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 screenwork 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 sells it in the hood for dirt cheap,

resell.

In these hard times, they press on like lean nails, and all of my experience, their sex has been

beam up back in elementary, my shoes used to rap. Every time my sobs hit the street that would flap. Then in high school, Lexon Anderson, a cap, because my jacket didn't have a brand name in the back. Later this lady took me to her apartment. It looked like the Macy Sportswear department. Clothes on the chairs on the couch in the carpet. A 20 had me icy like a. And the Arctic. If it wasn't for the hard work of a booster, most couldn't go to the gloves that were used to. If you don't fit the dress code, they'll boot you. Like people who get dressed up won't shoot you. I love boosters, the film stars Kiki Palmer as the leader of a crew of women shoplifters in the Bay Area who steal from luxury fashion stores and sell

the goods cheap to people who can't afford retail. Demi Moore plays the fashion designer

who stores their robbing from, and Lakeith Stanfield plays a figure who threatens the whole operation.

As you heard, before Riley made films, he made music. The coup released their first album,

Kill My Landlord, in 1993. Before that, he was a labor and community organizer, a UPS worker,

and a telemarketer, a job that would eventually become the subject of sorry to bother you.

Boots Riley, welcome back to fresh air. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

You know, I have watched I love boosters twice and both times I was thinking, what does

Boots know about boosters? Well, I have been a broke rapper for a long time having to stay fly, you know, just a job requirement. And,

and so I've definitely had to deal with a lot of boosters. When I wrote that song 20 years ago,

it was a lifetime of experience. So, and also just saw how, how much of a service it provided a community who's, in my case, the black community, I don't think they only exist in the black community.

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