.jpeg)
.jpeg)
After the successful 2018 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Boots Riley’s debut feature Sorry to Bother You, the rapper-turned-filmmaker soon had Hollywood bigwigs asking in meeting after meeting, “What’s next?”
“Somebody asked me if I had an idea for another project,” Riley says on a Zoom call from his home in Oakland, grinning. “I said, ‘13-foot-tall Black man.’ I didn’t have anything else besides that.”
That spark of an idea led to Riley’s second project, I’m a Virgo, a seven-episode absurdist comedy that tells the story of Cootie, a 13-foot-tall Black teenager who emerges from his home for the first time into an Oakland dominated (and patrolled) by a superhero/comic book executive named The Hero. Jharrel Jerome (Moonlight) stars as Cootie and Walton Goggins (Justified) plays The Hero; Mike Epps, Carmen Ejogo, and Olivia Washington round out the cast.
Like Sorry to Bother You, this newest release is a slightly futuristic, often hilarious, sometimes vulgar story rooted in the realities of his adopted hometown of Oakland. If Sorry to Bother You’s big bad (played by Armie Hammer) could be read as an amalgamation of Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey, and Sean Parker, Goggins’ The Hero takes on Hollywood’s superhero era. As you’d expect, Riley has some reservations about where it’s taken the industry. “This is not a superhero show,” he says, “as much as it is a show about superhero shows.”
Riley, 52, put out Kill My Landlord, his debut album with The Coup, 30 years ago. The themes from that project’s title track are front and center in I’m a Virgo— eviction protests, strikes, organizing strategy sessions, and an evil CEO. Riley’s music and radical activism have kept him in the zeitgeist for three decades. Yet somehow, he’s continued to deliver radical art even while writing and directing projects for indie media companies and multi-national streamers.
As of the night before our call, I’m unsure if the interview will happen. Riley tells me he has to check with his WGA strike captain to see if he’s allowed to do press for the show. Soon after we sign on, he smiles and tells me: “This is the first time I’ve actually been on strike!”
Boots Riley: What I’m doing with absurdism is heightening contradiction to the point of ridiculousness. That’s useful to me because it smacks the contradiction right in your face.
But I also think that things that are called comedy are more natural. They’re more realistic because it takes a lot of work to suck the joy out. I mean, people in prison are laughing at stuff, right? It is part of how we view things, how we talk, how stories have been told.
I told this story for The Moth and in the story that I was telling, there was a point where in the early 90s, we heard we were on some white supremacist kill list that always came out every year and it was like Ice Cube, Ice-T, and us. I bring it up in the story because that’s why me and E-roc bought guns. We were scared, but also, we were like, “We’re on the fucking same list as Ice Cube and Ice-T. Hell yeah!” That was in the story, and they were like, “We feel like it takes away from the seriousness” or whatever. So at the first event, I didn’t say that. But then at another, I said it, people laughed, and then they got back into it.
Joy and laughter show humanity more than life devoid of joy and just filled with sorrow. Obviously, I understand that atrocious things are happening, but to me, it’s very important to talk about how humans take that in.
And there’s joy! When people are playing characters in some of these situations—maybe they don’t relate or maybe they’re told a certain thing about that character—they sometimes play it devoid of that quality that makes them human, which is looking for that joy.
I want my work to get out there in the biggest way possible. There are other platforms that might actually be bigger, but this is the one that the chips fell to. As you pointed out, there was a conflict already with Larry Ellison’s money; in order to get your work out in a big way, you’re going to be dealing with folks that are involved in the extreme exploitation of labor.
Think about it like this: the biggest investors in Amazon are also the biggest investors in Netflix. They’re also the biggest investors in Disney, Warner, and all of these things. Two of them that I can think of off the top of my head are the Vanguard Group and Blackrock. Basically, what you’ve got is the ruling class using different avatars and business models to see which one plays out the best for them, which is why you can have the industry shut down over a fight over 2 percent of the profit. They’re thinking about the long game, and about all of their other industries in which people are striking and the statement that they want to make. Otherwise, it’s not worth it for them.
Of course, I would love to not have this question every time [I release something] so there’s a practical reason to want to do it somewhere else. But separately, as far as that’s concerned, a lot of times what’s put out there is this idea that there’s a way to have a gentler capitalism. “Look at these few bad guys,” right? The truth is, you’ve got to create a system that gets rid of the exploitation of labor, and creates a world in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor. That’s a conflict that much of what’s considered the left has avoided putting forward for a long time. Along with that comes this idea of, “Hey, I can buy from Starbucks and support the people because they buy their beans from the right companies.” It avoids the class struggle and that’s the struggle that we have to be engaged in.
So some of the questions around what company [I partner with] have to do with this idea that you can just boycott [these companies] — you know, vote with your dollar — but we’ve got to change the way the system is structured. And for me to do that, that means I have to support movements that are doing that by getting people to join those movements and that means getting my work out in as large a way as I can.
When I was 12, I was really into comic books. Like, almost psychotically into them. I was taking gymnastics, I was working out, I was learning to throw ninja stars and nunchucks and taking martial arts. I was like, “I’m gonna make myself into a superhero.” And for the kids that bought into that, it will lead you to, at the very least, support the cops. It could even lead you to becoming a cop.
Well, let me show you this. [Riley holds up Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?] Most people have heard of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? But this What is to be Done? is a novel that came out in the 1860s that was one of the biggest novels in Russia. It inspired the people we know as the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? was just him saying , “Okay, this is what we need to do.” He was giving a nod to that book that they all knew was part of their inspiration.
So, I definitely agree with the idea that all art is propaganda. It all puts forward some idea. But I will say this: aesthetically when you say propaganda, it makes you think something is dry and skill-less. I definitely feel like what I’ve succeeded at doing most of my career is style.
I don’t know if you noticed, but we have Slavoj Žižek in our show. He plays the voice of the baby. He has this one quote — I can’t do it exactly — but he says that at the point where you don’t know that you’re taking in philosophy is when it most works.
On this show, there’s some of that, but I do also nod my head to let you know you’re watching something. This is something someone is saying to you. And I can do that because there’s a character in there that believes the things I believe.
I mean, look: San Francisco has something like 60,000 vacant residences. Rent control could easily have made that not happen. But here’s my thing: it’s not just the people that moved in, it’s about what policies we create. Just blaming the people that moved in is not actually seeing what caused the gentrification.
We have a media that is very much addicted to listening to quote-unquote experts on banking, on mortgages, on crypto. On all these things, over and over, they sell us a bill of goods. And afterward, there’s no critique of them. Right now, we got it with AI. “Is there a problem with AI? Let’s talk to the people that run OpenAI.”
Exactly. The only thing that can fight against it is people shutting shit down. Because there’s not going to be some ethical consideration by the captains of industry. You’re only going to be able to do it by giving them no choice. Right now is probably the best time to do it because once there is an actual dollar value able to be assigned to it, that fight is going to be way harder. So this strike is at a pivotal point for humanity and culture right now.
The same things are going on with longshoremen and their fight against automation. What’s good about the longshoremen is they’re able to shut shit down. That’s the reason why it’s not automated right now. Because they’re like, “Okay, you want to do that? How are you going to make money while you build that?” Because nothing’s moving.
We get told how the world is going to be: it’s gonna be like this, you’re gonna start using this kind of money, we’ve got cameras on you, you’re gonna do this. It doesn’t matter what you like, it’s just going. But it didn’t have to be that way before and now people are seeing that it doesn’t have to be that way now. Right now, people are seeing that there’s a way to take control of this and that the exploitation of labor is where power comes from. It’s where that wealth comes from. So even in things like tech — maybe culturally, folks that work at tech companies aren’t ready to strike — but the rest of the world is able to strike around things that affect the tech world. So you know, this strike winning is important for humanity.