Boots Riley Quotes

There are a lot of leaders that talk about ending things like oppression – whether it’s discrimination or getting a job – but the reason for all of this stuff is somebody‘s making a profit off our backs. That’s the reason why black people were brought here in the first place. It was a profit motive.

A lot of us don’t get a sense of our personal power. I know the vast difference that one person can make in changing things.

It’s nice to be recognized for what you do, but that doesn’t satisfy what I wanted out of this music, which is for people to hear it and get involved in movements and campaigns.

What I wanted to do is put forth, musically, the idea that there’s hope that we can change the system.

I thought my parents were always having card parties – and they were – but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she‘d have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.

Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it’s not connected to actual movements, it doesn’t ask the right questions.

If you tell a story that’s only allegory, then it doesn’t help you at all. If it doesn’t bring some emotional charge, then it’s just talking about something.

A record is a commodity, but so is a hamburger. Just because I work at McDonald‘s doesn’t mean I reap the benefits of that commodity. That’s the reality with most artists in the record industry: They’re getting paid a subsistence wage so they can keep producing a commodity for the record label.

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.

The album ‘Party Music’ is a beautiful album, and people need to hear it.

The things you have to do to be effective – like forming a union at a fast food joint or a telemarketing company – aren’t going to work unless you do things like solidarity strikes. Solidarity strikes are illegal. They’ve been illegal since the ’40s, and they were made illegal because they work.

You make art, you make it from what you know, and that’s the best way to make art. You get lost in the details and make something that feels like it’s yours.

Because of my politics, I don’t necessarily think that the independent capitalist is that much better than the multinational capitalist; it’s just that the independent capitalist hasn’t grown as big yet.

I grew up around politics. I organized my first campaign when I was 14, a walk-out in my high school to protest the year-round school schedule.

I just look at music as a retreat from organizing. It’s like a tug-of-war with me. Music can be effective, but it’s not any good if there isn’t a grass-roots movement going on to support it.

You can’t get much done by yourself. Speaking as someone who made a movie – and it took hundreds of people to make it happen – I can say that.

A lot of organizers tell me that while they are making signs or doing whatever they do, they are listening to the Coup.

I think most people would love for us to be a socialist society.

Any collective action is made up of individuals who one day decided not to sit and watch anymore.

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

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.

When people listen to Jay-Z, they’re working all day or trying to work and pay their bills, and what they hear is someone who’s free. Who doesn’t have to worry about the electricity. But all we’re taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us, or they’re smarter.

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

‘Redistributing the wealth‘ – that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

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 always have thought that part of being involved with life is the same thing as just wanting to kick it with your friends, and being involved with life on a deeper level is wanting to change the situation that you’re in.

I want to fight the McCarthyist state that’s developing in this country so my kids won‘t live in a world where people are afraid to speak out.

I used to be mad, at first, that I couldn’t sound like Ice Cube. And I think that was probably one of the best things for me.

I think voting is the lowest form of political action that you can do. A lot of times, it keeps people from doing stronger things.

Trying to get somebody to read your script and you’re a musician? That’s the last person whose script you’re gonna read!

Oakland has always had artists attempting to define the immense beauty and ridiculousness around them.

I’m not a classically trained composer, and I can’t sing very well.

A lot of libertarians and ultra-capitalists like to put out this idea that competition makes for better creativity. But it’s just because we don’t see all the creativity that’s been crushed.

The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it’s a new era.

That punk approach of ‘We don’t wanna get big’ is really a bourgeois thing. It’s not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.

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.

My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the ’50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.

Either I’m really into the organizing, or I’m really into the music. As I’ve been going, I’ve been able to figure out ways to even it out a little more.

I’m not trying to make a speech on CD because who wants to buy that?

The goal with a show is to push forward the passion in a visual and sonic way. It all comes out in a trance-like way, fast and pulsating. Then people can go home and think about the lyrics later.

I used to get worried about writing a love song, because everyone else is doing them, and there are already enough of them out there. But I came to realize that there’s a reason for that: Love is powerful, one of the most powerful emotions there is.

The truth is, every movie is a message movie. It’s just that most movies have messages that are in lock step with the status quo.