It was P-Funk who first sang “Free your mind and your ass will follow,” but few artists that have come along in the decades since have upheld that musical ideal quite so fervently as The Coup. Along with DJ Pam “The Funktress,” Oaktown-bred Coup mastermind Boots Riley has spent the better part of the last 13 years dropping lyrical manifestos rooted in the sociopolitical consciousness of ol’ school forefathers like PE and BDP, but tinged with a welcome dose of humor that recalls Digital Underground, the Pharcyde and other George Clinton-influenced West Coast luminaries.

The Coup’s career has certainly been nothing to laugh about, as label problems (their current home, Epitaph, marks their fourth in five albums), FBI-investigated album cover controversies (we’ll get to that later) and the untimely shifting of hip-hop trends have conspired to create enough drama to fill several episodes of “Behind the Music.” Yet the duo has tenaciously persevered, and their new album, “Pick A Bigger Weapon,” is easily the funkiest blend of ass-shaking beats and mind-expanding lyrics this side of Prince’s “Controversy.”

While other MCs are content to glorify the gangsta lifestyle, on “We Are the Ones” Boots breaks down the ties between poverty and drugs in a way that simultaneously educates and entertains: "The one university I knew was Yale/so I cooked it, bagged it, put it on sale/Now philosophically, you'd be opposed/to one inhaling coke by the mouth or nose/But economically, I would propose/that you go eat a dick as employment had froze." He breaks it down Fahrenheit 911-style on the ridiculously danceable "Head (of State)," which finds him bashing Bush and dropping lyrical smart bombs such as "War ain't about one land against the next/It's po' people dyin' so the rich cash checks."

We recently caught up with Boots on tour to talk about consciousness, controversy and commercial viability.

 
I’m a big fan of the old school sociopolitical rappers– Chuck D, KRS-One, Rakim, etc. Were those guys a big influence on you when you were first starting out?

Yeah, but there were other guys, too, like Ice Cube, Easy-E, Schooly D– people that wouldn’t have been considered political hip-hop– as well as artists like Prince, Stevie Wonder, Gil-Scott Heron and the Last Poets. But I was also influenced by people that were connected with their community and tried to help change it, and by other writers. I’d say Toni Morrison is a big influence on my writing.

When you were breaking into the business in the mid-‘90s, conscious hip-hop was pretty much on its way out at the tail end of the Native Tongues era. Was that shift in hip-hop trends frustrating?

I started out on a compilation with a gangsta rapper named Spice 1. We worked at UPS together and came into hip-hop together. I was trying to put messages in my music, but I didn’t see myself as in a separate world from what was considered gangsta rap. In most hip-hop, people talk about the world around them and give people advice on how to survive. It just so happens that I have a deeper, more complicated analysis than most people. Some people are like, “Go sell this rock and you’ll be able to survive a bit longer.” And that’s true, to a certain extent. I just take it deeper and look at why there are no jobs in the first place. So the frustrating part was that, since other rappers’ [lyrical] content wasn’t being looked at by the media and mine was, it made it seem like all my art was about the content and not the music. There’s a lot of gangsta rap and conscious hip-hop that’s terrible music. Nobody wants to listen to that. You wanna hear good music, and we spent a lot of time on our production, but that part was left out of the media coverage. Continued on page 2 »