The Coup is that rarest and most subversive of pop-culture things: a party band with a brain.
The Oakland hip-hop crew's music isn't just fun and listenable — it's the kind of sound that compels one to nod, to bounce, to shake one's ass with little regard for one's self-consciousness or degree of talent for ass-shaking. The thick, organic, P-Funk-inflected grooves could probably slide right into rotation at both urban and alternative radio; we're talking about the kind of shit you'd be glad to hear blaring from the car next to you at a long light.
There's only one problem.
The Coup, and in particular its principal mouthpiece and representative, Raymond "Boots" Riley, wants revolution.
And Riley isn't afraid to say so. In virtually every song.
A typical Coup tune's lyrics are as incendiary as the music is funky, a combination of fact, rhetoric and ideas delivered via an uncannily clever way with words. Sure, it sounds way more entertaining than your average Noam Chomsky lecture, but with lines like "Bush and Hussein together in bed/ giving H-E-A-D head/ ya'll motherfuckers heard what we said/ billions made and millions dead" and "I'm here to laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor/ and help the damn revolution come quicker," it won't be hitting the airwaves at large anytime soon.
Most mainstream music fans (and members of the public at large) only know the group through an unbelievably unfortunate coincidence that occurred in September of '01. The original cover artwork for The Coup's fourth album, Party Music, was a picture of members of the crew planting a "bomb" made of musical equipment at the World Trade Center — and it was released for promotion only days before 9/11.
For months after the tragedy, Riley was a favorite target of hawkish columnists and cable "news" hosts, garnering an insane amount of the worst kind of publicity for The Coup. But Riley says he never worried that the incident would mean the end of his career — not even while it was happening.
"Actually, no," says the songwriter/producer/MC. "I wasn't thinking in those terms. I was thinking in terms of, 'How do I take this controversy and use it?' I could see by all the flags that were plastered all over the TV screen, that there was gonna be a big drive for war. And I thought about it from the standpoint of, 'How do I stop murder for profit? How do I lend a hand in making sure that some sort of voice of dissent gets heard?'"
Though it didn't exactly make him any more popular with shell-shocked Americans, Riley used his raised profile to voice his opposition to the bombing of Afghanistan and the specious connections being built between the War on Terror and Iraq's phantom WMDs. He believes he was speaking for others who couldn't, or wouldn't, make their own similar views heard at the time.
"Out of crisis comes opportunity, right?" he says. "I knew that other people had things to lose, and I had nothing to lose, and as a matter of fact, I always knew that it would come down to that fact."
Eventually the clamor quieted down, and Riley, beatmaking partner DJ Pam the Funkstress and a loose cadre of friends and musicians got back to smelting his socialist philosophies with the raw rhythms and acid rock shaped by everything from Prince and Hendrix to Cameo and Sly & the Family Stone. The Coup emerged from the studio this past spring with Pick A Bigger Weapon, its fifth and finest album to date.
Released on eclectic label Anti-, an imprint of iconic punk warehouse Epitaph Records and home to such mavericks as Tom Waits, Daniel Lanois and the late Joe Strummer, Weapon refines the group's now-trademark blend of politics, funk and humor to near perfection, and features guest spots from high-power talents Talib Kweli, Jello Biafra, Silk E and Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello (with whom The Coup bonded during '04's "Tell Us The Truth" election-year protest tour), among others.
At a time when many hip-hop producers seem to be paring the sound down to a bass drum and a syncopated hi-hat, Weapon's lush musicality seems nearly orgiastic, much like Public Enemy's miles-deep Bomb Squad sonics did in the late '80s.
"Well, the bass line has always been part of my music," says Riley. "Whatever trends come around, I love a bass line. On the other hand, some of the stuff that's coming out is more musical, it feels the funk. It's kind of like that New Orleans second-line stuff, when it breaks down to the drums. It's still got the funk. But my style is always, you have to start with the bass line, and if you're gonna do that, you've gotta have the other shit in there too."
Another thing a Coup record's gotta have is laughs. And Weapon incites them in spades, belying the general assumption that socially progressive artists are humorless, and would rather beat the listener over the head with an agenda than entertain.
"One thing I like about lyric writing is pointing out the ironies in life, and that in itself is humorous," Riley muses. "So, it's just writing good songs that do that. You know, that's how I talk. That's how me and my friends relate, so I'm gonna do that in my music too."
As groovy, catchy and funny as it is, The Coup's music is inseparable from its message. And it's hard to imagine the message of a dedicated socialist like Riley catching on to become majority opinion in the xenophobic War on Terror-era America. But the situation won't sway Riley's determination to inspire social change through his music. He's certain there's a file on him in a drawer in some security agency office somewhere ("that's why the FBI never visited me after 9/11, they already had a line on me"). The thought doesn't scare him, though.
"I'm not doing this to be comfortable," he says. "I know how to make a really good song. If I wanted to, I could make a song that isn't about any of the things I'm talking about. I know the industry, I have connections. I can get a song on the radio. The key is to not talk about what I'm taking about. It's not like I'm taking the easy road. So why would any of that stuff scare me?"
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2006.