The Coup: Steal This Album

"Angry white male Who the fuck you angry at You should be angry at your motherfucking self!" screams Geto Boys' Willie D on "Eye 4 An Eye," a blistering track off Da Good Da Bad & Da Ugly that epitomizes pretty much everything that's right and wrong with the world of gangsta rap. "Eye 4 An Eye" is a remarkable song, probably the best track on the album: It's a tour de force that finds Scarface and Willie D tearing into every smug, racist redneck in America with a breathtaking fury and urgency. It also, unfortunately, makes no delineation between righteous political criticism and ball-grabbing, gun-toting machismo. Like fellow gangsta-rap luminaries Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, and N.W.A, Geto Boys is infuriating to most liberals because it invalidates its legitimate political content by diluting it with sociopathic ranting and feeble misogyny. Of course, the group has a right to be as confusing, angry, and nihilistic as it wants to be. Gangsta rap has always been a maddeningly paradoxical genre, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more contradictory figure than Geto Boys' Scarface, a rap veteran who is a good Christian, a loving husband and father, and an unrepentant gangsta in his music. He's a gifted lyricist, capable of both thuggish brutality and emotional vulnerability, and Geto Boys is at its best when he departs from gangsta orthodoxy. But too often on Da Good Da Bad & Da Ugly, Scarface and Willie D are content to wallow in clichés. The album is not without its moments—on "Do Yo Time," "Livin' 4 The Moment," and "Gun In My Mouth," Scarface and Willie D rap with an urgency that belies their status as rap elder statesmen—but over the course of 18 tracks, the unfocused rage gets tiresome. "Unfocused" is about the last word you'd use to describe Boots Riley, the kinky-Afroed frontman for The Coup, an Oakland-based rap group whose militant Marxist politics have probably stood in the way of it receiving the respect it clearly deserves. The Coup's new Steal This Album is one of the best rap albums of the decade, a masterpiece that eclipses even its two superb predecessors in terms of depth, ambition, and political acumen. Boots and comrades may be dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, but there's more to the group than just in-your-face political grandstanding: Steal This Album is so rich in novelistic detail, so funky, and so wittily irreverent that even people who aren't sympathetic to the communist cause are likely to enjoy it. What makes Steal This Album such a giant leap forward is Boots' newfound ability to render the debilitating effects of poverty and hopelessness in wrenching, dramatic vignettes that transcend the boundaries of hip hop and achieve a literary power that's more akin to the short stories of James Baldwin than the work of other rappers. Steal This Album's crowning achievement is "Me And Jesus The Pimp In A '79 Grenada Last Night," a mournful, emotionally complicated song that explores a familiar hip-hop subject—the rise and fall of a pimp—from the perspective of an emotionally devastated child who is forced to watch his mother traumatized by the title character, a broken-down hustler who is still the only father figure the boy has. It's a wrenching, sad, beautiful song, full of poetry and despair, and a stunning reminder of just how powerful and transcendent rap music can be.