Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k)
aggressive, gleeful, seething
A high-velocity posse cut where El-P and Killer Mike trade verses of violent bravado, prison-abolitionist rage, and sexual boasting, all riding a chorus that mimics the imperative of the classic robbery line the group's name comes from. The song oscillates between cartoonish menace and genuine political fury at incarceration, clergy abuse, and state violence, refusing to let either register cancel the other out.
mass incarceration and prison abolition institutional hypocrisy (church, courts, police) hypermasculine bravado and sexual conquest vengeance as moral logic black identity and criminalization
Who's speaking
Two first-person rapper personas (El-P and Killer Mike) address listeners, rivals, and the systems that oppress them directly; the voice is unapologetically unreliable in its violent hyperbole but sincere in its political anger, blurring boast and protest.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a linear story so much as escalate through voice-trading verses: it opens with fashion-and-toughness posturing, pivots hard into a fantasy of prison uprising and revenge against guards and wardens, detours into raunchy sexual bragging tinged with loneliness about incarceration's effect on family, indicts clergy and political profiteers of the prison system, and closes with a scorched-earth battle-rap verse invoking historical and criminal-justice imagery before returning to the chorus's chant.
How it's built
Built on a repeated chant hook that functions almost like a call to action, bookending four dense verses that each shift tone and speaker without warning; there's no clean verse-chorus-bridge symmetry, more a relentless forward churn that mirrors the song's obsession with speed and momentum.
Section by section
Opening chant
The title phrase becomes a chorus that functions less as narrative and more as pure propulsion, an instruction to keep moving that frames everything that follows as urgent and breathless.
First verse
Fashion posturing quickly curdles into an explicit call for unity among gang and street factions to turn violence toward police and prison staff, escalating from style talk to insurrection fantasy within a few bars.
Courtroom outburst
“we out of order, your honor”
Flipping courtroom rhetoric back on the judge inverts institutional authority, casting the speaker as the one delivering verdicts rather than receiving them.
Sexual/domestic verse
Boasting about sexual conquest gives way abruptly to a confession about the isolation of incarceration, with the mention of missed family visits puncturing the swagger and revealing real loss underneath.'
Anaphoric vengeance passage
“the vision becomes a vow”
A chain of repeated word-endings turns personal grievance into a manifesto, naming politicians, prison profiteers, and clergy as the true villains rather than the incarcerated.
Closing battle verse
The final verse shifts register into pure lyrical combat, stacking dense internal rhyme and historical/criminal allusions to assert supremacy over rivals while still threading in commentary on racial profiling and state violence.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repetition of a key word across lines (in the prison-uprising and vengeance passages) builds incantatory momentum, turning political rage into something rhythmic and chant-like.
- hyperbole
- Exaggerated violent and sexual claims throughout function as both comic braggadocio and a way of amplifying real anger past the point of realism, forcing the listener to separate performance from sincerity.
- juxtaposition
- Sexual boasting sits directly beside meditations on prison separation from family, collapsing swagger and grief into the same breath.
- allusion
- References to historical/cultural touchstones (a notorious NYC jail, an underground manual, hip-hop forebears) ground the fantasy violence in recognizable institutions and lineage.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a deliberate collision of two Run the Jewels modes: cartoon-violent battle rap and genuine prison-abolitionist protest, with the exaggeration serving as a Trojan horse for real anger about incarceration, clergy abuse, and racialized policing. An alternative reading would take the violent and sexual boasting at face value as pure shock-value entertainment with the political lines as seasoning rather than the point — but the specificity and repetition of the anti-institutional material (prisons, clergy, profiteers) suggests the politics are load-bearing, not incidental.
Context
This track appears on Run the Jewels' debut album, released free in 2013, an era when the duo built their reputation on pairing gleeful shock-rap aggression with pointed critiques of police and prison systems. I don't have confirmed details about this specific song's recording or writing process beyond what's audible in the lyric.
Listen for
- the chant hook's stutter-step delivery and how it mimics acceleration
- the tonal whiplash between sexual bragging and confessions about prison-enforced family separation
- the anaphoric chain building from personal grievance to a list of institutional villains
- how the courtroom-inversion line reverses power without changing register
- the density of internal rhyme in the closing verse compared to the looser opening verse
About Run the Jewels
Run the Jewels, also known by the initials RTJ, is an American hip-hop superduo, composed of Brooklyn-based rapper and producer El-P and Atlanta-based rapper Killer Mike. They released their critically acclaimed debut album Run the Jewels as a free download in 2013 and have since released the follow-up albums Run the Jewels 2 (2014), Run the Jewels 3 (2016), and RTJ4 (2020), all of which have been released for free and received critical acclaim.
2013 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue