Return of the Real MC

Daniel Dumile, alias MF DOOM, lived a thousand lives and his career was a succession of false starts and bright flashes. Before passing away on the 31st of October, 2020, Dumile had been a young virtuoso rapper welcomed with open arms by the music industry, then an outcast that sneaked back onto the scene through the back door after years of wandering (now masked), the 'go-to-guy' of independent rap during the 2000s and then some kind of Indie messiah as dubbed by Thom Yorke and Flying Lotus. Elusive, whimsical, a trickster and a money maker, DOOM rewrote the rules of rap music, rubbed people up the wrong way and paved the way for a whole generation of MCs.

A combination of Jamaican dancehall, American hip-hop, Caribbean rhythms and Spanish wit, reggaeton has, since its birth in the early 90s, shaken the world of pop music time and time again. From DJ Playero’s first mixtapes to Daddy Yankee’s “Barrio Fino” and Don Chezina’s “Tra-Tra-Tra, Puerto Rican musicians and their Colombian counterparts in Medellin have done their utmost to take over the world. In the last decade, they have done just that thanks to artists such as Luis Fonsi, J. Balvin and Bad Bunny. Read on for 10 of the genre’s most important albums. Reggaeton won’t be going anywhere any time soon.

As they neared their fortieth birthdays, Killer Mike (a black rapper from Atlanta with close links to OutKast) and El-P (a white Brooklyn b-boy and proponent of experimental rap) formed Run The Jewels, a rap supergroup which could easily have been yet another addition to a long list of hiphop misfires. But on the contrary, they are now an institution, a group that delights audiences and awakens consciences. Their new album RTJ4 is their most political and devastating. Let us take a look back at Killer Mike and El-P’s story.