The Coup

The world can be a real drag when you have your eyes open. Active protesters and armchair politicians alike can easily suffocate in disillusionment, rage, and/or helplessness. Boots Riley and Pam the Funkstress, the twin engines of funk hip-hoppers The Coup, are fighting those battles, too, but they remind their listeners that it's okay to put societal ills on the back burner from time to time -- just so long as they stay on the stove.

While there is a spine of '70s funk and Parliament-Funkadelic love running throughout the album, the tone of the beats and vocal melodies varies dramatically from song to song. For all of its political heft, Pick A Bigger Weapon works pretty well as a straight-up good-time album, with the two sides intersecting brilliantly on standout "ShoYoAss," which blends call-to-arms lyrics with an irresistible call-to-the-dance-floor beat.

The slow-down love and lust jams are just a teeny bit off the mark, showing an over-reliance on repetition, but do provide an extra layer of interest. The electric guitar squeal and falsetto come-on of "I Just Wanna Lay Around All Day in Bed With You" would do Prince proud, while "Baby Let's Have a Baby Before Bush Do Somethin' Crazy" is, at the very least, practically a lock for the year's best song title. Silk E provides an appropriately raw R&B vocal on the latter, but it would have been considerably improved if they could have written a few extra verses instead of recycling the same one.

Hard-liners will want to cut out a number of zanier tracks (and skits) from Pick A Bigger Weapon, focusing instead on pavement-pounding beats like "My Favorite Mutiny," when the activities of the cartoonishly merry "Laugh / Love / Fuck" are all replaced with a starker and more strident mission: " 'Death to the pigs' is my basic statement," Riley spits, before going on to namedrop Rosa Parks, Ricky Ross and Gil Scott-Heron. Tom Morello adds a guest star guitar riff to "Captain Sterling's Little Problem," which encourages military defectors over the angriest and most discordant backdrop on the album.

"My Favorite Mutiny" also marks one misstep. One of the best qualities of politically-minded hip-hop is that it tends to view the world in terms of "us vs. them" instead of rap's more typical "me me me me." But on "My Favorite Mutiny," guest MC Talib Kweli reverts to that tired formula, likening himself to Huey P. Newton and reminding listeners that he "came in the game with a new way to spit." Actually, it's a testament to The Coup that this self-aggrandizing line smells foul in this particular Everyman environment. Aside from the deliberately dumb nursery rhyme anthem on "Head (of State)," Pick A Bigger Weapon is sharply written -- even "Head (of State)" drops some essential Cliffs Notes history for those who may have been tuned out.

The synopsis of Pick A Bigger Weapon as a whole? Fight on -- but don't forget to party on, too. -- Adam McKibbin, The Red Alert

If you look hard enough at the cover of Pick a Bigger Weapon, you can see dangling legs through a hole in the wall of a ransacked Omnimart corporate office. DJ Pam "The Funkstress"' holds a bat, Boots Riley holds a pen, and bottles of a product called Ass-Breath Killer are on a desk and the ground. It's evident that this cover isn't likely to put them in hot water, like the original cover of Party Music did almost five years prior, unless someone prominent and silly finds the legs shocking. The Coup's long-standing balance between humor and righteous anger remains on this, their fifth album, and they still deliver the laughs and rants over juiced synth-funk. This time out, they use the band format more than before, with the likes of Audioslave's Tom Morello, Tony! Toni! Toné!'s D'Wayne Wiggins, and a few funk vets chipping in on occasion. The album's press sheet draws comparisons to Prince's Dirty Mind and Too Short, and while that's not inaccurate, the references could just as easily be Digital Underground, Paris, Above the Law, E-40, late-'70s Parliament/Funkadelic, any previous Coup album, or just about any other funk-steeped rap album that has come from the West Coast. Nursery rhyme-style choruses like "Bush and Hussein together in bed, giving H-E-A-D head/Y'all muthaf*ckas heard what we said/Billions made and millions dead" will get some attention, while complex verses that are not as easy to digest (or quote) will not. Boots is as lyrically pointed as ever, dropping dozens of resonant rhymes that rail and educate, and he's even better when he punctuates his messages with humor, as he does in a faux-uppity voice on "We Are the Ones": "The one university I knew was Yale, so I cooked it, bagged it, put it on sale/Now, philosophically, you'd be opposed to one inhaling coke by the mouth or nose/But, economically, I would propose that you go eat a dick as employment had froze." Even "Ass-Breath Killers" has a much deeper meaning than the title indicates -- ass breath comes from kissing ass, and if you use the product, you'll grow a spine and maybe die for speaking your mind. Some fans might hastily skip past the sleazy romantic interludes ("Ijuswannalay..." seems to exist only to segue smoothly into "Head"), but the album is perfectly capable of rattling trunks and energizing activists. ~ Andy Kellman, All Music Guide