The Renaissance of Boots Riley: Reviewing SORRY TO BOTHER YOU + 2015 Interview

By Ted Coe. Monday, July 30, 2018.

I’m going to end this debut blog-post / essay with an appeal to read a sizable transcript of an interview I conducted in 2015 with musician / filmmaker / radical organizer Boots Riley. If you'd rather just listen in, I'm also reposting a recording of that conversation, in raw form.

Boots Riley is front man of hip-hop act The Coup, and much, much more.

Boots [Riley]
Street Sweeper Social Club opening for Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction
by cappndave (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Now, a brief look back to another moment in history: 1986, when TIME Magazine dubbed Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne, “Rock’s Renaissance Man.” 

Byrne was best known for his work with that prominent “New Wave”/ art-rock band, but he also was always applying skills that got him into two prominent arts schools, incorporated many “world music” influences into his own compositions (eventually even starting the eclectic record-label Luaka Bop), scored theater works, and so on.

For TIME though, it was the release of the feature comedy True Stories, an offbeat satire that he wrote, directed, scored, and even narrated on screen, that prompted the cover story. 

Three years ago, I might have also dubbed activist hip-hopper Boots Riley with the same “Renaissance man” title when I interviewed him on February 20th, 2015, before his band The Coup played a powerhouse set of music at the UCSB MultiCultural Center Theater. His 2018 debut feature film, Sorry to Bother You, is a crowning achievement for this rather wonderful personality. The honor definitely would apply, now more than ever.

UCSB MCC Poster for The Coup (2015)

By 2015, I had been a fan of The Coup for over twenty years, including their frequently memorable and stylistically-eclectic catalogue of music videos. Boots Riley is also an inspiring figure as a radical Communist firebrand. The Coup’s music is always biting, often very humorous, and politically eye-opening. As the group’s name suggests, Boots has positioned himself as an exceptional voice in popular music. 

The Coup’s records are satirical or righteously-angry depictions of resistance, of the people rising up against institutional oppression and widespread corporate criminality, in alternately bold or rather subtle ways. Boots is unafraid to critique global capitalism from a strongly Marxist perspective. He is fiercely dedicated to calling attention to the history of both social-justice and revolutionary movements. 

I always appreciated Boots’ lengthy musical partnership with a super-talented and pioneering female DJ, Pam the Funkstress (she died in 2017, and Sorry to Bother You is dedicated to her memory). Their roots in the East Bay Area, especially Oakland, CA, have resonated for me as well, as a native of Northern California. By 2015, he had already worked with a lot of other prominent musicians too from a range of genres.

What’s more, early that year there was also this narrative film in pre-production that I was only starting to become aware of. At the same time, one of my favorite left-wing publishers, Haymarket Books, was likewise putting out Riley's Tell Homeland Security — We Are the Bomb, a scrapbook-collection of his great song lyrics, commentaries, band photos, tour reflections, and more. 

I had previously had some terrific experiences exposing appreciative viewers to The Coup’s music videos. At the time, I was mildly surprised (even disappointed) that some of the student leaders I was working with at UC Santa Barbara’s community-radio station, KCSB-FM, were entirely unfamiliar with Boots’ genius. Even though they were playing to somewhat smaller crowds than I would have preferred, there was no mistaking Boots’ and his band’s commitment to galvanizing people through their art and public performance. Numerous attendees that night were completely blown away after seeing The Coup in concert.

Of course, three years have passed, and Boots Riley now seems to be everywhere. His debut film has screened at two major film festivals: Sundance and SXSW. Q&A appearances at numerous preview screenings followed. Newspaper and magazine articles abound. He’s all over the television, on the radio, and of course the World Wide Web. Here’s your new Renaissance Man from the world of popular music and now cinema. 

Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) in Sorry to Bother You

A companion tale to The Coup’s 2012 album of the same name, Sorry to Bother You was written and directed by Boots Riley. In preparation for our 2015 interview, I had already come to realize just how cinematic so much of The Coup's video work truly was, so it was not surprising to me just how invested Boots was in mastering that new medium.

Detroit (Tessa Thompson)
Sorry to Bother You (wearing Joe Strummer's actual jacket)

At the time, Boots himself was already labelling the story “a surreal dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction.”

Set in the corporate world of telemarketing, Sorry to Bother You follows the exploits of a struggling, young, entry-level protagonist Cassius (Cash) Green (Lakeith Stanfield); his artist-girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson); best-friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler); uncle Sergio Green (Terry Crews); union organizer Squeeze (Steven Yeun); elder coworker Langston (Danny Glover); libertarian corporate guru Steve Lift (Armie Hammer); and a quartet of other staff at Lift’s marketing company RegalView: my favorite being the dapper, bowler-wearing man with an eye-patch, Mr. ______ [“Blank”] (Omari Hardwick).

It’s all about racism, life in a capitalist world (including forms of wage slavery and even worse), gentrification and selling out, and resistance through art, activism, union organizing, and social revolution. 

Mr. ______ (Omari Hardwick) in Sorry to Bother You

Cassius Green’s succeeds as a telemarketer only when he begins to channel a more-than-nasal “white voice” right out of his customers’ deepest Horatio Alger dreams — per Langston’s suggestion. It turns out Cash is not the only one assuming this affect, so we hear white actors — like comedians David Cross and Patton Oswalt — doing voiceovers during these sequences that alternate between anachronistic, overly formal and mannered dialogue, crude "locker-room talk," and ironically-delivered street slang (see GIF immediately below).

Examples of the RegalView sales technique abound in the preview trailers, so the gimmick isn’t even where Sorry to Bother You’s true revelations are to be found, although there’s also something about the core premise that I still haven’t gotten used to (I found myself paying attention to the physical act of lip-syncing a wee bit, as if I was trying to figure out a magician’s bag of tricks). 

The less said about the plot, however, the better — it seems. Boots’ film is that surprising. Spoilers are best avoided here.

Cash Green (Lakeith Stanfield) and Steve Lift (Armie Hammer) in

Sorry to Bother You

The sci-fi elements are the most astounding parts in the film, but the magical-realist voiceover device, satirical commercials / infomercials and random TV ephemera, and overall accumulation of some rather absurd comedy bits (e.g., each of his calls physically deposit Cash into the recipient's personal space) and truly mythic traits give Sorry to Bother You the hallucinatory / psychedelic feel of some rather terrific underground comix of the early 1970s.

It all kicks into gear once Cassius rises up to the top-level high-rise office space at RegalView, as a “Power Caller,” with a rather frightening nine-figure proposal eventually being dangled in front of him. Cash's loyalties and sense of place, of right and wrong, his very sanity, are all thereby tested, as a result.

Some film critics and others I truly respect are already calling Sorry to Bother You one of the best films of 2018 — a belief I too share. Riley's images of the hilly Bay Area communities I deeply miss and truly love evoked in me a sense of the excitement and regional recognition that largely matched my personal experience of Greta Gerwig’s Sacramento-based masterpiece Lady Bird, from just last year.

On location in Oakland, CA.
(Image from The Village Voice, credit: Annapurna Pictures)

Little did I anticipate just how funny, dark, magical, dream-like, and powerfully literate Boots' final product would end up being. Sorry to Bother You is a puzzle of a film satire, and it evokes a lot of comparisons to other works, as viewers attempt to sort out all that’s going on in it. That’s an exercise I truly appreciate. (It was one way I could confidently conclude that Gerwig’s own hit movie was more than just a rehashed coming-of-age movie. Or just a sentimental favorite of mine.)

I’m trying to recall all of the references I’ve seen writers make in the Sorry to Bother You reviews I’ve looked at, or in social media posts that friends have made.

It’s less grounded in one particular genre than Jordan Peele’s satirical horror-film from 2017, Get Out. (Satire counts as its own genre though, no?), but I’ll list a bunch of the influences (or comparisons) I’ve noticed (or read about), here:

In Cinema

Office Space / Idiocracy / Mike Judge

Brazil / Terry Gilliam

Black Mirror

The Twilight Zone

Spike Lee movies (especially his under-appreciated Bamboozled?)

Repo Man

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind & The Science of Sleep / Michel Gondry’s work more generally (he’s actually name-checked in the film)

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)

Ken Loach 

Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope

Melvin Van Peebles Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Black Song

John Carpenter’s They Live

Lindsey Anderson’s O Lucky Man!

'90s Black film comedies (e.g., Friday) 

The Marx Brothers

W.C. Fields

Richard Pryor Live in Concert

Plus a few other movie influences Riley himself cites in a Film Comment article: 

Serbian auteur Emir Kustarica (Black Cat, White Cat; Underground; Time of the Gypsies)

The Wicker Man

Mishima

Tron

The Fight Club

Literature / Ideas

Paul Beatty 

Colson Whitehead
R. Crumb?

H.G. Wells
Mary Shelley

Jonathan Swift

Greek and Roman Satire

Voltaire’s Candide

Karl Marx

Franz Kafka

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

George Schuyler’s 1931 novel Black No More

Fran Ross’s 1974 novel Oreo

Art 

Banksy

Music

Too many to name, but major shout-outs to those suggesting Prince and TLC. 

And to the New York Review of Books’ Namwali Serpell for citing Sun Ra’s experimental science-fiction film Space is the Place (from 1971). (I really should take another look at that one.)

And there you have it, just in case you weren’t taking my word for it that Boots Riley is a truly fascinating and compelling dude. Plus, he has this terrific sense of physical style and what more needs to be said about the man? All of this public attention and celebration has been a long time coming.

Wanting to do my part and just let people know how much I think they will be stimulated and amused by Sorry to Bother You. I also highly recommend taking it in on the big screen before your time runs out. 

While I’m at it: this film’s success so far (it’s a sleeper hit that’s earned well over $13 million in box office returns to date) should grow as the accolades pile up. As with Get Out last year, I fully expect year-end recognition for the movie and significant notice during the awards season.

The reason I think the aformentioned interview is worth sharing in this way, despite being three years old, is that all of the topics and themes we discussed are as relevant today as they were when I first aired the conversation on my music-and-cultural-arts radio program, “The Freak Power Ticket,” on 91.9 KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara. I pored over the transcript with a microscope, to be honest. I have fond memories of, and am very proud of the territories Boots and I traversed.

Most tellingly, there was major attention to Boots’ cinematic vision; his revolutionary ideas, their origins, and development; his musical process; and much more. I think the great work Sorry to Bother You is actually enhanced by many of the points we cover therein.

KCSB-FM Executive Committee members and me with Boots Riley at UC Santa Barbara in 2015.

It certainly doesn’t feel like years had passed between then and now. If you have a moment, please consider giving this Renaissance man a bit more of your time… and see his film in the theaters while you still can!

(In the meantime, you can sample the audio recording immediately below... Or read on!)

_____________

Ted Coe: So I'm here with Boots Riley of The Coup… Welcome back to Santa Barbara.

Boots Riley: All right, thanks. Thanks for having us.

TC: You have a big show tonight… So this will be airing after the performance obviously, but, you're at the Multicultural Center Theater?

BR: Yeah.

TC: …How many times have you played Santa Barbara?

BR: As The Coup?

TC: Yeah.

BR: Three times? No, maybe four, four times. Yeah.

TC: So… you’ve got a lot of projects going on and we'll get into that. I wanted to start though by asking you to describe your writing process… both as a lyricist and as a producer and musician.

BR: Well I would say pre Genocide & Juice, my writing process was just to write lyrics… without a beat and sometimes by playing like old records that I had, that weren't Hip Hop records, and just playing the instrumental part and rap into it. 

And so that's why like on our first album, it doesn't really fit the beat all the time and it's not really that… the cadence isn't that great in my opinion. After that, I started making my own music, so I just made a lot of music and waited till I made music that made me feel a certain way emotionally. And then try to plug into what that emotion was and how that emotion materialized in my real life and then wrote about those things.

So the music comes first, then the feelings, and then the lyrics.

TC: Do you create music?… So, after the first record… Do you play instruments?… How do you supplement the lyrics?

BR: Yeah, well I meant earlier I am very bad at a lot of instruments and so a lot of times I'll just… finger out a bass line on like a Moog or something like that.

And then maybe like sometimes… some three finger chords to go along with it and you know, I’ll make up the drum beat on the drum machine. And then I'll have people come in that are friends of mine that play much better than I do and you know, embellish and do different things. Or sometimes I might just be working with the musician that's a guitar player and you know, have some sort of off thing that I want them to do that they have to know me really well to know the exact notes that I'm talking about. Like I might be like, I want this thing to go like [verbalizes bass line]… or something like that.

And they'll be like, “what the fuck are you talking about?” But if they know me really well then then it's a hit and miss, like, “no, that's not the note. This is the note.” you know, that sort of thing. So it's a really convoluted way of getting to something. But, um, because of that, I think I come up with ideas that a lot of musicians wouldn’t. Sometimes I also am… you know, I'll hear an old record and be like, I want to do something that's kinda like that but sounds… but we changed that up to be like this, you know, when. So, um, you know… that's part of how I do it as well. 

TC: When, when did you decide you wanted to make the music… a fusion of turntablism and sampling plus… the live instrumentation

 
BR: Never decided that… I don't know if it's a fusion of turntablism and I mean it's just… I started producing the music because people that I knew that were producers just flaked on me a lot. 

And so I started having to do that and then, you know… we would do it with live instruments because that was a way to get a better mix. You know, if you have like a sample, then your voice has to be so far over the music and then the drum beat has to be so far over the rest of the sample that you don't really hear the things in it that are things I like, which are like the bass line and you know, maybe some synthesizer sounds and things like that. I don't hear that when you just have a loop of a sample, it all sounds mashed together, which is a sound that has an aesthetic all its own that feels good, but it's not what I was going for.

TC: I'm really interested too… in your collaborations. And so, like this week on my radio program, I played The Coup. 

I played Street Sweeper Social Club, which is your project with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine… You’ve worked very closely with Pam the Funkstress and she’s… a very prominent DJ in the Bay Area.

BR: Definitely…

TC: But you've also worked with Ursus Minor, a French jazz ensemble, Star Fucking Hipsters… the hardcore punk group, Atari Teenage Riot. It was Rupa and the April Fishes I had discovered you did some backing vocals for a track by them, from the Bay Area. Um, and many others, Spooky, DJ Spooky. Yeah… And you had a lot of guests on Sorry To Bother You also.

BR: Yeah.

TC: So maybe you could talk about like your interest in collaboration.

BR: I mean all of the music we make is a collaboration, like as I just told you… in how we shape the music, you know, the musicians are a big part of that because I might make a bass line and they're like… that note that you're doing at the end, that's, you know, it’d sound better if you changed it to this note or whatever. 

So it's all a collaboration… I just want to say that… there's a fine line between that and you know… who wrote the song and things like that. And that's always being negotiated and figured out and agreed upon. So there's, sometimes the musicians are co-writers of the song, sometimes not. Depending on what was brought to the table and what we decided on beforehand, but so with the collaborations, I'm just always looking to do new things that are exciting…

The Ursus Minor, it's funny that you brought that up. Ursus Minor is actually a band that I'm. Or that I was in. It was me, M1 from Dead Prez. Jeff Beck. Jef Lee Johnson. And… what's his name, the drummer from Bad Apple? I forget his name now… Dave King and… François Corneloup. Oh yeah. And… dammit… Tony Hymas. And so that was just a weird thing that was fun to do… but it was… some really off-meter shit and stuff where it sounded better before I rapped on it, you know, like it was something fun to do, but I didn’t… you know, and I think it was more about the process than what came out of it.

TC: I really enjoyed it though.

BR: Yeah? Ok.

And then Street Sweeper Social Club, that was just something, you know, Tom was a friend. We worked on this “Tell Us the Truth Tour” and then I would, a lot of times go out with him while he…

TC: Was that with him… [as] Night Watchman and… what were you doing on it?

Billy Bragg + Boots Riley
(screenshot from Tell Us the Truth video excerpt)

BR: “Tell Us the Truth Tour” was a lot of different people. Me, Tom Morello. Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Janeane Garofalo, Jill Sobule. We all went out on this bus for… a bunch of weeks and it was about… bringing, it was… exposing media monopoly and… it ended up at the protest against the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement in Florida. So, with that, and that also ended up becoming like a song writing… class at night. It'd be me, Steve and Tom sitting up at night on the bus talking about songwriting. And, matter of fact, my song “Laugh, Love, Fuck” is really, in my mind, I was writing a Billy Bragg song. So…

TC: It's interesting, like “Sexuality,” or…

BR: Yeah, well I mean, yeah. And his is, he does his different. I think we have a different way…

TC: You know that song right?

BR: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. 

TC: So let's see. What about… your interest in… different genres of music that, you have a breadth that's really impressive. 

BR: …I don't think I started out that way, but when you are making your own music and you're collecting records, you're looking for influences that are all over the place. So like if you just do the funk records, you're going to end up having the same thing. 

You’re going to sample Roger 20,000 times or whatever. You're going to keep making that same thing. 

So you're looking for other kinds of music. And so a lot of this stuff was stuff that I wouldn't have just in my regular life become a fan of because music is all about identity a lot of times, right? It's like this person, that's that kind of person. I'm tuning into what they're doing, but looking for music to make, you, you know, like you, examples, you can see like Kanye, he's taking stuff from you know, proto-, you know, pop weird shit from the '60s because you're just looking for something to do something new with. Right? And so for me, you know, I would do, that's what I started out doing is… listening for new influence… like what kind of snare sounds could I find from this record and what kind of keyboards were they using, what kind of things were they doing?

But then I would also play the records, you know, because you're, you're, you're playing them… so listen to them at the house and then I would start liking some of the music and you know, that was the way that I was exposed to it. I remember that… I, you know, like for instance, I love the Dead Kennedys now, but in junior high school I hated the girls who had Dead Kennedys written on their jeans. And so I was never going to listen to that music… you know?

TC: And you've worked with Jello [Biafra, former frontman of Dead Kennedys]…

BR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TC: Huh...

BR: And that's how music really works.

TC: Yeah. Yeah. What high school did you go to?

BR: …I went to Oakland High, but what I’m specifically thinking about is… I was in junior high school in Pasadena.

TC: Oh okay.

BR: Yeah. Yeah.

TC: So you had some time in, SoCal...

BR: Yeah.

TC: You’re not, you seem very… like a Northern Californian to me.

BR: OK.

TC: I’m from Sacramento originally.

[Some quiet laughter from both.] 

BR: Alright…

TC: [Y]ou reflect some of what I see as the best of the region.

BR: Yeah. Yeah. Well okay. Thank you. I’ll take that.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so, you know, a lot of times because music is… because we're looking for someone that's representing us when we're listening to it a lot of times and so, and, and a lot of times who we can relate to is very much, you know... it's guided by who we think that person is and who we think we are. So it has to do with how somebody looks, has to do with, you know, the style that they have and what certain sounds make you think of, and all that kind of stuff.

TC: So you’re talking about punk and, and Anti- Records put out three of your albums?

BR: Oh yeah. Two. Two, no three.

TC: And uh, so they're, they're affiliated with Epitaph, which is a punk label. I can't remember the owner's name.

BR: Well, Brett Gurewitz is the owner and Andy Kaulkin is the president of Anti-.

TC: Yeah. So, um, it seems like the provocative nature of… The Coup’s lyrics has… aligns in interesting ways with groups like Dead Kennedys or like a lot of hardcore radical punk-rock music… but, was that something that you are aware of that have you grown to develop an appreciation for that kind of similarity?

BR: Yeah, well I think that the, the… definitely the roughness of it, you know, I think I was listening to, I was reading this interview with George Clinton from… 1976 and they were asking. And this was like right when he had his first hit record.

They've been going through the rest of the ‘70s without hits and nobody was listening to him and he had his first hit record and, and the interview was talking about how he's the next thing in Black music and this and that. And um, he was talking about one, how his music was so rough sounding to people in the '70s, that they thought of it as rock, they didn't think of it as Black music. And that he was talking about what, what was being seen as R&B at the time, in the late ‘70s, like Teddy Pendergrass and stuff, he was saying that that was just copying white music from the ‘50s.

He was pointing it, and it’s in this interview, that's from Rolling Stone that recently got reprinted, and… he was pointing out the use of the strings and when that started to be in Black music and the use of certain horn sounds and the use of certain sort of ways of doing it, which was smoothed out and he talks about that in his music at the same time. And so, um, I think like a lot of what Hip Hop at first got flack for was not, was not sounding smooth enough, not sounding, you know, refined enough and then, and now like Hip Hop and R&B is all about refinement, you know, like smoothness around a lot of it. And so I definitely, um, grew to really respect just putting it all out there, putting, you know, the roughness of it, that kind of came through and is in certain musics…

TC: Can… you have to go…?

BR: I need to go check and see what… [is going on with their pre-show soundcheck.]

TC: We can pick this up… [end of Part One.]

Part Two:

TC: Well if we have a, just a few minutes... I was interested in… your background and how you became an activist and I've read that your family, that your parents had been organizers of some sort.

BR: Well, by the time… so my parents were radicals, but by the time I was about eight they had burnt out of those organizations and my father went back to law school and he’s… pretty active now, but this was during the time when he was just going to law school and going to work...

So friends of the family were still like around and involved in things and… some youth organizer had asked if I wanted to go to something. I totally planned to not go and not show up. But I was 14. I didn't know how to assert myself. So I was like, yeah, you know, I'll be there at the house and I planned to not be there. And I happened to, I accidentally was there when he came by… with a van full of 14 year old girls and said, hey, we're going to go to the beach, but first we're all going to go support the Watsonville cannery-workers strike.

And... all I heard was “go to the beach.” So I was like, yeah, I'm there. What do we have to. Whatever that stuff is you said we got to do first, I'll do it.

So, and come to find out all these girls that were my age, they were very social and very astute and some of them were radicals. And... from there that summer, I got involved in the, in this, in the summer, in what was called their summer project for the Progressive Labor Party. It was helping to organize an anti-racist farm-workers’ union in Delano and McFarland, in Central California.

And… and these were the… this was a farm worker's union organized by folks that were too radical for the UFW, that had been people that were originally Chavez’s right hand men. And they were kicked out for being so radical as to want to organize undocumented immigrants. Because the UF… the United Farm Workers actually didn't organize …undocumented immigrants, which is most of the farm workers out there, so… and actually the UFW used to help Immigration to deport undocumented immigrants.

And so these are folks that were, the folks organizing the union that I was in, were folks that were kicked out of the UFW, but they originally came to Central California from Mexico City. They were students in the 1968 Mexico City demonstrations where the massacres were and they ran up here. But they didn't run up here… like sometimes when people go into exile or go into running, they're not organizing anymore. They're just hiding and happy to be alive. But these folks came from Mexico City to Central California with the purpose of organizing a revolution… and, so that was the summer project that I was involved in

TC: And you stayed involved?

BR: Yeah, I did like two or three summers and where we would live with families that were… and the way that they decided they would organize revolution was not like the model that we see here, “Hey, I'm a revolutionary. We're going to have these study groups and we're gonna have these demonstrations after school and, or after work, and on Saturdays, or whatever.”

No, they came and they got jobs in the field and they organized from there. And what I was there to do and many people, students were there to do, was to support them while they were in the field by helping to run the leaf… copy the leaflets. This is [way] back, you know, to… make the posters, to help organize the caravans, to do all sorts of things like that.

TC: And… so it, was that transformative for you then to have that kind of [experience]?…

BR: Oh, definitely. Because while I had become interested in these politics through a social thing, I really was not going to be, you know, I was a high school kid. I was not going to be like standing… and you're worried about what you look like, what you seem like to other people. There's no way I was going to be the dude standing there trying to pass you a flyer in front of high school. I wasn't going to do it, but going somewhere else where I didn't know anybody in the first place and that was, you know, I was able to do things and learn and get comfortable with doing things and being, doing things that were, entailed political organizing and then go back to Oakland with this kind of, with this practice of doing stuff.

And one of the original, one of the first things that happened was we had a, there was a year-round school issue, which was that they were going to cut back on spending on textbooks and teachers and um, make this year-round school thing where everybody was in track with… got tracked and when you were in ninth grade they would figure out whether you were going to go to college or not. And you stayed on this track.

And so, you know, a few people call for… a few of us call for… a walk out, which was… apparently turned out to be really easy to do because everybody wanted to walk out of school no matter what the reason was. But you know, this gave a good reason. So we had to walk out, this was, you know, with my new found confidence and skills, you know, we passed out flyers, organized stuff, had a walk out in one week, I think it was, and 2000 of the 2200 students at my high school walked out.

We marched down, you know, three miles to the, uh, to the, uh, Unified… Oakland Unified School District offices, at which point, you know, seeing 2000 kids. They immediately came out and said, “We've changed our mind. We're not going to do this.”

And we all felt drunk with power. 

TC: Wow.

Did you… go to university?

BR: I went to San Francisco State for a couple of years. I think I'm a junior.

TC: What were you interested in studying?...

BR: I studied history and film.

TC: Okay.

BR: Yeah.

TC: This connects up with something we were talking about off mic. Your interest in cinema.

BR: Right. I was in film school when we got, when we got a record deal. So...

TC: Okay… where was that? 

BR: I was at San Francisco State

TC: And it's like a strong program there.

BR: That's. Yeah, there. Then it was a little different than maybe now, then it was more focused on non-narrative art film... which works good for like music, video ideas or putting something in a museum. But I hadn't yet gotten to the parts where that was teaching me what I wanted to know. That was in the days when things were on film, video had not, didn't seem like a viable way yet to make a narrative feature. And so I looked, I was like, well...

TC: Didn’t have the texture you were looking for aesthetically?

BR: Yeah. It was just still VHS basically, which you could make a cool movie looking like VHS and now. But, um, anyway, so yeah, I got, I got the record deal and I was like, I could just tell these stories on me with my music.

TC: Right, right. Wow. What was the first label then?

BR: It was Wild Pitch Records...

TC: Was that an indie?…

BR: They were part of EMI.

TC: EMI.

BR: They started out as an indie, but the… by the time they got to us, they had been… they had combined with EMI Records

The Coup's Kill My Landlord
(Wild Pitch Records 1993)

TC: Actually, like recently, I gave a listen to Kill My Landlord. And… so I've been following you for a long time, but I hadn't really heard that one. And the first track is just, “Dig It.” It’s just... You really throw it down on that one… [quote] “the tip of my Mao Tse-tung.”

Some great lyrics.

BR: Yeah, I think that again was like the identity politics. Like let me sound off on who I am and you know, to kind of put it out there, who we are, but I don't know, I look at that first album is almost like a pamphlet on, on sound recording, you know, [a] pamphlet on tape… and I think, you know, I got better as a song writer after that. But um, yeah, that song was actually the very last song of that album that I wrote...

TC: You [are] sampling The Doors too…

BR: Yeah. Yeah. And uh, so yeah, we, we had gotten the deal and I was like they wanted me to turn in the album and… I just felt like it was missing something and most of the album is very slow because that's how we listened to music. We just rode in cars and…

TC: I've heard you talk about that the last time you were here in that recording [of an interview from 2010]…

BR: and then... so that all of a sudden I felt like, oh, this is a chance for me to reach out. 

TC: You said the East Coast versus the West Coast, it was a like a really different… sonic experience and…

BR: Yeah, it was like, I mean, I think like the East Coast is very much, was very much based on public transportation, like the culture around there. There's a lot of public transportation culture. Oakland is based around cars and so the music we listened to had to do with this culture that where you put… big stereo systems in your car and the way that you could hear that music coming out of that stereo system was by having a big 808 on it, you know, and because that's the big boom, the big kick and you had to, in order for that to have enough time to be big enough, I mean, in order for that to be big enough, you needed more time for it to expand, for, to do the boom. 

And... so that meant slower tempos. It's like why Too Short and all that… that’s why the tempos were slow because of that.

TC: So... the music video for “Me and Jesus [the Pimp] in a ’79 Granada Last Night.” That's with Roger Guenever Smith.

BR: Yeah.

TC: Who’s Smiley in [Spike Lee’s] Do the Right Thing, but he's also an accomplished actor on stage…and… that's had an impact. That song inspired a novel. I read… 

BR: Yeah. Yeah.

TC: Did you see that? Like you’re… there's a cinematic quality to work like that?

BR: Yeah, that's definitely one of the songs that we have that comes out of a need to make films, you know. And so I was able to do that. And then we got Roger Guenever Smith on there because he was just in some interview saying that The Coup was his favorite group. So I was like, you gotta be in this video...

And you know, he's a crazy dude. He's like really into method acting. He was really into becoming that character for a long time. So you can imagine, it was a two or three day shoot of “Me and Jesus the Pimp," and Roger Guenever Smith is being Jesus the Pimp through the whole time. And um, yeah, so it's crazy. He starts… you know, like I had to stop fights in bars and it was, you know, and he was getting the, he did the, the… crew didn't really know what he was doing, but he was like threatening people on this, like “you better turn that camera on and film this or I’m beating your ass,” you know, like people were scared, and people were quitting and you know, he had to afterward… write an apology. Like “this is part of my method. I should have… told people...”

But it's funny because he started out as a rapper named Hollywatts in the ‘80s in L.A. and he was in a group… with Ice-T and… I ran into Ice-T somewhere and I was like, “yeah, you know, I did a video with your boy Roger Guenever Smith,” and he was like, “That motherfucker is crazy. I can't go anywhere with him. I don't even, I don't fuck with him. He's crazy. He'll get you into some shit.”

So if Ice-T is saying that... you know, he's crazy.

TC: So who, who directed that?

BR: That was me and…

TC: You directed that...

BR: Yeah, me and my friend Chris Wrouble.

TC: Huh. So you've had that… your cinematic… your interest in film. The music videos have played a role in kind of allowing you to develop that talent?

BR: Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I've spent a lot of time analyzing film from a filmmaker's perspective in the sense of what I would do different and figuring out what they did in this part and what they did in that part.

TC: That's a big part, like my show is… a lot of my experience of music comes from soundtracks and like… it exposes you to a lot like, you know, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in Stranger Than Paradise or something like that. It's like…

BR: Yeah...

TC: That's, that’s… it's a channel for really interesting music. John Lurie’s music or something like that. Spike Lee, you know?

BR: Yeah, definitely

TC: So, uh, but that's interesting to me that you want to make a feature now and maybe you could talk a little bit about that project…

BR: So… I wrote this screenplay. It's a surreal dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction inspired by my time as a telemarketer. It's called Sorry to Bother You, which is the title of my last album. And I wrote the screenplay before I wrote the last album and because I wasn't, I wasn't hyped on writing another secret album, so I wanted to make bigger art, art that was connected in some way and so… I made the screenplay so I could write… the album and then now we're going to probably make another soundtrack that will, maybe it will have… double soundtracks for this album. 

But yeah, I, let's see the film is in... we, we put it out on McSweeney’s, its own paperback book… Originally, I was going to play the lead and have somebody else direct it, but I realized that it's too much of my baby that… And I, you know, I was too worried about certain parts of it and I don’t… a lot of people are not as crazy as I am. And, and some of the people that we had attached to it, it would have been their sophomore film and they wanted, I don't think they wanted to go as crazy as I did. And so the producers were like, “you need to,” the producers that I was messing with were like, “you need to… do it yourself.”

So we got Patton Oswalt and David Cross attached to it playing parts. Wyatt Cenac is playing the lead, Cassius Green [eventually the part was assumed by Lakeith Stanfield]..., the lead effects engineer from Beasts of the Southern Wild is part of the team...

TC: You have the funding? When are you shooting?

BR: In January. 

TC: Huh. Around Oakland?

BR: Yeah. The Bay Area.

TC: Yeah. Yeah. Um. That's cool… I know you have to leave in a minute, but... did you direct “The Guillotine” [music video] too?

BR: No. But it was…

TC: You conceptualized…

BR: …my concept. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of this stuff, yeah, as… like I said, collaboration. So the only things I've directed is... that is um, “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night,” and, uh, a documentary which is called Eating Forever.

It’s a short half-hour documentary…

TC: Is that online?

BR: Right now? It's not, for some reason. I gotta put it back up, but it's, it was based on our, um, it was a travelogue based on our trip to South Africa. That was me, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Black Thought from The Roots. Jeru the Damaja. Uh, um, and it was supposed to be a tour headlined by Lauryn Hill, but she didn't go at the last minute...
 

TC: So during the Occupy movement I was seeing a lot of social media… updates from you… in the height of that… around 2011, 2012 and that you were involved with some of the activism around the Port of Oakland… Can you share any thoughts on… that experience and where you think the movement is now?...

Boots Riley holding flyer for Occupy Oakland V for Vendetta benefit
at Grand Lake Theater DSC_0256
(Photo credit: Steve Rhodes. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

BR: Well that was, it was… I think it was an eye-opening experience for a lot of people because we saw Occupied encampments, if you will, sprout up in every city and town in the United States… in a… time and place where they're always telling us that there can't be a movement and that… not enough people are on board…

All these people came up around the broad idea that it's the 99% versus the 1% percent, which is a class analysis, which tells you something about the nature of the political movements before it and not addressing that, you know.

And... so… in Oakland. We tried to take it even further by putting out there that not only was it the 99% versus the 1%, but the 99% creates all the wealth for the 1%. And we showed that… we tried to show that we can withhold our labor as a tactic in this fight. And that was what one of the things that general strike was about.

TC: When was the strike?

BR: The General… the first general… the first strike… the general strike and port shut-down was November 2nd

TC: 2011?

BR: Yeah. And then we had, December 12th was the West Coast port shut-down… and then after that, one thing that's not talked about is in January of 2012, inspired by what we did, there was Occupy Nigeria, which had a nationwide general strike where every single thing in the country was shut down and they won their actual fight.

It was around, it was… it was around fuel prices and they… like every single thing. What I'm talking about, every, every restaurant, every railroad, every airport, every, everything was shut down. And in every town they had like 100,000 to 200,000 people out on the street. And there was this whole, they had their… this whole meme on the Internet, have, you know, Occupying Nigeria style and all this kind of stuff.

TC: That's amazing.

BR: You know…

TC: There's still… I mean, it's like the activism around Ferguson and… that… people are movable and… I don't know if… do you have some optimism about, you know, the opportunities for change?

BR: Definitely. I think that… I think that what people are waiting for is to see tactics that can work to win. And that's, that's basically what it's coming down to… People are saying, okay, I want to do something, I want to join something. 

What's the thing that can work? What's the thing that can win? And that's where, you know… I believe… it's important that we have strategies and tactics that win and… that has to do with radicals organizing around labor and not just for the sake of winning those things. Yes. But to show people that you can win things through… withholding labor…

TC: General strikes and…

BR: Yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah. And, and that will spark people's imagination.

TC: When did you do telemarketing?...

BR: A couple times. I did it first… right out of high school. But I was always doing sales stuff. I was… the 11-year-old kid knocking at your door, selling you a subscription, you know. Then yeah I did telemarketing later and in college. And then after Genocide & Juice [released in 1994], actually I quit. I had like a midlife crisis. I was 24 and I was like, “what the fuck am I doing?” 

I'm spending my whole adult life being a fucking artist, you know. And that was, you know, a lot of my heroes were revolutionaries who were really seriously organizing and doing things and really, you know, um, history changing campaigns when they were 19, 20 and 21...

TC: What would be, two or three names that you might refer to?

BR: Fred Hampton... many of the revolutionaries in, uh, in Vietnam or China or you know... you hear about the or... Angola at the time you hear about these things that folks… they’re about 20, 21, they're not figuring out what they're going to do for 20 years and then do it. You know.

There's an exception… Toussaint Louverture was 57 when he started the revolution in Haiti. But, you know, people are involved in a lot of things. I mean, you know, a lot of the historical figures we're talking about, we’re talking about folks doing things in their early twenties.

And so yeah, I, I was like, what the fuck am I doing? So I quit and me and… it was combined with problems that happen around [the song] “Fat Cats, Bigga Fish,” which was getting on the radio and the label cut off support for it even though it was growing and I was just really frustrated…

So we started Young Comrades and I… knew what I could do, where I could make money and still have enough time to organize. So I would do telemarketing for one day every two weeks and have enough to pay the bills.

TC: What was Young Comrades?

BR: Young Comrades was an organization… specifically organizing with a class analysis and around class struggle, but strategically organizing in the black community… So that was something that a bunch of us organized and…yeah, so I needed the, I needed the cash… and at the time I didn't have any kids so it was easy to do that. I don't think I could make enough doing that now. But… it's also a soul-sucking thing to do, to use your creativity for something like that…

But then through a series of different things that happened with that organization, it turned into not much more than a study group. And I was like, “fuck it. If all we're gonna do is put out ideas, I could put out ideas in a bigger way.” And so then I went back and made Steal This Album. Funny enough, a lot of the musicians on Steal This Album were Young Comrades.

TC: I love the Abbie Hoffman reference for that. 

BR: Yeah…

[Note: An infamous pre-9/11 design for the cover for The Coup’s 2001 LP Party Music originally featured a symbolic image of the World Trade Center exploding, with core band members DJ Pam the Funkstress conducting and Boots Riley detonating it with the following musical instrument…]

TC: I’ll let you go. But… I, I didn't realize that the Party Music detonator is a, what's it called again?

BR: A bass tuner. 

TC: Bass tuner. That was a, that was like kind of a missing part [of the story for me], maybe because I never got to see it up close. It was just through… like digital reproductions of the album [cover] that never got released.

BR: It was just, it was a bass tuner and Pam has conductors’ wands, so…

TC: Music bringing it down. What was that like to go through?… The album was due like September 12th or something?

BR: It was actually supposed to be out September 4th originally. If it had come out September 4th, we might be, you know, I might not be talking to you. I might be sitting in my, you know, platinum-covered apartment or something…

I don't know, but… yeah, it was… originally it was… we sent it in July to a bunch of magazines. All of the magazines were like, wow, this is the best. Rolling Stone was like thinking about doing an article, calling it the best album cover in the last 10 years, right?

TC: Yeah...

BR: But they printed the ad in August and it was supposed to come out September 4th, but because of some problems with the label already in August, they had already told me that they were pushing it back to November. So, we already knew it was being pushed back to November, but it was already out in magazines and stuff and so…

TC: It’s a zeitgeist record.

BR: It was… I was, if had to happen to anybody. I'm glad it happened to me. Because, it was exactly what I came into the frame to do.

TC: Yeah.

BR: You know, so I was able to talk about. I was for a while, I was the only like public…

TC: That was a weird time too...

BR: ...the only public, only entertainer at least, and maybe even only public persona saying that we shouldn't be bombing Afghanistan. The other person, the only other person was Viggo Mortenson. So…

Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of people don't know that he's. He used to be married to Exene {Cervenka of LA punk band X]. 

TC: Yes. Yes.

BR: And so that's where some of that came from.

TC: Well, that was a weird time. Thank you. I mean… it really meant a lot to some of us who were just, like, disoriented by what happened on 9/11 and…

BR: Oh yeah, it was a scary thing. And especially it was scary that then everybody was seeming, you know, like there were things people wouldn't say

TC: Yeah… all of the [1999] WTO actions and things like that prior to [9/11]… it felt like there was a shift going on in activism and then that just… the lockdown really happened there. So. But uh, so that's where the art is really important. You know, like your, your communiques from Occupy in Oakland, really matter too… along with your creative output. So...

BR: Thanks man...

TC: I’ll let you go perform. Thank you so much. Very nice to talk to you.  And um, what size [KCSB-FM] shirt did you say?

BR: A medium or large. 

TC: Okay. Okay, cool.

BR: All right.

TC: Look forward to the performance…

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Writer Ted Coe is staff advisor at KCSB-FM, the community-radio station based at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2002, he has also produced and hosted his own music-and-cultural arts radio program, 'The Freak Power Ticket.' For most that time, it has aired each Monday from 11am-12noon PDT (while regularly expanding to two-hours in the summer).