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

I'm Jesse Thorn. One of my favorite songs ever is called Underdogs. It's by the Coo,

a rap group from the Bay Area. It sounds like this.

This is for my bones. Never lived like a whole new. You took it so I got love.

I've raised this glass for the ones who died meaningless. And the new ones who get fed

intravenous. Somebody's mama called a job in the welfare for all case. When she greets,

she swear it feels like plastic wrap around her face. It's a painful, profoundly empathetic

snapshot of poverty and the stuff that people do just to get by. Here's the story behind

it. A couple decades back, Boots Rhyly, that's the frontman of the Coo. His dad lost a couple

hundred bucks. His friend of Boots got the money from his dad, promised he'd pay him back,

but he never did. And yeah, Boots is a reasonably successful rapper, but he isn't rich and neither

is his dad. So losing the money hurt, he was angry. And Boots did what a lot of rappers

would do. At first, he took pen to paper and started writing a dish song. But as he was

writing, he thought about where his friend came from, about what drove him to steal the

money. And he realized that he wasn't writing a diss track anymore. And just while writing

that, thinking about his life, this is a guy who had, when he was a kid, got burned and

covered in burns and lived, you know, it's hard to even talk about it. But anyway, this

was me writing a song that came from an understanding of a whole situation that he was in. And that

came first from a point of disgust and ended up with this song.

It's Bullseye.

This week Boots Riley. He's just written and directed his first film. It's called Sorry to Body

You. It's great. And I talk about that a lot. But also, we'll talk about how he got together

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