Consumer Guide Album

The Coup: Steal This Album [Dogday, 1998]
Even in the wake of albums called Kill Your Landlord and Genocide and Juice, it's a shock to hear anyone working in a pop form come out and say flatly: "See, I'm a communist." But the Coup are pure Oakland, a cross between Too Short, whose deep-bumping beats presaged a live-in-the-studio funk that would have sounded old school when the Bomb Squad was def, and David Hilliard, the Panther whose autobiography tops a reading list that also recommends Manning Marable and Saul Alinsky. Boots Riley's tour de force, which climaxes by flipping a surprisingly street Microsoft-Macintosh metaphor, is a corny, well-plotted tale where a 24-year-old kills the pimp and surrogate father who long ago murdered his mom. But every track impresses, including the music-as-dope opener, the revolutionary call to arms, the brutal medical expose ("It seems that he's lost the will to pay"), the repo-man burlesque, funny stories about sneaking into the movies and driving broken-down hoopties, and "Underdogs," which translates Manning Marable into terms any ghetto struggler can recognize. Ideologues believe communist artists are never this humorous, this balanced, this concrete. They're wrong. A