout the story. The film begins and it feels like they have been fighting for days, they’re exhausted, not a single punch is thrown, their violence is communicated through clumsy, raw emotion. They’ve already fought their ways past their judgements and learned hatred toward one another. Our goal was to highlight the futility of the violence, not celebrate it”.
< AJ Rojas (director)
