Oakland filmmaker, rapper and activist Boots Riley’s new film ‘I Love Boosters’ is a surreal crime comedy that follows three women who shoplift clothes to make ends meet. Like all of his work, there’s radical pro-worker politics, indictments of industry, and funk-filled absurdism. We’ll talk to Riley about his distinctive storytelling and how it centers his hometown.
Guests:
Boots Riley, writer and director, "I Love Boosters;" his previous films include "Sorry to Bother You"
This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Alexis Madrigal: Hey, welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.
In a recent interview, an audience member asked Boots Riley how his work was specifically Oakland, and he gave a roundabout answer talking about taking a road trip with the drummer Thomas Pridgen and playing Parliament-Funkadelic for hours until Pridgen begged to listen to something else. Boots said, “Well, we’re playing funk, so we need to listen to funk.” And Pridgen responded that it didn’t matter what kind of music he listened to. If it passed through him, it became the funk.
Boots said, quote, “I became this filter that was created by my surroundings. So all things that come through me, they have this color on them. They have this funk.”
What I love about this answer is that Boots Riley’s work is not Oakland-y in some basic one-plus-one way, but it takes in the histories and frequencies of the city, gets filtered through Riley’s Marxist and absurdist and aesthetic sensibilities, and what emerges on the other side of that filter is not merely the sum of the inputs, but something transformed, weirder, and, yes, funkier.
The latest example is his new film, I Love Boosters, which is out now.
Welcome back to Forum, Boots.
Boots Riley: What’s up?
Alexis Madrigal: So tell us about this film. For people who haven’t seen the trailer or the movie, they’re coming in cold. What is I Love Boosters?
Boots Riley: Yeah. I Love Boosters takes place in the world of professional shoplifting. It follows a group of professional female shoplifters who have an idol and a nemesis in Demi Moore’s character, Christy Smith. She is the designer that they love and the niche of clothes they steal and resell.
It gets into all the details of how the fashion industry works. And I’m not gonna say too many spoilers because we’ve passed our fourth weekend in theaters, so hopefully you’ve seen it. But if you haven’t, it gets into talking about power and community and our time, how we’re choosing to spend our time.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, we heard an incredible stat from one of our guests—
Boots Riley: And I will say this. It also has sci-fi and action, all that kind of stuff.
Alexis Madrigal: For sure. It’s almost like a sci-fi heist movie. It’s got heist components, I would say.
Boots Riley: Definitely. I emailed Steven—this is a name drop—I emailed Steven Soderbergh, and I was like, “You know, there are big Soderberghian elements in this movie.” He was like, “Don’t say that out loud.”
Alexis Madrigal: I mean, so I was gonna say, this is a movie in part about labor, in part about capitalism. And we heard an incredible stat from one of our guests recently that had me really thinking about how we think about the labor movement. She was saying that there are more people who work for the Cheesecake Factory than the coal industry these days, and yet it’s coal miners who are often the sympathetic image of the laborer in our culture.
Is that one reason to set a labor movie, a capitalism movie, in the fashion industry as opposed to one of these other industries we think of as being labor?
Boots Riley: Yeah. You know, when I set out to write it, I didn’t really think about it as the fashion industry. I thought about it as people I had come into contact with. And this is the industry they’re in.
Besides connecting with boosters throughout my whole life—and for folks that don’t know, a booster is someone who steals things professionally and resells them cheaper—and after knowing boosters throughout my whole life, I also worked a lot in retail. So I didn’t think about it like, “Oh, this industry versus that industry.” It was just things that I’ve been involved in. And yeah, these are all connected.
So much of what is told to us about why we can’t organize, for instance, has to do with, “Oh, we’re not this kind of industry. We’re that kind of industry. This is the only kind of industry that can organize,” these clear production sort of things.
But that’s the same argument that was used against the longshoremen organizing. They were like, “That’s the most unorganizable group,” because at the time they were at different piers, different ports, and got hired on the day of.
Alexis Madrigal: It’s like day labor outside Home Depot.
Boots Riley: Yeah. And so the argument was that that’s the least organized workforce. They’re unskilled, all of that sort of stuff. And now we know they’re one of the biggest forces in labor, and the ones here are the most militant union in the country.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. And in fact, for those who don’t know, you had a rap group named The Coup, and one of the members of your group became a longshoreman.
Boots Riley: Yeah. E-Roc. I just spoke to him the other day. He actually just retired. It’s hard on your body. But yeah, shout out to E-Roc from The Coup.
Alexis Madrigal: How long have you wanted to make I Love Boosters?
Boots Riley: I mean, right before I started doing Sorry to Bother You, I started thinking about what stories I wanted to tell. So I would say right about then, around 2017, I’m thinking about it.
Because when I wrote Sorry to Bother You, I thought it would be a one-off. I thought it was going to be more like how Kneecap had that movie—and I haven’t seen it yet—but that was more leaning into the fact that they do music.
When I started writing Sorry to Bother You, it was a vehicle for this whole thing. People would be like, “How do you like making the transition into doing movies?” I was like, “Making the transition? Not.”
And then it became so time-consuming and successful for me that it did become a transition. So, yeah, 2017.
Alexis Madrigal: That’s interesting because you do have this song deep in your back catalog called “I Love Boosters” with an amazing rhyme:
“My shirt is from Stacy, my pants are from Rhonda, my shoes came out the trunk of a baby blue Honda.”
So you have been thinking about this for a long time.
Boots Riley: Oh yeah. It hadn’t transferred from being sort of a—
And here’s the thing. With my music, I always thought in pictures and stories. We got very well known for a lot of story raps.
I was in film school when we got a record deal, and then we got known for 7-minute, 8-minute-long story raps. Even some of the other ones were short stories.
So I always wrote as I was writing the songs. I was also writing treatments for videos, even though I knew we’d never have the money to do all of these. I would think about it visually.
So yeah, there’s a lot.
Alexis Madrigal: And that was mostly as training or just for fun?
Boots Riley: No. It was just how I wrote the song. I was visualizing it as I was writing it.
Alexis Madrigal: We are talking with filmmaker, rapper, and activist Boots Riley about his new film, I Love Boosters—about the fashion industry, capitalism, funk, community, and making art in Oakland.
Of course, we want to hear from you. If you’ve seen the movie, what are your thoughts? What do you want to ask or tell Boots Riley? Maybe you’ve worked a retail fashion job or in the fashion industry. What was that like, and what’s your experience been?
You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786.
You can email your comments and questions to forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media, BlueSky, Instagram, and Discord.
We are going to go into the break here with a little bit of “I Love Boosters,” the song. This is off—which album?
Boots Riley: This is off Pick a Bigger Weapon.
Alexis Madrigal: There it is. There it is, which is—
Boots Riley: 2006.
Alexis Madrigal: 2006. All right. So there you go. Twenty years ago: “I Love Boosters.”
We’re here with Boots Riley. We’ll be back right after the break.