When conscious and political hip-hop had risen to its zenith in 1993, the radical anti-capitalist hip-hop group The Coup, led by politically-minded emcee and producer Boots Riley, released their first album, "Kill My Landlord." The video for the Oakland, California-based group's first single, "Not Yet Free," was on regular rotation on BET's Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps.

When the genre of politically conscious hip-hop was removed from the mainstream spotlight soon after, Boots and DJ Pam the Funktress remained active, receiving acclaim and praise for their follow-up albums. Their last ablum, "Party Music," was named the best rap album of 2001 by Rolling Stone and best album of 2001 by the Washington Post.

Now signed to Epitaph and armed with a better record deal, the Coup is ready to make another killing with their upcoming release, "Pick A Bigger Weapon." PopandPolitics.com caught up with Riley, a former youth activist, at his home in west Oakland to rap about politics, hip-hop, and the new album.

PopandPolitics.com: What motivated you to become an activist and what motivated you to pick up the mic?

Boots: Everyone wants to connect to the universe. I found that to really be part of it all, to really connect to the universe is to help to change it as opposed to just being there watching everything go past me. I think once I started organizing when I was 15, I realized that this is why I wanted to get involved. This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to feel like my time here is significant.

PandP: On "Laugh/Love/Fuck," (a song from the upcoming album "Pick a Bigger Weapon") you say on the chorus that you're here to, "Make the revolution come quicker." How do you plan on doing that through your music?

Boots: Hopefully, my music can be used by organizers as something to inspire themselves and others to keep doing the work they're doing. Also, there are messages that can be rallying cries to rally more people to the cause of what they're doing. I think music in and of itself serves as a cultural point of reference. People can hear an idea, a theme, and some music and know that everyone else that is listening to this music is relating to that theme or idea or goal in some way -- so it can help and create a unity of thought in some way, shape, or form. Hopefully my music can be used that way.

PandP: The new album's heavy on funk. How does The Coup's sound fit in with the current Bay Area scene, juxtaposed with the hyphy culture that's going on?

Boots: We've always been very funky in our music. And what's coming out is a variation of that funk that's been in the Bay Area for a long time. So we're right there in the middle of it. Our bass has always been low. Our stuff has always been crazy. My rhyme patterns have always been unorthodox. I think some of what people call "hyphy" music is mainly drums with few instruments. There are a few hits that are out that sound like that, and people call it hyphy. People think of Mac Dre's music as hyphy and his stuff is very much bassline, keys, guitars, everything. It's the same sound…. And our music is part of that sound that's always been there. The hyphy thing is more of an attitude than a sound change.

PandP: How did the industry react to the original cover art for "Party Music?" [The original artwork, completed three months prior to 9/11, depicted the twin towers blowing up and was slated to hit shelves around the same time.] What was your personal reaction when 9/11 happened?

Boots: I heard about it [9/11] on the radio and I didn't make a connection to the cover really, because planes slammed into the World Trade Center and I didn't picture it looking similar. On the album I have a bass tuner and Pam [the Funktress] has conductor's wands. It's supposed to make the statement that our music is destroying capitalism. I was fine with pulling the cover. My music talks about masses of people coming together to affect change. The album cover was only a metaphorical piece of art that talked about what we wanted our ideas to do… I was fine with pulling it so that people didn't mistake what I was talking about.

At the same time, it had gotten so much publicity. Many entertainers at that time that had anything political about them were scared of getting shut out of the industry. I had publicists that were like, "I can't work on your album anymore 'cause I won't have a career after that." I used it as an opportunity to speak out at the time against bombing Afghanistan. The main controversy I got was not for the album cover, but for the statement that came out afterward that stated the U.S. had created worse atrocities all over the world, and what the flag stood for, to me, was slavery and oppression. That's what got all the right-wing writers up in arms.

PandP: Your new album's coming out on Epitaph, what used to be a predominantly punk label. Why is a punk label enlisting more conscious hip-hop?

Boots: As you see from marketing, the same people that buy Jay-Z buy Linkin Park. The same people that buy David Banner buy Evanescence. It's the same people buying all of this stuff. Record labels see that. A lot of the punk audience listens to "underground" hip-hop. Also, Epitaph is known for taking groups that sell 100,000 to 150,000 copies each time out and tripling, if not quadrupling and quintupling their sales. They have groups that they have taken from 50,000 sales to 700,000 when they join them.

PandP: I remember watching your videos in the early 90s. Your videos used to get played on BET, but they don't play any of your recent videos.

Boots: BET's Rap City used to be a format in which, if you could show you had a good quality video and song and you had national distribution, you had a good chance of being able to get played on Rap City. It's not like that anymore. You have to show that you're getting regular rotation spins on the radio.

PandP: Is your audience generally comprised of an alternative crowd? You were featured in Bakari Kitwana's article "The Cotton Club: Black-conscious hip-hop deals with an overwhelmingly white live audience" in the Village Voice.

Boots: My live audience is the same as most hip-hop audiences, which has to do with the fact that black people are kept away from shows. Even here, the KMEL crowd [a popular mainstream urban radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area], it's not mainly black when you go to their shows, it's mainly a white audience. A lot of that has to do with how shows are promoted. That doesn't mean that the crowd that listens to this music doesn't have more black people listening to it, it has to do with how promoters are encouraged to keep black people away, everything from ticket pricing to where flyers are passed out to where events are held.

What I was talking about [in the article] is that hip-hop is being gentrified by the police and by the industry, which is quite a different angle than what he [Kitwana] took. What he tried to say was that black people don't listen to any music that's political anymore, which is not the case. He tried to make it seem like 50 Cent and Eminem have a greater percentage of black fans, and we know that's not true. If you get anywhere close to platinum or gold, most of your fans, 90 percent of them are white. My point is not that a lot of my fans aren't white. Many, if not most of my fans, are white -- but that is the same for Master P, that's the same for Jay-Z, that's the same for all of hip-hop.

Hip-hop in general, when black folks get together, the police don't like it. A fight that happens when there's a black crowd turns out the whole show, the police shut it down. But a fight that happens when there's a white crowd, those fighters get pulled outside and the show goes on. You don't hear about it because the show didn't get cancelled… The other thing is, police can decide based on no obvious criteria at all, to okay the permit for your event and that really just depends on who they deem the crowd is going to be.

Yeah, most of my audience is white. Most of the people that buy Nikes are white, most of the people that buy FUBU are white, most of the people that watch Dave Chappelle are white. We live in the United States and the people that have the money to buy these things are going to be white. My music is about the working class defeating the ruling class, and in the working class, there are people of all shades.

PandP: Why the title "Pick a Bigger Weapon"?

Boots: It means "up the ante." And the reason I used "Pick a Bigger Weapon" is because I think that we're all fighting the system whether we feel like we're in the struggle or not, and that fight takes the form of struggling to pay the rent, trying to keep the lights on, things like that. Those are the struggles we all should be engaged in collectively. It's about taking our daily struggles and collectivizing them and it would be a stronger blow to the system.

Also, my girlfriend and I were having dinner with poet Jessica Care Moore and my girlfriend was on her third or fourth martini and Jessica was like, "C'mon girl, pick a bigger weapon." That's symbolic of people looking for ways to make their lives better and right now we've been taught to overlook actually fighting the system together to make our life better.

Sage Francis ain't for your everyday Nike-clad rap fan. The Rhode Island native's music has been labeled "nerd rap" and "emo-hop," probably because he makes more references to Jack Kerouac and Johnny Cash than 2pac and John Gotti. Politically-charged and poetically-versed, his messages, buried in metaphors and witty wordplay, might take several listens to catch.

It's been a busy year for the one half of Non-Prophets (the other half is producer Joe Beats) and seasoned rap battle veteran. He released "A Healthy Distrust" earlier this year on Epitaph Records, recently released the "Life Is Easy" DVD, and is currently on tour in support of KnowMore.org, an online community website co-founded with his friend and fellow poet Bernard Dolan. The goal of the new site is to provide consumers with detailed information on corporations including -- business history, statement of ethics, shareholders, employee relations, and more.

Sage spoke to Pop and Politics in early November.

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You were the first hip-hop act to sign to Epitaph, is that true?

That's true.

Now their roster includes Atmosphere, Blackalicious, MF Doom, and the Coup…

Yeah, that's a pretty strong hip-hop lineup. It's probably the best hip-hop label out there, strangely enough.

But it's a punk label.

What makes it a punk label?

Well, most of their artists were predominantly punk.

They're a label that collectively puts out the hip-hop that I think is most important and the best hip-hop of right now. To me, it's a hip-hop label. But I don't care if it's a hip-hop label or not. I wish I was the only rapper on the label so I could have the novelty of bragging rights. But yeah, I'm really proud to be on a label with other artists of this era that I think are doing some really cool stuff.

Why is it that Epitaph is enlisting some of the most powerful hip-hop acts out there today, as opposed to hip-hop labels? Is it that they allow more artistic freedom?

SF:They do allow more artistic freedom. I think they have a better understanding of the hip-hop we do and how it came about and why there's an audience for it and how it actually is shared by some of their audience. Although, I think the punk pop contingent fan-base of a lot of Epitaph artists' aren't really into hip-hop or even whatever we're doing.

But personally when I went to Epitaph, I got a big kick out of giving the finger to all the hip-hop labels. I could have gone with Atlantic or Epic or whoever is putting out hip-hop that is "eh" to me. A lot of them have talked to me and talked about signing me, but when they realized I didn't fit the face of what they wanted from a white hip-hop artist, they tried to urge me to fill that role, and I fled to be a pretty good selling artist on Epitaph. I like making Epitaph the money rather than those labels that were trying to make me fit the white rapper role.


What is the stereotypical white rapper role?

You know, you gotta co-opt black culture just like Eminem, be a white man in black face without the black face. It's insulting. We could get into a big racial debate about it, but I come from Rhode Island. I come from a white community, a small town Irish Catholic community and I was given different opportunities in life and I accept that and I acknowledge that. I lived a unique life and that's what I reflect. I can't reflect street life.

Coming up through the years, I've had managers… trying to push me to talk about drugs or even sell drugs in real life so I would have fodder for songs. I look at Eminem's career and I'm like, this dude fell into that. I feel like he did what I could have done and I don't feel worse for not doing it. I see where he's at, it's incredibly successful. He has incredible skills. I don't think he would have been used if he was talentless. I think Dr. Dre is a very brilliant man who saw the potential in it all. And when I first saw they came together as a unit, I was like "Man, it's over now."

This guy's got the street credibility with the support of black artists who get respect from a black audience, and he has incredible skill and he has something original about his background which I don't think he really is too honest about but, whatever.

The hip-hop labels wanted another Eminem. Who's gonna be the next Eminem, who's gonna be the next Eminem?

Now you got Paul Wall.

SF: Who I have never heard. I'm glad, too. I see his pictures and I think I may steal his mouth one day, put it in my pocket and save it for later. Everyone was waiting for the next Eminem. Who's the fat white guy that came out?

Bubba Sparx. He had Timbaland behind him and he still flopped.

Because he didn't have enough skill. I watched him do a performance on Saturday Night Live and he was sad. I was very embarrassed for the guy, looked like he had never been in front of an audience in his whole life.

So whatever, I went with Epitaph. They took me as is. They're like, "We like what you do. We trust that you're gonna have a long career. We see how it's developing. We see how you've treated your fan-base. We see how it's grown over the years and we're on board. Would you like to help build that?" Because they have more resources, they are able to give me access to more people and that's why I make music. I make music so people will hear it. And they validated me as a more official artist as far as the media is concerned. So I'm happy about that. I knew that was the most important thing about going with a bigger label (I wouldn't really call them a major label). And yeah, everything's been going great.

It just seemed odd when I heard you on the Punk-O-Rama compilation. There's all this punk and then there's Sage Francis.

I dig that. It was good for me, being able to stick out on a punk rock compilation. All of a sudden, here's a hip-hop song. People take notice to that. A lot of people have told me, "Hey I started listening to you after I heard you on that Punk-O-Rama CD" because otherwise, the only hip-hop they're hearing is the stuff that was on the radio, the stuff that was force fed to them by the media. And that's not what they liked. Those type of hip-hop songs were not the life they were living. That's not what they understood or appreciated. Then they heard a song of more substance to them. I'm happy to have finally had access to an audience who normally would not have checked out a hip-hop record. Now they're like, "Man now I listen to so much hip-hop. Thank you, you opened me up to hip-hop."

Obviously, you're influenced by punk yourself. You make references to Minor Threat, Fugazi, GG Allin. You were also a slam poet. What roles do they play in your music?

I only listened to hip-hop as a kid, I would never listen to anything else. I was always scared of losing a hip-hop stripe for checking out some other kind of music. In 1996, the whole Chronic era of hip-hop annoyed me and I just wasn't feeling hip-hop like I used to. I had friends in college who were into the hardcore [punk] scene. So I went and checked out some hardcore shows.

I recognized that these groups were selling their own merchandise. They had made their own tapes, they were selling magazines they put together themselves. I was introduced to the DIY movement in music which was not prevalent or even existent in hip-hop. Hip-hop was major label driven. Hip-hop was very mystical. I didn't understand how the hell you get a record out. I didn't understand how you get records into stores.

When I saw the DIY ethic in punk rock, I realized, "Wow, you don't need a million dollars to put out a record. You really can start out small, selling [your record] to friends, and put on your shows and do everything yourself." Of course it's not gonna be big, of course you're not gonna make a lot of money. But at least you're gonna be doing music and at least you're gonna do what you love. Starting at that point, I built my own record label which was Strange Famous records. I started selling my own music to the point where I could quit my job. I started doing music full time, did "Personal Journals," started putting out more official albums. The more the money came in, the more official I could get.

Technology was changing quite rapidly at that point. I wasn't even on the Internet in 1996. 1997, 1998 comes and now I got an e-mail address. Now I figure out, "Whoa, I got access to the whole world." Boom, Napster happens. Free file-sharing network where everyone has my music, where I'm able to tour the world without having an album out yet. That just took the DIY movement to a whole new level of "I don't care if you buy my record or not, if you like my music come to a show." Bang. More money comes in. Now my career has developed well beyond where I ever thought it would simply by sticking to my guns and making the music I enjoy. Quality music that I didn't let outside influence change what I was saying or how I sounded. That allowed me to flip off all the hip-hop labels who I thought were pushing me in the wrong direction.

Meaningful, political, and socially conscious hip-hop was more prevalent in the early 90s/late 80s with groups like Public Enemy. From a rapper's perspective, what happened? What factors contributed to the suppression of the political and active voice in mainstream hip-hop?

The political and active voice is still there. It never went away. It just that there's a kind of hip-hop that caters and panders to the lowest common denominator. It's the cheapest, cheesiest, easiest music to make that you know a mass amount of people will easily accept and buy in to and will generate a lot of money.

Therefore, a lot of publicity and promotional power goes into that kind of music. Therefore, that's all the media will cover, that's all you'll get to hear about unless you dig a little deeper and find artists that are making music that has more substance to it.

Groups like PE I think were the pinnacle of hip-hop and its purpose. The reason why I think it came about. The sound that it had, the aggression, the revolt, rebelling against the status quo was essential to its cause and the reason why I think hip-hop existed.

Now we're in an era almost 20 years later and a lot of things have changed. Technology has changed, people have changed. Society isn't better. The purpose for that music hasn't gone away. And for all these artists who have benefited from pandering to the lowest common denominator and for them not to feel any kind of responsibility for not doing the right thing for social improvement is upsetting.

What motivated you and Bernard Dolan to launch KnowMore.org?

It was Bernard's brain child. He had thought it up. I thought it was a brilliant idea. In fact, I couldn't believe that it didn't exist already, to have an organization that supplied the public with info to figure out who owns what business. Where the money goes, how do they treat their workers, are they someone worth supporting, do you want to put your money into this company.

So he's like listen, we have to buy the technology to catalog and archive info on every company we can get info on and allow the public at large to also edit and contribute info about these companies. He gave me the bill and was just like, "It's gonna cost this much money, whad'ya think?" I think this is an awesome idea and I'm willing to pay for this, so I funded the project. I also know that I have a politically active audience. So I said, "Let's open this up to my forum, let's open this up to my audience at first. Let them kickstart this project so it can grow." So that's where we are now. We're on this tour promoting KnowMore.org and we've got like 40,000 hits a day and we expect that to grow more and more.

Hip-hop has a history of constantly evolving, so if you asked me five years ago where hip-hop would be today, I wouldn't have expected glitzy bling dance rap to still dominate the radio and charts. But surprisingly, they're still leaning back in da club, rollin' on dubs, drinking champagne, big pimpin', and showing girls their "oh!'s."

Yes, a lot of it sounds the same. Yes, a lot of it is garbage. And yes, some of it is actually quite good. It obviously appeals to many listeners if artists are selling millions of copies and even though it may not be very poetic or thought provoking, it's filled with rhythmic grooves to make people loosen up, move their bodies, and nod their heads.

But like many hip-hop fans, I need a little consciousness to balance with my crunk juice. Conscious rap, that tiny subgenre consisting of supposedly non-misogynistic, positive, socially and politically aware emcees (Dead Prez, Mos Def, Mr. Lif, Talib Kweli, among others), has never flowed with the currents of the mainstream. Common's latest album, "Be," however, may change that.

Common (Sense, as he used to be called) has always kept one foot in the underground and the other on the banks of the mainstream. He's one of the few conscious rap artists to gain commercial success. He released his first album "Can I Borrow a Dollar?" in 1992, but became most respected for 1994's "Resurrection," which featured the song "I Used to Love H.E.R." He also had a hit single with 2000's "The Light."

On "Be," Common teams up with fellow Chicago native Kanye West to shine light on the neglected Midwest. When you think hip-hop, you think of Snoop's sunny Cali, Jay-Z's gritty New York, and Lil' Jon's dirty South. Artists like Kanye, Common, and Twista are letting the rap world know that there's more to the Midwest than bad weather and Eminem. Song's like "Chi-City" and the album's first single, "The Corner" paint portraits of life in the artist's hometown.

Common's Afro-centric rhymes on the album are accompanied by a backdrop of jazzy, soulful beats, produced almost entirely by Kanye West. "The Corner" is a reflection of urban street life featuring The Last Poets reciting spoken word poetry, while Kanye West raps "I wish I could give you this feeling" on the chorus. And if you don't feel as if you're on a Windy City street corner among crooks, hustlers, cops, preachers, and poor and working class people trying to get by on a regular day, then you don't know how to use your imagination. While most hardcore hip-hop heads will love this song for its old-school flavored beat and Common's raw flow, it won't help him get record sales from the MTV audience.

More radio-friendly is his current hit, "Go," a song in which Common recounts moments of steamy sex, contradicting his "conscious" label. Sure, he's a conscious emcee fighting for the black struggle and all, but that doesn't mean he can't talk about hittin' them skins. Part of Common's appeal is that he can talk about sex and talk about ghetto life. And what, a man can't enjoy sex? Even Catholic priests like sex...bad joke? Sorry. At least he's not obscene about it like most rappers on the radio. The song also features one of my favorite lines on the album, "Still I got ta pause, when I think about her in them drawls."

The only problem I have with Common is a comment made on a track titled "Real People." For such an intelligent artist, he makes such an ignorant comment, which almost makes me hate writing this positive review.

"Black men walkin' with white girls on they arms / I be mad at 'em as if I know they moms / Told to go beyond the surface a person's a person / When we lessen our women our condition starts to worsen. "

Just how is a black man dating a white woman lessening the African-American "condition?" Maybe he's got his kufi on a little too tight, but as a person of color, I don't see any problems with interracial relationships. Disapproving of interracial dating is so early 90s. I am keeping in mind that the song is about "real people" and Common is...well, a real person with his own opinions and views on society. (A heated debate about Common's contradictions has been taking place on the SOHH.com message boards over a rumored comment made on New York City's Power 105.1 Star and Bucwild radio show on May 24th. According to the message board folk, Common admitted to having sex with white groupies and called it "conscious pimping." Very conscious my righteous brother.)

Despite my personal gripe, "Be" is classic Common, a resurrection of "Resurrection," with 11 solid head-nodding songs and no skits, interludes, outros or intros. The limited deluxe edition also comes with a bonus DVD making the CD a must-have for true Common fans. If you're not familiar with the artist, pick up the album.