The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it's a new era.
Boots Riley
If we created a society based on love, it would be a society without exploitation.
In Chile, they had penas, where the community would come together to sing and plan how they were going to overthrow the government. There's a real hopefulness in that community style of organizing.
If people come to a record store, and they can't find your album, they buy something else.
There are a lot of leaders that talk about ending things like oppression - whether it's discrimination or getting a job - but the reason for all of this stuff is somebody's making a profit off our backs. That's the reason why black people were brought here in the first place. It was a profit motive.
I thought my parents were always having card parties - and they were - but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she'd have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.
I grew up around politics. I organized my first campaign when I was 14, a walk-out in my high school to protest the year-round school schedule.
No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.
Sometimes my influences are really on my sleeve. So I just make sure to wear a lot of sleeves.
We all - even at a base level, even a Republican - understand that the people with the money are the ones with the power. We all learn that.
I've always been about, how do I get my ideas out to the most people?
What I like about music is that you make a song, you've got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life - they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It's in their world, and it takes on its own life.
A record is a commodity, but so is a hamburger. Just because I work at McDonald's doesn't mean I reap the benefits of that commodity. That's the reality with most artists in the record industry: They're getting paid a subsistence wage so they can keep producing a commodity for the record label.
The Obama campaign decimated the newly regenerated anti-war movement in 2008. And he definitely isn't anti-war.
You can't co-opt labor issues if you are in the working class.
The truth is, every movie is a message movie. It's just that most movies have messages that are in lock step with the status quo.
I can run the gamut with beats that no one else would think of. I'm not a trained musician, so I focus on what feels right before I dispatch to writing.
What I wanted to do is put forth, musically, the idea that there's hope that we can change the system.
A lot of libertarians and ultra-capitalists like to put out this idea that competition makes for better creativity. But it's just because we don't see all the creativity that's been crushed.
I think voting is the lowest form of political action that you can do. A lot of times, it keeps people from doing stronger things.
I was in an organization called Progressive Labor Party and International Committee Against Racism. And I was - I started out helping to organize a farm workers' union in Central California.
The Coup does not support the American flag.
There's the part of me that's the organizer, part of me that's the artist, part of me that's the person who, even with those two things, wants to figure out what my place in the world is. How to engage with it and whether my life has any meaning.
I listen to everything from The Cure and The Clash to Prince and George Clinton.
I've never really subscribed to the theory that repression breeds rebellion. I don't think that's really true.
A lot of organizers tell me that while they are making signs or doing whatever they do, they are listening to the Coup.
Oakland has always had artists attempting to define the immense beauty and ridiculousness around them.
Either I'm really into the organizing, or I'm really into the music. As I've been going, I've been able to figure out ways to even it out a little more.
Many people feel that unions aren't militant enough for them and don't do anything.
I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.
I want my music to be not only representative of other people's lives but also contributing something to the struggle that people are going through.
There's a very thin line between rock and funk. Funk is like a dirtier blues, and so is rock. They're close cousins.
The folks that are suggesting Occupy move to electoral politics are ignoring history, ignoring what actually creates change. People get involved in electoral politics because they think there is no movement that can create change.
For me, the association with rock is one of force and anger and aggression. And definitely, in the past, I've made songs that attack like that. But what I usually try to appeal to is peoples' everyday feelings, the things that they're going through as they deal with the system on a one-to-one level.
When people listen to Jay-Z, they're working all day or trying to work and pay their bills, and what they hear is someone who's free. Who doesn't have to worry about the electricity. But all we're taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us, or they're smarter.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, in general, by putting this idea out there that the one percent is leeching off the 99 percent, is making a new discussion, making people figure out how to withhold their labor and come and put their issues on the table with the ruling class all over the country and all over the world.
My training was with some old British communists who had organized unions in the '60s and '70s. And their philosophy was, if you can't drink a pint with a man, how are you gonna get him to go on strike and risk his life?
If I wasn't rapping about politics, then I might have been just another person trying to sell albums, and I might have sounded like everyone else out there.
I just look at music as a retreat from organizing. It's like a tug-of-war with me. Music can be effective, but it's not any good if there isn't a grass-roots movement going on to support it.
If what you want is actual change, then what has to be built is a mass movement that is militant and can use direct action to slow or stop profit. A movement that can do that can demand whatever it wants.
It's nice to be recognized for what you do, but that doesn't satisfy what I wanted out of this music, which is for people to hear it and get involved in movements and campaigns.
I don't need to be validated by academia, because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case.
Any collective action is made up of individuals who one day decided not to sit and watch anymore.
The album 'Party Music' is a beautiful album, and people need to hear it.
Because of my politics, I don't necessarily think that the independent capitalist is that much better than the multinational capitalist; it's just that the independent capitalist hasn't grown as big yet.
People want something that's relevant to their lives. They want something that means something to them, and they want something where it seems like people have thought about what they're saying.
Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.
If I want to get my ideas out, I have to be involved in the mechanism that the world is ran by.
Trying to get somebody to read your script and you're a musician? That's the last person whose script you're gonna read!
I have a problem with superheroes in general because, politically, superheroes are cops. Superheroes work with the government to uphold the law. And who do the laws work for?
