A-Side
The Coup first landed on my radar with its album Pick A Bigger Weapon. It’s full of anitcapitalist fury—Jello Biafra and Tom Morello make appearances, lest you doubt The Coup’s machine-raging bona fides. Filled with serious subjects, it’s also a pretty funny record. Even the couple of sweet-sounding love songs can’t escape its politics.
BabyLetsHaveABabyBeforeBushDoSomethingCrazy lays it all out in the title.
IJusWannaLayArounAllDayInBedWithYou keeps you fooled until the last 10 seconds. It’s a rainy day homage to calling in sick, chilling out with your lover, and focusing on the means of reproduction. The track ends with a dialogue between Coup frontman Boots Riley and the woman of his affections as he showers her with sweet nothings:
We go together like grits and cornbread. You know we stick together like peanut butter and jelly. We all over each like white on rice. We be in bed together like Bush and Hussein.
You know, all the standard things a guy says.
This album (and my discovery of it) all happened in 2006. I started digging into the Coup’s back catalog, quickly finding a new favorite that mixed the sweetness and politics of BabyLetsHaveABaby… and IJusWanna…, this time from the perspective of a father.
My own daughter was born in June of 2006, just six weeks after the release of Pick a Bigger Weapon. Suffice to say, I’d heard the first on today’s playlist—at some point just before or after she was born, which was much too early to introduce her to it. Sure, it starts off sweet enough:
You know you my cookie baby and you’re smart / I can see it in the lines of your school art
But The Coup’s gotta Coup, and just 3 short couplets later:
Tell your teacher I said princesses are evil / how they got all they money was they killed people
If somebody hits you, hit ‘em back / THEN negotiate a peace contract.
These are the lessons I wanted my daughter to learn. My son, too. Feminism is for everyone. So I was keenly determined that both of them took to heart the next few lines:
Life is a challenge and you gotta team up / If you play house pretend that the man clean up.
In the second verse, The Coup doesn’t so much as abandon the fatherly pretense as he does use a kind of patriarchal pulpit to advance a female first future. “That’s why the woman got the gun in the logo”, he raps, about the band’s own symbology. And to drive the point home:
The revolution take time and space / But you as a woman gotta know your place
That’s in the front, baby / I’m being blunt, baby
If they get mad say it’s they time of the month, baby.
I ask you: IS THERE ANY BETTER ADVICE A FATHER CAN GIVE HIS CHILDREN? Well, yes. But not til they’re 12.
I tried and failed several times to expose my kids to the wisdom of The Coup but it just never stuck. Anticapitalist hiphopaganda isn’t for everyone, I suppose.
B-sides
- Fuel, Ani DiFranco — You don’t have to like Ani DiFranco to qualify as a feminist, but you at least had to go through an Ani phase. I fall in the latter camp, having enjoyed her casually while at school in Buffalo (during the years she was just a local act there), forgetting about her, then getting back into her briefly in the late 90s as she started making more interesting music around her already polished lyrics. This “song” (really just spoken word poetry over some decent music) is maybe the best of them all. Nothing I can say about it that she doesn’t say so much better in her lyrics. Just listen.
- We the Common (for Valerie Bolden), Thao & The Get Down Stay Down — Goddamn, I love this tune. It’s catchy as hell, musically dense, and just a joy to listen to. And like all great Americana, the subject matter is heavy and dark. You don’t need to know the backstory of Valerie Bolden for the lyric “All they wanted was a villain, a villain, and all they had was me” to make some kind of sense. But you should learn who she is and maybe help her out if you can.
- Smoko, The Chats— A reminder that the smallest acts of defiance are all it takes to keep the grippy hands of capitalism at bay. Smoko is Australian slang for smoke break, and The Chats understand that you DO NOT WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BREAK. The role reversal in the song might leave you to believe they think otherwise—the singer is the one getting annoyed at all these people on their break—so consider this a friendly reminder that no punk band has ever recorded a song about clocking in on time or making the boss happy.