Raging against societal injustice is thankless, exhausting work; over the long haul, even the most determined firebrands go either stale or shrill. Boots Riley, leader of the radical Oakland rap group the Coup, has raged longer and harder than most, but somehow, on sixth album Sorry to Bother You, he sounds as nimble, funny, and wry as ever. There are a few signs of strain-- that self-deprecating album title, for one, which is a far cry from the incitement of 1998's Steal This Album. And occasionally, Riley acknowledges that making rebellious party rap to fight the system is the definition of pissing in the wind: "I could rhyme silk with cigarettes/ I could rhyme Jack Daniels with triumph/ But no sentence I could spit could've shifted events," he raps on "My Murder, My Love". But even conceding defeat, Riley sounds anything but defeated.
Sorry to Bother You continues the band's push into full-blown funk-rock, begun in earnest on 2006's Pick a Bigger Weapon. These are rough stylistic waters, but Riley and his band steer us through safely: On opener "The Magic Clap", Riley invokes the harder gangsta-rap meaning of "make it clap" while the hard-charging band, working up a driving fuzz-bass groove that recalls Sly Stone's "Dance to the Music", implies the more old-fashioned kind. "You Are Not a Riot" is an unlikely fusion of shouting, twitchy punk-rap, and seething Elvis Costello new wave. "Your Parents' Cocaine" recruits Justin Sane from Anti-Flag for a snotty pop-punk singalong mocking spoiled rich kids.
Holding all of this together, as always, is Riley's sharp humor. "You Are Not a Riot" is an acrid takedown of a fashionable faux-rebel, and every line he reels off pierces like a fountain-pen nib to the eyeball. "You, you are not rebellion/ You are a sitcom based on a torture chamber," he sneers. The disarmingly tender ballad "Violet", meanwhile, is a fond remembrance of a transcendent night with a woman, and Riley's language sings with the same beauty as the strings and French horn: "Skyscrapers crowded around to watch/ As we laughed at the faulty perception of clocks."
Politically, Riley is still reporting from a world where there is "a salary cap on a birth certificate," ("The Magic Clap") and those paying close attention to his words will be rewarded by righteous screeds like this one, from "The Gods of Science": "Some pray to the Christ, look to Buddha or Mohammed/ Some pray to the crack of a rich man's pocket/ The biggest advance was plumbing to the projects, now the scientific process got hijacked for profit." Heavy words, but Riley skips them across the song's nervous four-note post-punk guitar riff, and they disappear into the blur of the groove. The Coup have always been a party band first and foremost, and Sorry to Bother You reaffirms their belief that the revolution, if there is going to be one, will start at the hips.
Riley and the Coup have always thrived on rap's margins, seemingly immune to whatever else is happening in the genre at the moment. Independent rap is more alive with talent right now than at any point in years, but the idiosyncratic guest roster of Sorry to Bother You reflects little more than Riley's idiosyncratic interests-- Anti-Flag, Japanther on "Long Island Iced Tea, Neat". It isn't until the final track, "WAVIP", that Killer Mike and Das Racist show up, and it's for a tossed-off, one-take-style goof: Mike snarls, Kool A.D. mumbles, and Heems deadpans, "I'm pretty great, you should be like me." A bassline wobbles on two notes, and the song is over and out in less than three minutes. It feels like a funny afterthought, as well as a missed opportunity. But if an allergy to the obvious route is part of what has kept Boots vital all these years, we'll take it.
