exclusive interview: boots riley of the coup talks revolution, new album & live shows (part 1)

Boots Riley is the outspoken frontman for Oakland revolutionary hip-hop group The Coup. Blending hip-hop, soul, and punk rock, The Coup have a sound as radical as their politics. Since their 1993 debut, Kill My Landlord, Boots has become known as much for his activism and revolutionary politics as his music. He founded Street Sweeper Social Club with Tom Morello in 2006, and has been an active and vocal member of Occupy Oakland. The Coup’s latest record Sorry To Bother You drops October 30th.

Interview by Nathan Leigh

It’s been 6 years since Pick a Bigger Weapon. Before that it was 5. Why the delay between albums?

Well this time I did two releases with Street Sweeper Social Club in between so that was part of it. The other part is well, you know, maybe I should be more prolific, but I only put out albums that I’m in love with. I get in to the process of writing them and making them and I think that’s part of what takes so long. I’m kinda trained as a lyricist. And when I say lyricist I mean in the hip-hop sense. Where I can do the witty lines all day, and punch lines all day. But I only wanna put out songs that I really feel attached to. Things that have an emotional and passionate appeal to me. Not just things where it looks like I’m a good rapper or a good lyricist. I think that’s where it comes from. Just waiting for inspiration.

Does playing with a live band change the process from when it was you and DJ Pam?

It’s never been just me and DJ Pam. That’s just how the label liked to market it. There used to be a time when people would come and see a band on stage in a hip-hop crowd and be “aw, what the fuck is this?” But from the first album, except for drums, everything was live.

Has it been the same band all along?

No. It’s been many different people. There’s probably a good twelve different musicians that have circulated through. A lot of people have kind of moved up. Jubu is now Frankie Beverly’s guitar player has been our guitar player at one time. Thomas Pigeon was our drummer. They kinda come and go. But for the last five years it’s been pretty solid. But all of these folks come from the same community. So there’s twelve people that know the set and know the songs.

How has the music industry and hip-hop in general changed in your 20 years in the game?

I think that the few gate keepers that there were are now irrelevant for the most part. That’s the big thing. You can get directly to people. Obviously if you have some money behind you, you can get to way more people. When we first started, like booking agents didn’t book—there were the big booking agencies but there weren’t smaller booking agents. If you were a hip-hop group and you had less than 100,000 sales, you could go sign up for one of those big booking agencies. But they would never get you any gigs. So when we were like number 2 on BET and MTV and all that stuff, we would get maybe 3 or 4 good paying shows a year. And by good paying I mean paying.

Right, enough that everyone could eat.

Yeah, yeah. Because what would happen is you’d get some promoter here or there trying to do stuff. But before we even got on the plane the party would be canceled cause the cops would decide that it would be rowdy or something like that and they’d tell the promoter they couldn’t do it. And what happened—really the big change for hip-hop—is when Peter Schwartz from the Agency Group started booking Hieroglyphics in rock clubs. And Hiero was getting booked in rock clubs all across the country. And it was kinda like where they was scared of hip-hop before? No, actually white kids come to their shows. So they were able to get rock clubs to book them. But before that if you weren’t selling like 200, 300 thousand it was hard to get booked on a tour. And that changed in the late 90s.

What also changed it was that at that switchover point—at one point in the mid-90s—all these cities all across the US had bans on hip-hop. So there was a ban on hip-hop in Oakland. There was a ban on hip-hop in Berkeley. There was a ban on hip-hop in all of these places all over the place. And that ban, sometimes was an outright ban that the city council ratified. And other times it was a policy change. If you were throwing a hip-hop show, you had to get it cleared by the police department. And the police would only let it happen if you hired one police officer per 50 people that you were gonna have. Basically based on the capacity of the place. So it made it not possible for a lot of—so even in those cases there was a de facto band.

What happened was, promoters—even black promoters—found out that if they only passed out flyers in white neighborhoods, the police wouldn’t mess with them. So you go from one show circa ’95 that we had in Oakland that was Outkast, Easy E, us and something like that on Hegenberger road in East Oakland. 3,000 black folks showing up to see Outkast who were headlining to the very next year Outkast at Maritime Hall. Nobody in Oakland knew that it was happening. It was promoted all the way up through Northern California in different places. And the promoters made sure that very few black folks came. And by very few, at that time it was more than it is now. But it was probably like 30% black folks. And a lot of people didn’t know that the show was happening. It was sold out. But that was the big change that I noticed right there.

Do you see the internet and file-sharing and all that stuff having any impact?

Well it opens it wide up. Because now labels can’t use their formula, where they’re like “hey if we put X amount of dollars into Artist Number 2 we know we’ll get at least Y profit.” Their formula doesn’t work. They can’t do that anymore because they never known when some other group might gain popularity. And they kind of have to use their own opinion.

When you released Steal This Album that was before Napster and file-sharing was really a thing. How do you feel about file-sharing as theft? Is that something you worry or care about?

Not at all. I think what happens is when people get your album for free, more people listen to it than would have listened to it before. But also, they come to your show. They buy a T-shirt. They pay to get in. You get a bigger percentage of show money than you do of the CD money anyway if you’re on a major label. Even on an independent label. More money comes to the artist this way. There’s more of a pool of folks to draw from that know their music now. They don’t have to go and listen to that one dude. You know an indie band might have had in the 90’s a core group of twenty people that had the record first and they had to play it for other people before that. No. A thousand people in that city can have your music and they’re a possible show goer. And on top of that, if people are really into you and the things you’re doing, and you make your artwork cool and make the thing something to have, you’ll have some people buying the CD and buying the album. So have you heard the album yet?

Oh yeah, it’s fucking hot, man! How is Sorry To Bother You different from past Coup records?

So the main difference between this and the other albums is that, even though we had live drummers in concerts, I’d be more of a control freak. I would only do drum machines, thinking I wanted a certain sound for some reason. I would only do a drum machine sound with everything else being live. But for this one I decided to make it more like what our live show is. So what song are you feeling the most on there?

Honestly? “Violet.” I was not expecting that at all. I mean, “The Guillotine” is a great song, but Violet is badass. It is a beautiful song. Like, tears, man. Not something I would have ever expected to hear on a Coup record. How are you planning on doing that live? You tour with a three-piece, right?

When we tour, there’s six of us on stage. Bass, guitar, drums, and organ. Maybe some other keyboard sounds in there. And then Silk-E, who’s like a young Tina Turner. She’s singing on those songs. We’ve just been in rehearsal for the past two weeks. It comes off. It’s not strings. We do it with organ cause I’d rather just have organ than fake string sounds. At some shows we may have a quartet come up and do some stuff.

In Part 2 of this interview we talk with Boots about his revolutionary politics and Occupy Oakland. It will be posted on Monday October 29th!