The Crocodile & ReignCity Present:

Friday Feb 17

The Coup

at The Crocodile

8:00PM | 21+ | $13 Adv.

Buy Tickets

With

• Theoretics
• DJ Funkscribe

Born in Chicago and raised in East Oakland’s Funktown neighborhood, Boots became a teenage community organizer, but later switched from a clipboard to the microphone, forming the Coup with rapper E-Roc. Pam the Funkstress, the first female DJ star in the famously competitive Bay Area turntablist scene, later signed on.

As a producer and lyricist, Boots Riley has crafted critically acclaimed albums for The Coup that have graced the year-end Top 10 lists of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and more.  They have also received “Album of the Year” honors from The Washington Post, Time Out New York, while Billboard Magazine declared the group “the best hip-hop act of the past decade.” Born in Chicago and raised in East Oakland’s Funktown neighborhood, Boots became a teenage community organizer.  From his history of student organizing in Oakland’s public schools, serving on the central committee for the Progressive Labor Party, being the President of Youth InCar (Youth International Committee Against Racism), organizing to build California’s Anti-Racist Farm Workers’ Union, to developing “guerrilla hip hop concerts” (mobile concerts on flatbed trucks), Boots Riley has been an integral part of the progressive struggle for radical change through culture. 

The Coup’s most recent album, Pick A Bigger Weapon, kicks off with a classic Boots Riley line — “I’m a walking contradiction/Like bullets and love mixin’…” —and then it just gets better. After a 16-year career that has defined the word
“uncompromising”, the Coup returned armed with bigger funk and taller tales. Backed by a stellar recording band that includes Audioslave’s Tom Morello, Dwayne Wiggins, and veterans of Parliament-Funkadelic, the Gap Band, Toni! Tony! Toné!, Jesse Johnson, and Frankie Beverly and Maze, the sound is a little edgier on this record and the beats a little faster.” The Coup’s uniquely bent grooves point to “Dirty Mind"-era Prince, late-80s Too Short, and the trunkrattling hyphy sonics of the New Bay movement.

Links

• The Coup
• Theoretics