Boots Riley wants to 'compel and repel' you

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today is filmmaker, rapper, and community organizer Boots Riley.

His work for the last few decades has circled the same argument that capitalism produces the contradictions we live with and that art can make them visible. He made that argument as the frontman of the Oakland-based hip-hop group The Coup, and in his screen work with his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. a surreal satire about a black telemarketer who finds success after he learns to use his white voice. And he's making the argument again in his latest film, I Love Boosters, which was first a love song he wrote 20 years ago about shoplifters, or boosters as they're called. A booster is a person who jacks from the retail and sets it in the hood for dirt cheap resale.

In these hard times they press on like me nails. And all of my experience, SX has been a female. Back in elementary, my shoes used to rap. Every time I sold it the street there were flap. Then in high school Alexanders in my cap, cause my jacket didn't have a brand name on the back.

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