Inside Boots Riley’s new book of lyrics and commentary, Tell Homeland Security–We Are the Bomb, there’s a picture of the rapper as a kid, clutching a copy of Frantz Fanon’s colonialist takedown The Wretched of the Earth. The Oakland artist has juggled lyricism and activism for most of his life. As a teenager, one day Riley observed people shouting, "Fight the power!" in the cadence of Public Enemy while expelling cops from the neighborhood. It was a formative sight. In 1991, Riley founded the Coup, an avowedly communistic hip-hop group that defied conscious rap clichés while dishing some of the most starkly radical rhetoric around. Today, the Coup endures as a rave-up funk group. Most recently, the band issued Sorry to Bother You, an album based on a screenplay by Riley that McSweeney’s published in full last year. Recently, Riley discussed his new book, capitalist myths, marketing insurrectionist rap, and crowd-sourced annotations. We met in his office, a narrow room spartanly outfitted with nothing more than a school desk. Floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a view of downtown Oakland below.
Pitchfork: Why’d you decide to compile your lyrics in a book?
Boots Riley: I always write knowing that people will hear it, but also hoping they’ll see it. So a lot of times I make lyrical decisions based on what looks better. Also I write based on what I saw for a video. I obsess over lyrics in the hopes that they’ll endure in different ways. I’m very precious about it. I could live with album, CD, and tape covers where you can read the lyrics, but those are going away. People have the same albums digitally. People ask me questions about songs that used to be answered on the jacket.
Pitchfork: The lyrics are online, but you don’t have any control over their presentation.
BR: When Google has convinced everyone that the company should be responsible for archiving everything in the cloud, things are going to go missing. We’re not going to know why. Later on, people won’t be asking why. That’s a really pessimistic observation, or one that assumes we have the same system in the future. But yeah, that’s another reason to put it on paper.
Pitchfork: Since we’re talking about a book of rap lyrics in 2015 I should ask about Genius, the website.
BR: The annotations can be part of a conversation so long as people aren’t looking to Genius for definitive answers. Sometimes it’s presented in too authoritative a way. There are answers to, "What did the author mean?" But the author doesn’t always say them out loud. Also, there are songs I listen to and maybe interpret differently than the author meant. The idea that there’s a proper definition of a slang term is a different sort of analysis altogether… Basically, though, there are [songwriters] who are good at talking but don’t have anything to say. And they’re the ones who say a lot. They have a vocabulary. They have a long way to explain nothing. A lot of them are on that site. … Sometimes it’s like in Airplane! with the woman translating "jive."
Pitchfork: I think you mention in the book that Steal This Album was the first record where you did print the lyrics.
BS: I always wanted to but the label would be like, "Nuh uh. That’s five more cents per." With our first couple albums we didn’t get a lot of props for quote unquote lyricism. We got that later on. Critics didn’t know the Coup until Robert Christgau started writing about us. And once I put the lyrics on there, then people were like, "Oh yeah, ya know, maybe they can write good."
But also the music sort of set it up to be taken a certain way or not. "Not Yet Free", which was our first single off the first album, had this slow, rolling beat. It went for a minute and a half before I started rapping. I thought dudes would be riding down the street for a while and settle into it first, but like, people don’t really listen like that. I believe it was in the Source, a review said, "More slow rolling gangsta rap from Oakland, California." We were pissed off about that at the time. But it actually built our fan base.
Pitchfork: Right. Folks figured that intellectual, political hip-hop sampled jazz but g-funk production was for street stuff, which is sort of bunk in general but especially for the Coup.
BR: Exactly. We were pissed off because people thought we were just following trends because of our production, or we were dismissed as political rap. Even people who said they were into political rap, a lot of them didn’t want to listen to it. They just liked that it existed! A lot of the industry folks say it would’ve been different for us if we came after the Fugees broke, but at the time no one knew how to market it. This was a time when there was an extreme marketing gap.
Pitchfork: One theme of your lyrics and the commentary in the book is what you call "the myth of Black capitalism." Why do you return to that in the lyrics so much, this sense of economic mobility as fairy dust?
BR: It’s a main ideological element that’s used to keep people out of movements and make them feel that it’s just them fucking up. …That’s why I countered it so much in the music. I’d have these conversations with E-40. He had a totally different situation because he had money from other things, so he was able to hold out for a certain kind of deal. Back then I believe there was a back and forth going on between us in some of the songs about it. It’s funny, like with 50 Cent lately, there’s no way people can accept that he’s struggling. They don’t want to believe it. If they are able to believe it, it’s only because they’ve decided that he really went out of his way to fuck himself over.
Pitchfork: It was interesting to read you on the few songs inspired by Occupy. But there aren’t many songs in your discography that chronicle specific acts of resistance. Is that a conscious decision, a way to avoid sounding didactic?
BR: I just worry that it won’t be that interesting to a lot of people. A lot of my music is for organizers, for keeping them inspired. I don’t have a lot of, like, insider raps. "The Name Game" is the only one where I rap about the industry. There were a lot of rappers who were like industry rappers. Chronicling what was happening on an action or a campaign would be like my equivalent of that and I wasn’t into it. It wouldn’t move me enough to think that it would move other folks. I can imagine doing it in such a way that made people want to be a part of something.
Pitchfork: You write about incorporating an intersectional view of oppression into "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night". How did you arrive at that perspective?
BR: When we talk about all of these various kinds of oppression that capitalism deals out, the thing about it is that they’re utilitarian; they’re necessary to keep capitalism going. Different kinds of oppression evolve to maintain exploitation. Capitalism needs racism and sexism to support class. Capitalism works for very few people. Racism against people of color is detrimental for everyone and sexism against women is detrimental for everyone. It impedes our ability to live life fully. That’s where that song comes from. It’s not about how so and so shouldn’t talk about this, it’s the idea that a class analysis gets you an understanding of how the whole world works and dictates that you have to destroy the system.
Pitchfork: In the book, you’re also a little derisive of the song, calling it "masturbatory" and suggesting that it’s too long.
BR: I like the epic story. The issue with it being masturbatory is that less people hear it. That song, we had to edit it down to like five minutes to get a few video places to play it. It only got played once on BET after I had a public back and forth with the president of the network. It got played once and didn’t get played again until YouTube came out. If I were the pure agitprop facilitator that some people say I am I’d be making three-minute songs only, with sixteen bar verses. Our verses had sixty-four bars back then. Our first album had no choruses. We thought the label would try to make us sell out by adding choruses. That was the artistic ego. It’s funny that people call what we do pure agitprop, because I can see that I’m not doing agitprop very well. I make a compromise between what I know will work in a political sense and what I think is good, what sounds good.