The Coup
To longtime fans of The Coup, this is going to sound like a pathetically delayed reaction. Ten years after The Coup’s debut album and 2 years after their last album (though another is imminent), I had the pleasure of seeing Boots (touring without Pam) at the Park West in Chicago as part of the AFL-CIO’s “Tell Us the Truth” tour.
I was there mostly to see Billy Bragg for my nth time. And while I still think Billy is great, I found a new musical interest. And for me that is unusual. I usually find it difficult to listen to a performer live and hear something that grabs my attention: especially without a friend prodding me to listen for it. But with Boots it stood out clearly. His disarming smile and trademark afro grabs one’s attention. I immediately related to the sarcasm and satirical method he used to deliver his message. I remember (though this may be false memory — reconstructed now that I’m familiar with The Coup’s repertoire) several of the songs grabbed my interest: “Heaven Tonight”, and “”Wear Clean Drawers” were great songs with sweet music that could appeal to the left-leaning, mostly white liberals in the audience.
On the other hand “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ‘79 Granada Last Night” seemed surprisingly out of place for this audience: but it grabbed my attention. Even during the live performance I got the subversive message contained in this song: a message that starts off in the vernacular of and even seeming support for the ideology surrounding the worship of prostitution and brings the listener toward understanding the anger of the song’s protagonist and his discovery of the need for revolution. After chronicling the pain and stifled life faced by the protagonist a line near the end sums up the transformation nicely: “And I don’t think it’s gonna end’’til we make revolution, but who gonna make this shit if we worship prostitution?”
Returning home after the concert, i thought to myself I really need to google The Coup and buy a CD. Unfortunately my attention span is short and it took a while to actually remember to do that. Finally I bought The Coup’s last two albums and found that song after song had the same great politics as the songs I heard live.
Never had I heard of an artist writing so much about revolution. Or surplus value appropriation. I’ll probably write more about the specific albums (I have all four now) in the future, but it has been an eye opening experience. Much like my experience with graduate school. As an undergraduate I was interested in economics and I became more and more interested in Marxism and Marx in particular. I thought that there would be no opportunity to study Marxism — especially in economics — because it had been banished from the academy. Instead I thought I’d have to resign myself to studying Post Keynesian economics: consider Marxist political economy only a hobby. But at UMass and perhaps one or two other programs worldwide, there is an opportunity to study Marxist political economy. Likewise, I assumed it was not possible for a musical artist to write lyrics that spoke so directly to the working class. But once again The Coup has shown the way: again proving the way we repeatedly underestimate our revolutionary potentials — in the here and now!