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Artist News Releases
Run The Jewels video comments on “purgatory-like law enforcement system”
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 27 March 2015
Run The Jewels have put out the video for ‘Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)’, featuring Rage Against The Machine’s Zack De La Rocha.
Commenting on the video, which shows a fight between a black man and a white policeman, director AG Rojas says: “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”, he continues.
“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 way past their judgments and learned hatred toward one another. Our goal was to highlight the futility of the violence, not celebrate it”.
Rapper Killer Mike adds: “This video represents the futile and exhausting existence of a purgatory-like law enforcement system. There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world. However, there is an opportunity to dialogue and change the way communities are policed in this country”.
Watch here:
