Quotes from Boots Riley

Every progressive movement in U.S. history has been portrayed negatively by the media at the time it happened.

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.

I try to find creative ways to put ideas out to make the ground fertile for organizers.

Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

I don't need to be validated by academia, because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case.

The Coup does not support the American flag.

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 crux of our power isn't only in our voice. It is in our economic function in society.

I thought there were too many songs about people's personal lives.

This idea of 'cool capitalism' is still capitalism. It doesn't matter if Elon Musk quotes Nas.

If I want to get my ideas out, I have to be involved in the mechanism that the world is ran by.

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 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.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, in general, by putting this idea out there that the one percent is leeching off the 99 percent, is making a new discussion, making people figure out how to withhold their labor and come and put their issues on the table with the ruling class all over the country and all over the world.

There's a very thin line between rock and funk. Funk is like a dirtier blues, and so is rock. They're close cousins.

A lot of people heard about gin and juice for the first time from Snoop Dogg, but it was nothing new in rap music, and it was nothing new in the black community.

If I wasn't rapping about politics, then I might have been just another person trying to sell albums, and I might have sounded like everyone else out there.

Rarely, someone comes around that is influenced by so many things but is looking for a new way to do something.

I was an avowed professional revolutionary by the time I was 15.

If people come to a record store, and they can't find your album, they buy something else.

I was in an organization called Progressive Labor Party and International Committee Against Racism. And I was - I started out helping to organize a farm workers' union in Central California.

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.

No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.