Run the Jewels / ooh la la
ooh la la
gleeful, menacing, celebratory
A high-energy flex built on a chopped vocal hook lifted from an old funk/soul sample, where El-P and Killer Mike trade boastful, cartoonishly violent bars about money, appetite, and chaos. The song is less about a coherent argument than about swagger, texture, and rhythmic pleasure — a party track with menace curling underneath it.
braggadocio excess and appetite anti-authority posture chaos as identity hedonism
Who's speaking
Two first-person narrators (El-P and Killer Mike) speaking directly to listeners and imagined rivals, boasting in exaggerated, half-comic terms; the voice is unreliable in a knowing, performative way rather than confessional.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as escalate a mood: it opens with a hook that sets a loose, festive tone, then moves through verses that pile up images of hunger for money, food, sex, and violence, before turning explicitly anti-authoritarian and finally embracing outright anarchic imagery, ending back in the wordless hook as if the chaos dissolves into pure sound.
How it's built
Built around a repeated nonsense/scat hook that functions like a chant, bookending three dense verses. Each verse ratchets up the intensity and absurdity, culminating in a bridge-like final verse that pivots from personal flexing to a broader statement about disorder and rule-breaking before collapsing back into the hook, which by the end fragments into pure vocalization.
Section by section
Opening hook
The song opens not with words but with a chant-like sample, immediately establishing rhythm and mood over meaning. It functions as a communal, almost ritual invitation before the lyrical content even begins.],
First verse
“lookin' for M's like I lost a friend”
The verse frames money-chasing with the emotional register of grief, a darkly comic simile that sets the tone of treating material hunger as existentially urgent. Military imagery follows quickly, linking financial hustle to armed threat.
Second verse
“first of all, fuck the fuckin' law”
This verse leans into raw, appetite-driven imagery — food, sex, violence layered together — while invoking hip-hop forebears to assert lineage and skill. The tone is gleefully vulgar, using humor to soften and heighten the aggression simultaneously.
Third verse
The focus shifts slightly toward self-mythology, casting the narrator as a scrappy underdog turned untouchable force, while warning imagery about violence returns, framed almost as folkloric threat rather than literal narrative.
Final verse
“inmates run the asylum”
The closing verse escalates from personal bragging to a broader anti-authority statement, invoking anarchic and antihero imagery. The asylum metaphor crystallizes the song's thesis: order has broken down and the speakers revel in that collapse.
Outro hook
The song dissolves back into the wordless chant, now further fragmented, suggesting that after all the verbal chaos, what remains is pure sound and momentum rather than resolution.
Craft
- extended food/appetite metaphor
- References to raw meat, seafood, and eating recur throughout, blurring hunger for money, sex, and violence into one continuous appetite that frames the rappers as predatory and insatiable.
- pop culture allusion
- Nods to figures like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Jeru the Damaja, Bruce Lee, the Joker, and Hannibal Lecter position the speakers within a lineage of outlaw or unhinged icons, borrowing their cultural weight to inflate the boast.
- hyperbole
- Claims of urinating on royalty or running an asylum push the bragging into cartoonish exaggeration, signaling the verses are meant as theatrical excess rather than literal threat.
- onomatopoeic hook
- The wordless 'ooh la la' phrasing works almost as an instrument, giving the track a percussive, sing-along texture that offsets the density of the verses.
Reading it
Read most straightforwardly, the song is a maximalist flex track where two established rappers assert dominance through exaggerated appetite, cultural references, and anti-establishment posturing, using humor and hyperbole to keep the menace playful rather than literal. A secondary reading might treat the anarchic imagery as a broader political statement about distrust of institutions, consistent with Run the Jewels' recurring anti-authority themes elsewhere in their catalog, though here it feels more like texture and attitude than developed argument.
Context
Run the Jewels are known for pairing aggressive, technically dense rapping with explicit anti-establishment politics, often balanced by humor and pop-culture-savvy references. This track fits their pattern of combining party-oriented, sample-driven hooks with verses that are simultaneously comedic, boastful, and pointed. I don't have specific confirmed details about the sample source or the song's production background, so I'm avoiding claims there.
Listen for
- how the hook's nonsense syllables function almost as a drum layer
- the shift in tone between playful hedonism and violent imagery within single lines
- the way pop-culture references are used to inflate the speakers' outlaw persona
- the escalation from personal boasting to broader anti-authority statements in the final verse
- the return to the wordless hook as a kind of comedown after the verses' density
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