Rhyme & Revolution

In the world of rap music, perhaps no group has been as socio-politically outspoken as Oakland's The Coup. This East Bay mainstay is chiefly the project of rapper Boots Riley and DJ Pam The Funktress - though rapper E-Roc was a regular contributor early on, and The Coup is currently touring with a live band - and this crew has been making waves that go well beyond the Bay Area for years now.
The Coup's first release, Kill My Landlord (1993), mixed Boots' hard-line socialist ideals and cleverly scathing lyrical delivery with Pam's mix of thick and luscious funk and soul breaks and big, bottom-ended bumps. Genocide an' Juice, the 1994 follow-up to …Landlord, saw The Coup continue on their path of establishment destruction. The album was so incendiary and gaining such popularity at one point that, according to Boots, major label EMI paid a half a million dollars to Wild Pitch Records, the indie label that released the album, for the rights to Genocide an' Juice, and promptly removed it from stores' shelves. The record was re-released in 2001 by Jcor Entertainment.
The Coup released their third album, Steal this Album, on San Francisco's DogDay Records in 1998, and though it didn't have the same impact as The Coup's previous releases, it established Boots and Pam in the hip-hop community-at-large as talented and visionary hip-hop artists, and moved the group up through the ranks of the industry enough to land a deal with Dan The Automator's 75 Ark label, which released The Coup's fourth album, Party Music, in November, 2001. The album's release date was originally in September, but was pushed back due to the eerie similarity between the album's initial cover art and the September 11th tragedies. The cover image's foreground had Pam waving a conductor's wand and Boots pressing a button on an electronic device as the World Trade Centers exploded in the background. The art was created well before the Trade Center towers were brought down, and 75 Ark pulled the image from production on September 12th.
On August 23rd, 2001, a mere three weeks before September 11th, Boots Riley opened himself up to a few questions about the source of his revolutionary drive, what first lit the fire in him, and where this is all going.

How did you get into sociopolitical activism and rapping?
My parents were heavily involved in political organizations until I was about seven or eight. My father was in the civil rights movement, and he was in more revolutionary organizations also as a full-time organizer. By the time we moved out to Oakland from Detroit, when I was about seven, my parents were pretty much burnt out and not really doing much, so they went back to school. My father ended up becoming a lawyer and my mother's a lab technician now. I got involved in doing political organizing when I was 14, so by the time I really started seriously rapping, I was about 20. But I was also in this group called the Progressive Labor Party for six years by then, and what ended up coming out of it all wasn't just happenstance. I always used to rap in high school, but I just saw it as something interesting to do on the side. I got into rapping because of organizing, and I eventually just decided to put my energy into rapping.

When did you first realize that you could use music as a medium to incite movement?
We were doing some sort of campaign in a projects called the Double Rock projects - this was in the summer of '89, and this is actually an incident that I put on our first album in a song called "I Know You" - and a woman named Rossi Hawkins and her two twin sons, who were both eight years old, got beat down by the police in the middle of the Double Rock. Everybody in the projects who was just hangin' out was wondering what was going on and what [the police] were doing. The police got scared as a crowd gathered and they told everyone to get back, but the crowd wasn't getting back, they were coming closer, all angry like, 'hell no!' The police started shooting up into the air, yelling at people to get back so the crowd retreated, but then decided to go back, saying "fuck this," because the cops just beat up two eight-year-old kids and their mother. The police were trying to cover the whole thing up, trying to arrest the mother and the kids and put them in the car, so the crowd stopped that from happening. There's all sorts of stories about what happened after that, but by the end of the night, eight police cars were turned over inside the projects and the police had run out on foot without their guns. But none of this was put in the newspaper or anything, not even a one-line mention the next day's [San Francisco] Chronicle or [Oakland] Tribune.
Like I said, every one had different stories about what happened; some of them matched up and some of the didn't, and that's what's gonna happen when you got a big crowd like that. But the one thing that did keep ringing true in each story was the fact that, when the police started shooting - and I don't know if you've ever been around when a gun is fired, but your first instinct is, 'lemme get the fuck up outta here because I could die right now' - so that's what everyone was thinking right then, and somebody started chanting "Fight the power! Fight the power! Fight the power!" Now, that was the song at the time, in the summer of 1989. That Public Enemy song was out right then and that's what everyone was listening to, and that's what made everyone stop and think, 'Yeah, this one thing that we all know is right, that connects us all,' and we all went back, we stopped that from happening. That's when I knew that music could take a place in the movement.

What's the guiding idea, and how does The Coup fit into the movement?
I believe that we need to take the wealth from the top five percent of people who have it and distribute it equally. People need to have democratic control over the wealth that they produce. I call it communism; you could call it socialism, you could call it pork and beans - see, it doesn't matter what you call it. It's about the people having democratic control over their own production and their own wealth. So The Coup fits into it by hopefully creating battle cries for people to yell as they're doing this stuff, and to hopefully be a tool for organizers to get people to see the necessity of them being involved in the movement. And hopefully that movement isn't just talking about pie-in-the-sky things, but talking about reforms and changes that can be made immediately so that the people can see victory happening and know that they're a power individually, and that there's power in numbers.

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