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A conversation with Boots Riley

Boots Riley is not a morning person, but he is a deep thinker. Whether it's with the legendary Coup or Street Sweeper Social Club, Riley represents himself fully and gets his point across. While touring with Rock the Bells, he took the time for a phone interview. SSSC is currently supporting their new "Ghetto Blaster" EP.

You were just in Oakland, correct?

Let see was a place where, and to a certain extent is still is a lot of media hype about how dangerous Oakland is. A lot of nonsensical stuff that gets puts out there. There is violence in Oakland, but it usually folks struggling and hustling for money and involved in dope, right? That violence happens with people in this underground economy. Not just people goin wild and crazy, thieving savages as the media puts out there. But because they put that out there for a long time, there were people that wouldn even come to an event during the daytime in Oakland on a Saturday if they weren from Oakland. They thought they would get carjacked, just get shot randomly like somebody at a stop light. Shoot him!" It really makes no sense with how humans act, so people thought of black people in Oakland as being subhuman things.

Oakland has been gentrified a lot in the last ten years and part of that has been to have public areas free and clear of black and brown people. You had all sorts of laws about cruising, or gathering in parks. Things like that, to make developers able to advertise it as being less black populated than it is so that people would move here. So, there are a lot of people who move here with the hopes of not interacting with the community that already exists here. That being said, there are a whole bunch of new restaurants and clubs and things that weren here before. I think it going to be interesting when the population that people were taught to fear start going to these restaurants and clubs.

Do you see a difference between touring with a rap group from a rock group?

Let me say this, The Coup has always rode that line: between funk and rock, and if people have seen our live show and we been UGGS Outlet touring with a live band since the 90 People that have seen me perform, they see me put out energy and dance UGG Boots Outlet and jump around and all that. I trying to embody the music, like visually embody it, as well. As far as how the show is going, for me, it the other side of the same coin.

As far as the crowd, here the truth: if you dealing with anything that culture in the United States, selling records, the crowd is going to be that cold word When black folks in hip hop use the word they mean it not all black people.

I think the hip hop audience, the people that mainly buy and go to shows, are mainly white. I think that what I noticed from all a lot of these shows is that it the same kids from the same area. It might even be the same family! That doesn always hold true, but there is not a whole lot of difference. I think standard rock n roll shows have way more dudes than women. As it is with some underground hip hop shows, there are way more dudes than women. It a lot of white dudes with t shirts and baseball hats and backpacks. Then you go to the frat rock shows, and it the same white dudes with t shirts and baseball hats.

Like, our show is not the regular rock show or the regular hip hop show. Two and a half songs into our set, every band member is covered and drenched in sweat. I talking about all of our clothes are drenched in sweat by the third song.

And you wearing long black coats.

And we wearing some hot ass uniforms!

How hard is it for Rock The Bells to get all of these musicians involved across all of the country?

It probably just as hard as Lollapalooza was. It kinda weird with hip hop, that something that gets talked about, people asking hard is it to get all these folks together? We musicians: it what we do.

Sure but you have some real heavy hitters on this tour. From Rakim to Lauren Hill.

How hard is it to book it? I sure it hard for all of that, but you know what? People want to do Rock The Bells. People want Rock The Bells to succeed, the artists and the audience. It reminds people of the old school Fresh Fests, the old school Def Jam Tour, the old school one with Run DMC and Beastie Boys. Especially if you weren old enough to go to those things, they remind you of that and people still want hip hop to succeed. It has that thing. Even though there are people on this bill that have, by all standard measures of capitalist success, made it. People still feel like this music represents them and they want to get it onto a bigger stage. The crowd is excited and the musicians are excited, so people seem to bend over backwards to do this and I know we did.

Who are you looking forward to seeing the most?

Well there are a lot of folks I never seen. One is Lauren Hill, Slick Rick, Rakim I never saw. I heard he has a raw band. Tribe Called Quest, although I seen them numerous times, I sure it will be crazy.

You worked with Stanton Moore before, from Galactic, right?

He recorded the drums on the first album.

Who is your touring drummer right now?

Eric Claw Gardner. He was also the drummer for Gnarls Barkley. I toured with Stanton and Galactic quite a lot.

I read about that. You got in some trouble in Virginia, right?

Norfolk. Of all places, a town with the word in its name gave me a citation for cussing! I was going to have to serve jail time, but we beat them and made them change the law.

Come on man, I been proven right!

I know you have, I just wondering what your stance is?

At the time, it was shocking to a lot of folks that I would even say it. Not because people didn believe it, but because everybody was scared to talk. What was crazy was a couple of weeks after that, I was part of the in our name campaign. They asked me to get folks to sign on against the bombing in Afghanistan. It was started by the families that suffered during 9/11 who was saying they wanted no war in their name. I tell you what; I know a lot of artists in R Hip Hop, and the Rock world. If I don know them, I have ways to talk to them of the people I talked to said agree with this. But my record label told me that if we get involved with something like this, we won sell records. And if we don sell records, they can fund the project, so therefore I can sign something like this.