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review of "party music"
The Coup, an openly revolutionary socialist hip hop group from Oakland,
California has a new album out that is exuding with social commentary.
“Party Music” is the name of their fourth and latest album put out by 75 ARK
records. The Coup is made up by the poetic and fiery vocalist Boots Riley
and the creative musician Pam the Funkstress on turntables.
Their new album was met with a challenge after the incidents of September
11th. Back in March, when they were designing the album cover’s artwork
they decided upon a metaphorical scene. The end product was a picture of
Boots and Pam standing in front of a crumbling World Trade Center with a
detonator in their hands. Boots told magazine interviewers that his message
was, “capitalism needs to be destroyed.” The Coup has a small audience to
begin with but this controversy pushed their art and politics into pop
magazines around the country, including Rolling Stone and Spin. However,
the music industry would not allow such a revolutionary message be sent out
at such a sensitive time. The original cover was, for all intense purposes,
censored and the group had to come up with a new design.
However, the lack of metaphorical artwork on the cover does not diminish the
creative and militant message of their lyrics. The album features songs
that cover the gamut of capitalist alienation and exploitation from police
brutality to low paying jobs/unemployment. In his lyrics, Boots goes
farther than simply decrying the problems of capitalism, he openly calls for
revolution and socialist revolution at that.
This album is as good as those that preceded it, if not better! I highly
recommend their work to any revolutionary who seeks substance in the form of
music. Let me conclude with a sample lyric, “Raise your hands in the air
like you were born again, but make a fist for the struggle we were born to
win!”
The review above was written by Rob Welsh of Ashland YSA.
