Welcome to the New York Times podcast. You're having great merch helps too of music news and criticism.

I'm your host John Garamonica. Where I see it, you probably three is from the ages one to four, round the age of five

you shift away for your body to be stored.

They promise education, but really they give you testing scores,

and they predict in prison population by who's growing the lowest.

And usually the lowest scores, the poorest, and they look like me.

And every day on the even news they

feed you fear for free and you so numb you watch the cops joke out a man like me

until my voice there hasn't been a whole lot of music that has arisen from this particular political and social moment that's felt completely poignant.

You know, we talked about a little baby a couple weeks ago who kind of had that perfect

intersection of genuine popularity and also speaking to the current moment.

There's also plenty of other songs that have been released that on a smaller scale have been

really effective. But there was something specific about the most

recent run the Jules record, which came out a month ago, where it felt like

it arrived at almost like, you know, I don't believe in things like this, but almost kind of like a preordained moment.

Obviously the record had been done for a while before it came out, it had been recorded in a different moment. But in listening to

RTJ4 and in going back into the run the Jules catalog, what's very clear is that the America that everybody is very clearly

living in now and actually has been living in for quite some time, even if their eyes have

been a little bit covered to it.

This is the America that Run the Jules

have been rapping about and making music about for years now.

This is a group that remains skeptical

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