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Your support makes all the difference.Withdrawn in 2001 when its sleeve design - an anti-capitalist fantasy of the twin towers crumbling - proved disastrously prescient, The Coup's Party Music was one of the century's first politically potent hip-hop albums. That calling continues here with Pick a Bigger Weapon.
The luxuriantly Afro-ed Coup ideologue Boots Riley speaks not for the " have nots" but rather the "don't gets", with theft seen as a borderline revolutionary act on the poor's behalf in raps such as "The Stand" and "We Are the Ones" ("We like free speech, but we love free cable"). The Iraq war is rejected as imperial adventurism in "Captain Sterling's Little Problem" and "Head (of State)", the latter reducing the conflict to catchy rhymes such as "War ain't about one man against the next/ It's poor people dying so the rich cash cheques."
Riley and DJ Pam the Funkstress (with the help of some Gap Band veterans) take care to lace it all with infectious Seventies/Eighties synth-funk riffs, a formula that's best represented on "Laugh/Love/ Fuck", in which a groove reminiscent of Patrice Rushen's "Forget-Me-Nots" carries an appealing manifesto: "Laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor/ And maybe make a revolution."
DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Laugh/Love/Fuck', 'Head (of State)', 'Baby Let's Have a Baby Before Bush Do Somethin' Crazy'
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