knockin' boots?

work boots

Noz proclaimed Boots Riley of the Coup one of the most underrated rappers of all time putting him appropriately enough next to Chuck D as rapper putting politics into of all of his rhymes. So I was amped and inevitably disappointed at The Coup show last Saturday at NYU’s Skirball Center that was an opportunity for Boots to rip the current administration a new one in the safety of an adoring college educated crowd. But maybe Boots didn’t see that as much of a challenge… preacher and choir and all. Instead the mood was mellow. The show lacked the precise funk of samples that a DJ (Pam the Funkstress was absent) can add to a live show and instead relied on the loose ‘live funk’ of a group of respectable players. Only the prerecorded-track dominated “My Favorite Mutiny” sounded like the booming system necessary to attack ‘a system’… but with the absence of guest mcs Black Thought and Kweli and certain portions of the recorded song, the track felt woefully incomplete. The live version of “I Just Wanna Lay Around All Day In Bed With You” was the best match for a live band and a laid back MC. A heavy dose of personal with a subversive pinch of political is maybe the perfect formula for Boots. And he might agree since he wound up the show with an encore rendition of the brilliant ‘Wear Clean Draws.’ This track has less to do with ‘Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos’ than with Sasha Frere-Jones description of country music in which artists more often than not “choose to tease out the political in everyday life, unpacking mundane acts, many of them compulsory, be it going to work or opening your eyes.”
Cue The Coup…mellow muffled bass with sunshine-through-the-blinds keyboards. Boots sets the scene…

“Monday rush. I’m supposed to skip, but I just found Sunday in your hips”

He dreamily continues into cosmic metaphors for his girls wonderland body and then kicks the years best series of sex rhymes not done by R. Kelly…

“Thoughts wrangled up, legs tangled up, baby do this feel good angled up? Can’t be expressed by a sangle fuck. Wanna gently caress it and bang it up”

But, as he tries to lose himself in the sunshine of his life, the nightstand clock intrudes. Torn between a morning quickie and his 9-to-5, he realizes most of his time belongs to his boss and so the desire to stay between the sheets becomes stronger. The hook introduces a comic falsetto like an exaggerated hip-hop era pimp but it’s really, of all things, just a playful falsetto… something embarrassingly intimate that can make a couple of lovers of soul music share a groggy morning laugh. And then perfectly on cue Morris Day, the perfect complex cliché of the player-fool, the throwback soul-clown for hip-hoppers of a certain age, comes screaming from the past (or is it the alarm clock?) repeating his signature question “What time is it?!” which echoes into Boots’ dream world of a “sick-day.”
Boots philosophizes on the only things he feels he actually controls: intimate moments of the life of Riley. He flips a paradoxical metaphor with a claustrophobic outside and a universe under the weight of his girl and then thoughts of “lost aerobics” are oddly accompanied by a double time handclap creating a mini flamenco-fire with a Wonder-esque harmonica meandering over it. Suddenly his sex / work debate spurs a thought of burning his workplace down if not allowed to head home by 5:02. He taps into a working-class disgust of not getting paid for every second he has to be in service to the boss. Strings come in as he struggles to make his decision. At least the cymbals of the trap set and symbols of the political set (a Jesse Jackson? speech reiterates Day’s query) combine to make beautiful music together…
Boots doesn’t necessarily ruin the mood when he tells his girl “We in bed together like George W. Bush and Sadaam Hussein.” It actually might remind her why she’s probably with him in the first place. “Aw, Boots, you silly…” But pretty serious about it at the same time...

The Coup - I Just Wanna Lay Around All Day In Bed With You