Oakland has always had artists attempting to define the immense beauty and ridiculousness around them.
— Boots Riley
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.
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.
That punk approach of 'We don't wanna get big' is really a bourgeois thing. It's not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.
I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.
I'd been working since I was eleven so I could buy my own comic books. I was that kid knocking on your door, selling subscriptions to the paper and crying because I wasn't going to sell that last paper that would allow me to go to Disneyland.
The things you have to do to be effective - like forming a union at a fast food joint or a telemarketing company - aren't going to work unless you do things like solidarity strikes. Solidarity strikes are illegal. They've been illegal since the '40s, and they were made illegal because they work.
The crux of our power isn't only in our voice. It is in our economic function in society.
The opportunism of electoral politics makes people lie to each other.
With a movie, you have the power of putting out an idea about the world and for people to take it seriously.
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.
I used to get worried about writing a love song, because everyone else is doing them, and there are already enough of them out there. But I came to realize that there's a reason for that: Love is powerful, one of the most powerful emotions there is.
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.
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.
I listen to everything from The Cure and The Clash to Prince and George Clinton.
The album 'Party Music' is a beautiful album, and people need to hear it.
When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.
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.
You make art, you make it from what you know, and that's the best way to make art. You get lost in the details and make something that feels like it's yours.
Going to school in San Francisco, you're not going to meet as many people that are making films as you would if you went to film school in New York or L.A.
The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it's a new era.
Sometimes my influences are really on my sleeve. So I just make sure to wear a lot of sleeves.
If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.
I've always been about, how do I get my ideas out to the most people?
I think most people would love for us to be a socialist society.
You can't get much done by yourself. Speaking as someone who made a movie - and it took hundreds of people to make it happen - I can say that.
Trying to get somebody to read your script and you're a musician? That's the last person whose script you're gonna read!
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 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.
'Redistributing the wealth' - that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.
Every progressive movement in U.S. history has been portrayed negatively by the media at the time it happened.
Music is first for me. How the music makes me feel, it's like energy. It has to match my life. What's happening around me or to me. That's where it comes from.
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.
No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.
I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.
Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it's not connected to actual movements, it doesn't ask the right questions.
I was actually really good at telemarketing.
This idea of 'cool capitalism' is still capitalism. It doesn't matter if Elon Musk quotes Nas.
My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.
Making movies seemed so impossible as far as getting my ideas funded.
That existential crisis is something you rarely see portrayed by black characters; the idea that people think about their own existence and that they have hopes and dreams is taken away from people of color in their representation.
There's this zeitgeist happening, and people are more open to 'Sorry to Bother You' being a hit with 'Get Out' being out there. But that zeitgeist is also happening because of the movements going back to Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Usually, film is years behind. It just so happens that, this time, everything is lining up.
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 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?
Any collective action is made up of individuals who one day decided not to sit and watch anymore.
The Box would not play 'Takin' These' because we had a scene where we were taking furniture out of Rockefeller's mansion and giving the stuff out on the street for free.
What I wanted to do is put forth, musically, the idea that there's hope that we can change the system.
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.
I'm not trying to make a speech on CD because who wants to buy that?
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.
