Run the Jewels, Rick Ross and others respond to Trump's victory with bitter new music - Los Angeles Times
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Run the Jewels, Rick Ross and others respond to Trump’s victory with bitter new music

Run the Jewels, the hip-hop duo of El-P, left, and Killer Mike, have released a new anti-Trump song.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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Donald Trump is not even in the White House yet, but already some in the music community are incensed and reacting the best way they can: through songs.

Hip-hop duo Run the Jewels’ El-P and Killer Mike, who spent the bulk of the election cycle stumping for Bernie Sanders, have pushed up the release of their collaboration with singer Boots as a reaction to Trump’s victory.

The group’s Soundcloud page says the new song “2100” is “for our friends. for our family. for everyone who is hurting or scared right now. here is a song we wrote months ago. we werent planning on releasing it yet but… well it feels right, now.”

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Explicitly against war and Trump, the tune kicks off with some haunting organ and feedback sounds and the chilling lyric, “How long before the hate that we hold lead us to another Holocaust?”

Run the Jewels also noted on Soundcloud that the song is “about fear and its about love and its about wanting more for all of us.”

Florida rap veteran Rick Ross goes a step further in his new video for the 2015 track “Free Enterprise,” featuring John Legend. The song’s already infamous lyric referencing a Trump assassination remains, although the president-elect’s name has been censored for the video.

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The bulk of the clip, however, is concerned with the racial profiling of African Americans by the police, closing with the statement that “one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.” It adds the statistic that black males are nearly 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites.

The video ends with a shot of Ross standing in front of an upside-down American flag with a defiantly raised fist. [Warning: Both songs feature explicit lyrics.]

Meanwhile, Atlanta garage rockers the Black Lips tweeted a link to “Deaf Dumb and Blind,” a hastily put-together “anarchy style punk song” inspired by the election results. The raw rocker includes this potent refrain: “The blind lead the blind / And the dumb lead the deaf.”

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SoCal rock duo Best Coast took a different tack, creating an email hotline for those discouraged by Tuesday’s stunner. Other tweets from the band called Trump “evil” and “racist,” and promised that their next album will be “angry as ...”

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