Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

I'm Jesse Thorn, it's Bullseye.

So this week we are coming to you from my home office in Los Angeles about a week into

the Self-isolation. We figured now is as good a time as I need to look back at some of

our favorite Bullseye interviews. So a 2018 conversation with the great Boots Riley.

Boots is hands down one of the most interesting people making art today. Among other things

he's the front man of the coup, one of my favorite rap groups of all time. The coup make

straightforward music. The beats never had a lot of frills. Boots when he wraps does so

plainly. But the central element of the coup is its message. Boots told stories when he

wrapped, painted pictures from his real life. He talked about social justice and poverty

and racism. A lot of hip-hop is about prosperity, overcoming a system that's been rigged against

you for centuries, success stories, in other words. The coup with Boots as the front man

want to throw the system out entirely. About eight years ago Boots started working

on a movie, something he'd never really done before. He started telling friends about it

asking acquaintances in the industry for advice. Sometimes he'd just corner a movie producer

for 15 minutes. He wrote a screenplay and thanks to a combination of audacity, determination

and luck, he actually made the movie. It's called sorry to bother you. It's set in Oakland

in a kind of alternate reality. Lequith Stanfield is the star. He plays cashous green, a black

man who gets a gig doing telemarketing. And it's in that job that he finds the key to success.

He's going to do a dead-on impression of a white dude and magically people listen when

you call. From that point forth, it gets weirder, much weirder. If you've seen sorry to bother

you, you know what I mean. But if you haven't, I don't want to spoil anything for you. I'll

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