Director Of The Year: Boots Riley Interview

To date, Boots Riley has been relatively underappreciated as a director. But his brilliant new satire, Sorry To Bother You, is likely to change that.

“It’s always good when you see your work cause a reaction,” muses Boots Riley. Born in Chicago, into a family of social justice organisers, political activism feeds everything Riley does. And he does a lot. A rapper and lead vocalist with hip-hop groups The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club, he is also a community organiser and educator in Oakland, California, where he founded organisations like The Young Comrades. Oh, and a film-maker.

Riley’s work has created controversy, with mainstream success eluding him – so far.

“When you point out what’s wrong with the world, it often seems like a bother,” Boots explains, referring to people’s resistance to his work. “People will tell you that you’re wrong or to stay quiet. Because to accept a new and maybe troubling perspective on the world takes work. So it’s an adjustment.”

Which explains the double-meaning behind the title Sorry To Bother You, a movie which sees Riley’s political activism, visionary art and sense of community combine with rapturous results. A rip-roaring tale of racial code-switching and capitalism, it sees a young Black man ascend the corporate ladder by deliberately using a “white voice” during telemarketing calls, only to discover that the corporation he works for also supports legalised slavery, neatly packaged with Silicon Valley slickness as WorryFree lifestyles.

“In America, you see people code-switching all the time,” he says. “I’m sure there is a version with Irish people, where certain voices are deemed undesirable?”

There are definitely class stereotypes forced onto a lot of Irish accents.

“Well, exactly. There’s a similar thing with race in America; class is inscripted into certain ethnicities,” says Riley. “So the racist tropes of Black people and people of colour are ones like ‘Oh their culture is just insufficient to survive in the system. They’re savage, they’re lazy, they’re not geared towards education. Their family structure is broken’. All of these things are a way of saying that poverty is the fault of the impoverished. The truth is that there’s no capitalism without poverty. For capitalism to work a certain number of people have to be unemployed. You can’t have full employment under capitalism, because then anyone could demand whatever wage they want. That seems like an extreme, but you see media outlets like The Wall Street Journal openly worrying as unemployment goes down. Because that means that, conversely, wages go up. And as wages go up, stock values go down. So poverty is built into capitalism.”

There are clear parallels here with how people affected by homelessness or addiction, or even Travellers, are depicted in Ireland. But of course, there’s the more immediate connection to how racism and class have been weaponised by the Trump administration.

“How do you convince the largest section of the working class – which in America is the white working class – that their poverty is their fault?” Riley asks. “You don’t directly say that. You say ‘Look at these others. Here’s how poverty works. Don’t be like that’. Then you have someone who is making $22,000 a year feeling like they are middle class, because they see themselves as different to what they’ve been told ‘real, deserving’ poor people do. So you end up with a white working class who more align themselves with the ruling class than with other people on their level.”

The idea of WorryFree in the film shows how slavery was justified for centuries.

“One of the arguments against abolitionists was ‘Look, folks are getting everything they need; they’d be destitute without this, and they’re happy!’” explains Riley. “After chattel slavery ended they needed a different argument so they created the idea that Black people were savage, so they needed to be controlled.”

When Riley wrote the script in 2012, a horrific stroke of premonition-laden genius saw him include the line “WorryFree will make America great again.”

“I took it out before we went into production,” he confesses. “I knew it would seem like this film was all about Trump, and it’s not. It’s about more than him.”
For Riley, Sorry To Bother You is about highlighting the political messages we absorb daily, through art and the media – and how damaging they can be. I ask Riley what he thinks of Kanye West’s public allegiance with Trump.

“It’s total bullshit,” he says. “A lot of people are surprised by Kanye’s opinions, but if you look at his lyrics, it’s all in there. A lot that gets put forward even sometimes as ‘conscious’ lyrics are actually telling Black folks ‘You’re messing up, you need to get your mind right’. ‘Golddigger’ and all these songs. These are the things we learn in highschool. There’s no lesson saying capitalism doesn’t work. They tell us that if you’re smart and a rugged individualist, you’ll succeed. So a lot of these songs are a version of things we learned in highschool. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not really like Kanye has changed. What we need to do is to start looking at the political meaning behind the lyrics of what we consume – not just rappers, for everyone. Everything we listen to has a political message.”

With Sorry To Bother You receiving rave reviews, and a Boots Riley’s TV show on the way, it seems we’ll be listening to his political message for the foreseeable future. About time too.

Watch the trailer for Sorry To Bother You below.