Pitchfork

Although The Coup have been making their rounds in the hip-hop community since the early 90s, they didn't garner mainstream attention until after the planes crashed in the World Trade Center last September. Before 9/11, The Coup had been preparing to release their fourth album, Party Music, with the cover notoriously depicting Coup members Boots and Pam the Funkstress standing in front of an exploding World Trade Center with a mock detonator in hand. That eerily prophetic album cover, and the subsequent press coverage that followed, bolstered The Coup's renown and provided a fitting metaphor for 9/11: America ignores voices of dissent until they become a threat.

Now that The Coup has the attention of the public and the FBI, FOAD records has decided to reissue The Coup's '98 classic Steal This Album with an additional disc of live material. If you already own this album, you won't have much use for the reissue; the live disc is nice, but definitely not worth the extra dough. If, however, you are one of the unfortunate many who have yet to unearth this jewel, read on and discover for yourself the Communist-coated splendors of Oakland's finest.

The scorching and west-coast-funky "The Shipment" kicks the album off with a harmonica-laced beat that'll leave you shaking your ass and lighting a Molotov Cocktail. If Karl Marx had this much funk and charisma, we'd have toasted those bourgeois fucks decades ago! "Exhilarating," Boots declares in an elastic flow that winds around a juicy bassline, "I accuse you of nigga hating/ And exploitating for profit making/ Don't cop a plea cause I'm B double-O T from the C O U to the P." The best thing about Boots is that he doesn't sacrifice his clever wordplay and indelible flow in order to fit in his rather heady political concepts. How many emcees could pull off rhyming "macrobiotic chemical colonic" with "political symphonic lyrical narcotic" and not sound like a complete asshole? But for Boots it's a seamless and natural progression. As the track fades out, Coup DJ Pam the Funkstress, who plays Engel to Boots' Marx, cuts up Prince singing "thank you for a funky time." This is a certified banger that may be one of the greatest kick-off tracks eva.

Fortunately, this is not the album's highlight; that distinction belongs to the next track, "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Grenada Last Night". The song is a narrative about a pimp named Jesus who, after spending 15 years in the slammer, finds himself face-to-face with the son of a prostitute he'd killed decades before. Boots spares no details as he dissects the myth of the heroic pimp that hip-hop has long perpetuated. While the song's veiled social commentary is on point, the secret to the song's success is Boot's penchant for laying down evocative imagery in his rhymes. In the song's third verse, he observes how "the red and white lights as the ambulance flies/ Reminds me of midnight in a dopefiend's eyes." Goddamn!

On the skit "Pizza Man", Hiero hero Del the Funky Homosapien plays a repo man who disguises himself as a pizza delivery boy in order to enter an old lady's apartment and repossess her TV. The skit segues into "The Repo Man Sings for You" (also featuring Del), which is a sequel of sorts to "Repo Man" from the Coup's previous album Genocide and Juice. As you could probably have guessed, Boots and Del have no love for this "agent working for the man" whose "manuscript[s] say you owe him for this land." In the song, Boots is victorious as he chases the repo man away, but a twinge of melancholy lingers as Boots implicitly acknowledges the inescapable nature of modern poverty. As witnessed in this song, Boots' ability to situate his political ideology in everyday situations is what distinguishes him from other neo-Marxist emcees. He never dips into the overly didactic, and he's quick to insert humor into the songs whenever possible.

While the aforementioned tracks are the ones that may initially stand out, the entire album rocks harder than a detonated dirty bomb. A live band provides the instrumentation throughout, and Pam the Funkstress really shines on the 1s and 2s. What's even more incredible about this album is how repeated listens bring out the nuances of Boots' politics and humor. The only qualm I have with Steal This Double Album is the live album which, while pretty fresh, doesn't quite justify repurchasing the CD. But if you don't already own this classic, you need to cop this now. Even if you're the sort that's put off by the album's anti-imperialism rhetoric, the skills on display here will have you seeing red-colored stars for days.