El-P Thinks ‘Meow The Jewels’ Is Probably The ‘Best Cat-Themed Album Of The Decade’

Run The Jewels 4 is set for release in 2020, but let’s not forget that Killer Mike and El-P have actually already released four Run The Jewels albums. Aside from their three numbered albums, they also shared the deeply silly Meow The Jewels in 2015. Of course, the album is a remixed version of Run The Jewels 2, but with the instrumental components replaced with cat sounds. If you ask El-P, he’ll tell you that Meow The Jewels is likely the best cat-themed album of the 2010s.

A fan tweeted today, “Just a reminder that @KillerMike and @therealelp remixed Run the Jewels 2 with meows and other cat noises and it’s one of the best rap albums of the decade send tweet,” and to that, El-P responded, “well… best cat themed album of the decade i like to think. also every dime of profit went to charity.”

As El-P noted in his tweet, the album doesn’t exist for no reason. It came about because aside from traditional album pre-orders for Run The Jewels 2, the duo also offered a bunch of ridiculous buying options they didn’t expect anybody to pony up the dough for. One of those was a remixed version of the album using cat sounds, for the bloated sum of $40,000. Fans created a Kickstarter campaign to make it happen, and the campaign was actually successful, raising $60,000. Killer Mike and El-P are men of their word, so they actually made the album, and donated the Kickstarter money to charity.

El-P previously said of the album, “Meow The Jewels was a joke. It was just a joke. I was smoking weed at the kitchen table trying to come up with the Mass Appeal pre-order packages for all the vinyl and all that sh*t. And I just was bored and thought it would be funny if we just came up with a bunch of fake ones.”

Other contenders for best cat-themed album of the decade include the new Cats soundtrack, Wilco’s Star Wars, and all albums released during the past ten years from Cat Power, Thundercat, Cashmere Cat, Doja Cat, and Yusuf Islam (better known as Cat Stevens).

Revisit Meow The Jewels below.

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