Writing about an album made from cat sounds probably isn’t the best way to start a new hip-hop blog, but fuck it. Cats and hip-hop go way back anyway. Just ask Naughty by Nature. And even today, Tyler, the Creator can’t get enough of Photoshopped felines.
Now though, with the Meow the Jewels Kickstarter hitting its funding goal with days to spare, that rap and cat relationship is about to be taken to a whole new level. What started out as a joke is happening for real, and it looks set to go down in rap history as either the dumbest album ever conceived, or one of the most brilliant.
It began a few months back, when Run the Jewels (aka El-P and Killer Mike) announced there would be a special ‘remix’ edition of their new album RTJ2, recorded using the sounds of cats. With a price tag of a modest $40K, it was taken as nothing more than joke, and a nice little pop-shot at the drama surrounding that not-so secret one-off Wu-Tang Clan album.
One fan took it to heart though, and set about making sure the remix album came out for real. The Kickstarter appeal to raise the $40K soon got the backing of Run the Jewels itself, with El-P stating that his slice of the crowd-funded cash would get donated to the families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
Before long the campaign had caught the attention of the hip-hop world and beyond, with some of the biggest names in the game pledging to work on the album, including Dan the Automator, Prince Paul, Just Blaze and Alchemist.
Who knows what the project will actually sound like, but the end result is less important than the journey towards it. Musically, hip-hop has never been shy to blur reality with fiction, from the mostly made-up violence of classic gangster raps, to the stories told by the alter egos of artists like Ghostface Killah, MF Doom and Quasimoto. It’s also a genre well-versed in crossing over to the weird side, even something as weird as making beats from cat noises.
But Meow The Jewels could also end up having a deeper meaning beyond the music. A project as crazy as this will always cross-over into mainstream news media, helping introduce Run the Jewels to a wider audience, which in turn is good for independent hip-hop as a whole.
It’s the charitable donation and connection with the situation in Ferguson that is key though. Hip-hop has always had a serious image problem to the outsiders that don’t understand it. Many of those same people have also likely struggled to keep track of the full extent of the aftermath and fallout from the deaths of Garner and Brown. But with rappers having been reporting from the front line, especially artists like Talib Kweli and Run the Jewels’ own Killer Mike, the true scale of the issue has been getting through loud and clear not just to their fans, but further afield thanks to news outlets and social media.
El-P’s Meow the Jewels donations will only help to further raise the profile of hip-hop as a creative movement with enough power to make a difference, which puts the whole project way above the status of cheesy gimmick. If we end up getting some decent music out of it too, that’s merely a bonus.
It’s unclear when Meow the Jewels will drop, but peep the trailer below in the meantime. RTJ2 is released later this month.