The Coup: Pick A Bigger Weapon : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"We're the have-nots, but we're also the go-gets," raps Boots Riley early on the Coup's fifth album. From there, Riley -- a Bay Area MC and avowed Marxist -- charges up his group's most militant record yet with calls for an armed revolt against the government ("ShoYoAss"), tributes to shoplifters ("I Love Boosters!") and a thumbnail sketch of our complicity in Saddam Hussein's reign of terror ("Head [of State"]). Riley's rhymes work so well because they're more about real life than rhetoric: Next to the polemics are street scenes, jokes about anti-ass-kissing pills and a poignant tale of a young woman who dies from liposuction. Banging calls-to-arms like "My Favorite Mutiny" combine soul-power choruses and steely grooves, with help from Riley's DJ partner Pam the Funkstress and a band featuring Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine; cuts like "Ass-Breath Killers" split the difference between G-funk and mid-Eighties Prince. At seventeen tracks, Pick a Bigger Weapon isn't as focused or as thoroughly block-rocking as the Coup's 2001 classic, Party Music. But it's the rare record that makes revolution sound like hot fun on a Saturday night.