Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Street Sweeper Social Club's Boots Riley

Tom Morello, best known as the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, wasted little time before starting a new band after the break-up of Audioslave. He turned to Boots Riley, a rapper best known for his critically-acclaimed work with The Coup, and Street Sweeper Social Club was born. With their self-titled debut album in stores and fresh off a summer amphitheater tour with Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, Boots called in to talk to Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki about the new record, the messages behind his songs, the root of his political activism and more.

Boots Riley: He invited me on this Tell Us the Truth Tour, which was him, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle and it was him as The Night Watchman. We would do my raps of my songs with my other group, The Coup. We’d do it with him playing acoustic behind me. So that’s how we met up, was on that tour. Over the years, I would do appearances at Night Watchman shows, and we’d do that sort of thing. I guess he liked that idea but wanted to make it electric because as soon as Audioslave broke up, he took me to dinner and said, “We’re in a band called Street Sweeper Social Club”—at the time, it was Street Sweeper—“and we’re gonna make anthems for the revolution.” He gave me a cassette tape with 26 different riffs on it and said, “Get to writing.” He never asked me, he just told me and I didn’t answer. I still haven’t answered. Wait until we sell 30 million records to decide.

Was there any kind of hesitation? You had success and a lot of critical acclaim with The Coup and it’s got to be a lot of hard work starting something brand new, especially with kind of an unwieldy name for some people. So was there any hesitation at all before you jumped into this?

I’m still gonna do The Coup, I’m still gonna do Night Watchman. And Rage is still gonna do live shows, at the very least. So there was no hesitation whatsoever.

I saw you guys play a few weeks ago and one of the things you said onstage was something like, “We’re the best band with the worst name you’ve ever heard.” So where did that name come from?

Well, a street sweeper is an automatic weapon, a machine gun that instead of shooting bullets shoots shotgun shells. So it’s definitely a very deadly weapon. Matter of fact, if you go on YouTube and put “street sweeper,” that’s the first thing you’re gonna see, the demonstration of that weapon. And that relates back to the idea that our music is our weapon, which is also why we have the logo like that. That’s where Street Sweeper comes from. The Social Club part is we’re not just a band, we’re a social club.

I know Tom handled the music part and you did the lyrics. But it wasn’t like he just handed you finished songs, right?

No, matter of fact, the versions he sent me were acoustic, with no drums or anything like that. So, yeah, I wrote to those. Then we ended up getting in the studio with [drummer] Stanton [Moore] and filling them out more. Then I went back and wrote some more. So definitely the style of things that I write about are more from a personal level. To the extent that they’re rallying cries, they’re rallying cries that more have to do with, “Hey, you and me, let’s go do this.” I relate personal stories to the larger political world. When listening to the record, I had to make sure to keep my own personality involved with it, so those were certain challenges there, as well as every now and then Tom would be like, “I dare you to do this” or whatever. With “Fight! Smash! Win!,” he dared me to put the phrase “up in the club” in the chorus. So that’s where that came from—“We’re gonna fight, smash, win, Just like gettin’ up in the club with a fake ID, if it don’t work we gonna do it again.” So different things like that. There were certain points where he made the music around more of an idea I had. Like “Promenade,” I had the idea of the lyrics already and I was like, this needs to be a four-on-the-floor sort of thing and we need to make a Morellian version of “Another One Bites the Dust.”

That’s a good description of it, yeah. The songs definitely rock. They have a funky, groovy feel to them and get you on your feet. But like you were talking about, they’re also like a call to action and work on other levels. Does one side come before the other and which is more important?

I think it all kind of develops organically. The music definitely has to move you before you’re gonna listen to anything that the lyrics say. There’s definitely a lot of well-meaning, righteous political groups that which I love the people that are involved in it but hate the music, don’t want to listen to it. I figure if I’m gonna make bad music, it doesn’t matter that it’s political. If I have a message to get across and I’m gonna make bad music, I might as well just do speeches.

The core message is that you the listener are the one that’s gonna make things change.

I think a lot people see these huge systems in place and think, “I’m only one person, there’s nothing I can do.” What would you say to that person?

When you were younger, was there something specific that drove you to become an activist?

Well, yeah. A youth organizer drove up to my house when I was 14 with a van full of girls my age and said, “We’re gonna go to the beach, but first we’re gonna go to this march in support of a cannery workers’ strike. You want to go?” And that was what drove me to be involved in politics.

I think that the musical influences and political influences were separate for a long while. But there are people that definitely fused ideas into their (music) that definitely later I appreciated—Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, people like that.

I’d like to ask you about a couple of the songs, sort of the inspiration and what they’re about. Let’s start with the single, “100 Little Curses.”

Well, that’s just drawing the line. It’s about that top 1 percent. Drawing the line and saying, “They’re on that side, we’re on this side,” and creating a different kind of consciousness which has to do with realizing who are the ones that are doing the exploiting and realizing even though, for instance, with this war that seems to have come out that this is a war for oil. I don’t think it’s in most people’s minds that it is a war for oil that benefits very few people in the world. It doesn’t benefit the whole of one country even. It benefits very few people. And as many of my songs are, in the spirit of how one person talks to another, there’s a lot of humor involved. So it’s done in the form of wishing bad things on that top 1 percent.

“The Oath” has to do with that connection between personal transformation and societal transformation. I’m not one of those people that says you have to change yourself before you can change the world. I’m a person that believes that it all has to happen at the same time and that the only way you’re gonna change yourself is by being part of changing the world.

One of my favorite songs on the album, “Clap for the Killers”—how about that one?

That’s just pointing out the real gangsters and killers. We have an image when we say the word “gangster.” We have an image in our mind of what that looks like. But we don’t think about the folks that give the orders to pull the triggers. We don’t think about the folks that kill hundreds of thousands of folks. We don’t think about the folks that make policy decisions that force people into starvation and violence and things like that. It’s interesting that although this goes on—it’s been going on for decades and decades—there’s not really any film that makes that connection and puts those folks in as evil of a light of, say, Godfather might or, say, New Jack City might or anything like that. So that song just explores that.

You already talked a little bit about the music of “Promenade.” That’s another one of my favorites, so maybe you could talk a little bit about the lyrics to that one.

That is probably one of the most abstract songs on the album. It’s a macabre square dance in which the movements of the dance represent the crazy and violent world in which we live in and the need to change the system. That’s probably the best explanation I can give for that song.

Like I said, I saw you guys play a few weeks ago. Nine Inch Nails, Jane’s Addiction—that had to be a pretty cool tour to be on. How did that go for you guys?

That was great. That was biggest thing I’ve been involved in. Although there was a bunch of rock stars, everybody was friendly. It was like family. So it was a great experience. And the crowd—I expected to see a bunch of goth people in black fingernail polish with arms crossed, staring, mad at us that we weren’t Nine Inch Nails. But the crowd was not like that and was way more supportive than I thought that they’d be. So it was a lot of fun.

One of the first Street Sweeper Social Club shows was up at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. That had to be an interesting experience.

Oh yeah. The prisoners were really happy that we were there. They were so excited. They began getting hyped and getting out of their chairs and they knew they weren’t supposed to, so they’d have to look nervously at the guards and sit back down. People there, they’re doing anywhere from 20 to 40 years and life, and so it’s not like they’re there for a few years. There was a guy there that was like, “I’ve been in prison 15 years and this is the best day that I’ve had here.” So they were really touched anybody even thought of them.

Yeah, we’re gonna tour in the fall. We’re doing some shows throughout August. We’re about to hit Japan right at the end of July. So we’ll be touring in the fall and the winter.

Do you see this band as a long-term thing? Will there be more albums and tours in the future?

Oh, definitely. We’ve got other songs that we didn’t put on this album, already. So we’ll definitely have another album going, and we’ll be touring in the fall and the winter. It’s not just a one-album thing.

Oh, one other thing that people may not know: The background vocals on “Promenade” are done by Steve Perry from Journey.

I saw that name on there and I was wondering if it was the same Steve Perry. That’s interesting. How did that happen?

I don’t know. That was some Tom Morello magic. I think he heard the song and was like, “Hey, I’ve got a background part for that,” and that’s how that went down.