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COUP, THE
aka: Boots Riley (Emcee, Activist); Pam the Funtress (DJ); E-Roc (Emcee)
(??? - Present)
Interview with Frank Meyer:
Political Party
12/05/2001, Yahoo! Music
Frank Meyer
Oakland's Coup have been kicking out politically charged yet ass-shakin' hip-hop for almost a decade now, and they show no signs of giving up the funk any time soon. Rapper Boots Riley and DJ Pam The Funkstress have always stood head and shoulders above their competition, but like many edgy, left-of-center artists, they've had a tough time crossing over to the mainstream. With lyrics that celebrate the ideas of Karl Marx and the Black Panthers and take a hard, skeptical look at the government, social injustice, the music industry, and racial prejudice, it's hardly surprising that they've had a difficulty appealing to the MTV generation.
Like Fishbone, Living Colour, and Boogie Down Productions before them, the Coup can be a bitter pill to swallow--but a satisfying one nevertheless. With the release of Party Music, Boots and Pam have issued their most commercially viable effort to date, a leaner but meaner musical affair that cushions its lyrical blows with more accessible beats and hooks. This could be the record that puts them over the top...or it could be yet another critically acclaimed but commercially ignored release from a duo that refuses to play the bling-bling game like good little MCs.
Born Raymond Riley, Boots was involved in political activism long before he started rapping, and he formed the Coup with second rapper E-Roc (who left after the group's sophomore effort) and Pam (one of the very few female DJs in rap music, and certainly one of the best of either gender) in the early '90s to push for social change through music. In 1993, the trio dropped their debut, Kill My Landlord, a bare-bones, funky affair that laced bass-driven beats and sing-song hooks with hard-hitting lyrics about political activism ("I Know You"), self-love/hate in the black community ("F--k A Perm"), and revolution ("Dig It"). The album, which received critical raves and helped the Coup build a solid (if small) following, was a slap in the face to the gangsta-rap of the G-Funk era. "When we first started out," says Boots, "there hadn't been the Fugees or OutKast or anything like that out there, so the labels were like, 'How do you market this? You're not in this category or that category or anything like that.' We weren't all-the-way crossover like a P.M. Dawn or something like that, but it wasn't gangsta-rap or what they thought was political rap, so it was a real problem for them to figure out how to work us."
The concept album Genocide & Juice followed in 1994, continuing in the same vein but fattening up the beats and focusing the razor-sharp lyrical attack. Spitting lyrics like an assassin with deadly aim, Boots blasted millionaire tycoons and their wheelings and dealings ("Pimps [Free-Stylin' At The Fortune 500 Club]"), fake gangstas ("Gunsmoke"), record company hustlin' ("Name Game"), and the prison system ("Santa Rita Weekend"), among other targets. The album was a quiet milestone that may not have impacted the charts, but made a major impact on those open-minded enough pay attention to the Coup's danceable sermonizing.
"It was real, and nobody wants to hear anything that's real," comments Pam. "If you're not bling-blingin' and drinkin' the Cristal and drivin' a Bentley, you're not considered anything. The Benz is their moms, the money they borrowed, the cellular phone is their friends--it's just a bunch of fake stuff. But I'm gonna be Pam The Funkstress and I'm gonna be Pam, and I'm not gonna change for anything. Even if I had lots of money, I could still walk through the street. The difference between us and other groups is that as soon as they get off the stage, they have to have security guards rush them back to their room. When we get offstage, we shake hands and get hugs and everything else. And people come to me and say, 'Pam I can't believe it, you're just so Pam!' I'm not no different from you. I don't have that attitude, 'cause you can get it taken away just as fast as you got it. You fans are the ones that make you, not you. I understand that Puffy can't just go walk through a crowd, but like Biggie said, 'Mo' money, mo' problems.'"
Problems for the Coup came with the demise of their record label, Wild Pitch, along with lack of sales and internal problems; as a result, they went on hiatus for several years. But in 1998, Boots and Pam reunited (this time without E-Roc) for the awesome Steal This Album, released on the Bay Area indie Dogday Records. The disc featured a live band on almost every track and found the duo in top form; Boots hit a new storytelling peak on tracks like "Me And Jesus The Pimp In A '79 Granada Last Night" and "Sneakin' In," and he penned some of his most scathing lyrics ever on "20,000 Gun Salute," "Piss On Your Grave," and "Busterismology." He and Pam spent most of the year touring with a live backing band and received much fan and press approval with their more musical approach.
The recently released Party Music continues in the classic Coup mold, but adds several new elements that make the music far more accessible. Working in his own studio with a live, Boots had the luxury of more time to craft the album. "Musically, I just had more time to do it myself, whereas before it was like, 'We have this much money to be in the studio, eight hours are up, that's the song,'" explains Boots. The noticeably more upbeat and danceable grooves make Party Music more digestible for post-OutKast/Nelly audiences, and while the lyrics are certainly as cutting as always, there's a more positive spin on the presentation as a whole.
"On this one, I kinda wanted it to sound like a mixtape almost, the closest to a mixtape you could have," says Boots. "But what I just really wanted to do was up the tempo. On our first album, the average beat per minute might have been 76 beats per minute. On this one, the average beat is 103, 106 beats per minute. I wanted to get something that was more upbeat...but then, if I go upbeat, I've never been the kind of guy that would want it to be all-the-way hard stuff, so I'm gonna go more funky. Put those two together, and it makes for some dance-floor, party-music type stuff."
Even though Boots once again weaves subversive themes and concepts throughout the album (one song title is "5 Million Ways To Kill A CEO," for example), the feel is undoubtedly more optimistic; if the Coup's previous albums were calling for revolution, then Party Music is the proverbial uncorking of the champagne bottle after the battle's been won. "The Coup is still the same, but a lot of fans will have to adjust to this album because it is a little different from the last three," admits Pam. "We've always had a few uptempo songs here and there, but for this album we just said, 'We're gonna make it straight party music, one song after the other after the other.' The lyrics are still there, but we're not preaching on this one. We're still talking about the same things, but we're talking in a different language. The vibe of the music is a little different, but the lyrics are still on the D.L., still hidden. It's still critical of the system and the music industry, but from a street perspective now."
"Our music kind of follows a tradition," points out Boots. "One thing is that, for instance, in African art, art is always function. It's not just something you put on a wall that's separate from something--it is the wall, how you make the wall to hold up the house, the furniture. It's functional, but it's art, so that something that's functional isn't made just to be functional. So that there's in music also, the music has a function, it has a communicative thing. The drum was something to convey a message, but it was neither primary whether it was the message or the music--it was both. Even into more modern things like Fela Kuti, his music in Nigeria was party music, that's what it was for, but it was also for getting out information, 'cause what it was was an affirmation of life--that this is part of life. The struggle we're involved in is not separate from our day-to-day lives, it's something that's we're dealing with, whether we want to or not."
The Coup recently had a lot to deal with, whether or not they wanted to, when the September 11 terrorist attacks forced them to change Party Music's unfortunate artwork at the last minute. The original cover photo--shot many months before the tragedies--shockingly depicted Boots and Pam detonating an explosion of the Twin Towers; the image was intended to symbolize the destruction of American capitalism/big business and serve as a chilling juxtaposition to the album's misleadingly lighthearted title. But post-September 11, it was obviously the wrong artwork at the wrong time.
"I was stunned, my mouth just went open and I said, 'Oh my God!'" is how Boots recalls that dark day. "The first thing I did was call the New York [record label] offices and say, 'I know you're gonna pull the cover, right?' I can't represent that--it's death. It's not like something happened to the Tower or a car ran into it or a few people got hurt--these were thousands and thousands of brothers, sisters, janitors, mothers, fathers, and kids that were in that building. I just couldn't represent that. It's not funny." The cover was quickly switched to an equally compelling but less offensive image of a gasoline-filled martini glass in flames--literally, a Molotov cocktail. "We're still serving you something, but we're not hurting anybody."
So as the Coup once again dodge controversy while still staying true to their cause, they have to wonder how they've made it to the 10-year mark in hip-hop, a genre whose acts are known for having short shelf lives. "Because we're real and we won't settle for something different," Pam declares. "Longevity, we do have that--we've had longevity and consistency even though we're underground. But people who know the Coup or follow the Coup know we're not watered-down, we're not mainstream, we're sticking to our guns. This is the Coup, this is what we are. You like us or you don't like us."
Damn straight.
Updated: 06/16/2005
Source: http://launch.yahoo.com/read/interview/12036186 |
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