TRUTH TO POWER: The Coup’s Boots Riley (here with DJ Pam the Funkmistress) leavens his politics with humor.
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You can’t say a guy who blasts out of the starting gate with a song called “Kill My Landlord” and, then, eight years later, comes up with a riveting, darkly humorous rap titled “5 Million Ways To Kill a CEO” doesn’t have murder on his mind. That guy is Boots Riley, the main man behind the Oakland hip-hop outfit the Coup. In those formative days, back in 1993, Riley was joined by E-Rock and DJ Pam the Funkmistress. Nearly a decade and a half later, Pam’s still on board. Other than that, membership in the Coup is an ever-shifting affair. Think Parliament-Funkadelic, with Boots as George Clinton.On April 25, the Coup released their new Pick a Bigger Weapon, their fifth full-length, and the group’s first for the punk-oriented SoCal indie Epitaph’s Anti- imprint. It’s the first Coup disc since Party Music (Tommy Boy), an album that unintentionally caused controversy when its original cover art — a pre-9/11 image of the World Trade Center going up in flames from an explosion detonated by the guitars and turntables of the Coup — had to be scrapped. Nevertheless, a few advance review copies were pressed that summer and showed up in various publications, creating a situation ripe for misunderstandings.
Over drinks at ZuZu last month, Boots recalled how Tommy Boy publicists issued statements to the effect that the Coup didn’t support violence. But that wasn’t exactly the case. In the pre-9/11 world, the cover, he says, “made a good metaphorical point: it was music destroying capitalism. When the attacks happened, I didn’t want people to confuse the politics of my lyrics — because I do talk about violence — with the attacks. I don’t want people to think it’s some individualistic I-have-the-right to-decide-the-fate-of-the-world sort of thing. What I talk about is people taking control of the resources that are around. I’m talking about the power of people. But if that coincidence had to happen to anyone, I’m glad it was me. I was prepared to deal with it, and I have less to lose than a lot of other rappers.”
Riley wasn’t cowed by the flak he took for that original cover, as the title Pick a Bigger Weapon attests. Again, though, he’s touched a raw nerve and created plenty of room for misunderstanding. The new title, as he explains, has nothing to do with gang hardware or with picking a fight with any rival rap crew. “The point in my songs,” he says in reference to the violence that has plagued hip-hop, “is that we’re not each other’s enemies.”
The enemies Boots has in mind dot our history. They’re in the White House. They’re the wealthy, predominantly white, almost exclusively male power brokers of the world. This is a guy who in one of his raps advocated taking a leak on slave owner George Washington’s grave. The “Head (of State)” finds “Bush and Hussein together in bed/Giving H-E-A-D: head”; “Captain Sterling’s Little Problem” encourages American soldiers to desert. “Ass-Breath Killers” is a fantasy about a pill that counters blind subservience. Riley imagines Nat Turner, John Brown, Mao, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, as taking the drug: “MLK took half a pill/Procrastinated/Once he took a whole pill/They assassinated.”
