Maya S. Cade
Boots, do you think audiences are ready for the kind of leftist, solution‑oriented art you’re presenting to them?
Boots Riley
I think they’ve been more ready than the media wants us to believe. When I was in high school in the 1980s, they got on the PA system and called me a communist. That didn’t make people afraid of me. It made a lot of them think, “Oh, the government doesn’t like this dude—that must be cool.” That was the “me” decade, supposedly apolitical, but that was my experience. Then after 9/11, my band had an album with the Twin Towers blowing up on the cover—which we’d done before the attacks. Afterward, we were on MTV‑sponsored tours, on Fox News, all that. My bandmates thought I was going to get shot if we went through the Midwest and the South, especially because I was stopping shows to speak openly against the bombing of Afghanistan. Not Iraq—Afghanistan, right after 9/11. Everywhere we went—Montana, Michigan, Florida, Texas—I’d stop the music, say my piece, and get thunderous applause. So much of the job with being in the media is to make you think you’re the most left person in any room, that everyone else is more conservative than you. But that’s not what I was feeling on the ground. Then you had Occupy, which was very radical in its language and its targets, happening in pretty much every town. You look at how people responded to Sorry to Bother You: the thing folks had trouble with wasn’t the politics—it was the horse dicks. That’s what got people. I heard story after story: “My Republican parents loved it.” Later, during the 2020 strikes and other workplace actions, I was getting dozens of messages from organisers saying, “We were trying to convince people that a strike was possible. It wasn’t landing. Then we screened Sorry to Bother You and that flipped the switch.” Workers would be texting, “Equi‑Sapiens, let’s be out,” and using the film as a reference point for real‑world action.
So for me, the question isn’t “Is the public ready?” I start from: the public already knows things are messed up. The public is more open than we’re told. The question I ask myself is: how do I move people emotionally towards imagining something they can do? Not “the” solution, but a solution—something that shifts them from “It’s all hopeless” to “Maybe we can try this.” That’s what I’m after.
—Black Fire: Charles Burnett and Boots Riley in Conversation
Posted 23 hours ago.
