YouSaid · the spoken record

Boots Riley

lines on the record: 96
first: 2018-10-08
most recent: 2018-10-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“murder rates and all that kind of stuff and in reality it's it's just that you know we have these people that have business illegal businesses that they have to regulate themselves because all business uses violence to regulate itself whether it's a tech business whether it's a supermarket or whether it's a dope dealing operation Violence is used and the violence that legal businesses use is called the police. The police are going to do something to you if you do something to a legal business. During prohibition, If you rob the liquor dude, gangsters come after you. Now you rob the liquor dude, police come after you. Ten years ago, you robbed the weed dude. Depending which we do, maybe some gangsters will come after you.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they end up engaging in the illegal economy. Much of our culture tells us, including TV and media and even songs, are that poverty is due to the bad choices of the impoverished. Like, you just didn't pick the right schools. You weren't paying attention. You're a little too aggressive. This whole discussion of people having the wrong idea of what masculinity is is often tied into this idea that people are making these bad choices.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the idea of whiteness is this idea that even most white people don't have, but it's a reaction to the idea of blackness, which is, you know, like, so there's all these racist tropes about black folks, which are that, and they have a utility. So we live in an economic system that has to have unemployment. It cannot exist with full employment. If you have full employment under capitalism, then anyone can demand whatever wage they want. Wages go up, stocks go down, all that kind of stuff. An army of unemployed people is very necessary because you have to be able to threaten jobs. Some publications like Wall Street Journal and others will openly worry when they feel that the unemployment rate is going too low. Now, knowing this, we also know that unemployed folks Have to eat. Just like everyone else.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's missing the fact that people are looking for a culture that represents the struggle. That the world is in. We were earlier talking about our friend Jill Sobiel. I met her on a tour with Steve Earle. Steve Earle, Country Radio won't mess with him mainly because of this one song he did, which was the ballad of Johnny Walker Lynde, which was about a white kid from Marin who joined the Taliban. And when the US came to invade Afghanistan, he fought against the US. The U.S. captured him and, you know, had him on a gurney and made a big thing about it. And Steve Earl's song, which is from the standpoint of Johnny Walker Lynd, he's saying, look, I'm watching MTV and he names off a few other things that are associated with whiteness and the way that it's portrayed in the media and sees that he doesn't see anything. That represents him.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which is kind of like, oh, I'm just, um, Seeing what this is about, and this is cool, and okay, now I'm gonna go get a cappuccino. And while that may be going on, I think it's also missing a piece of it.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of capitalism, because of how capitalism works, that art is created to struggle, which is also created to a passion. And I think that there's something more than like a tourism that's happening. There's people wanting to connect to that feeling of... Trying to be free of dealing with the world and gaining power over your life because we all No matter where you're from, we're trying to engage with the world. And have some say so over what's around us. And although folks are at various levels of being able to do that, that still a need. And so people connect to that.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, it's been like this for a while, definitely with music. Music, for instance, is, I think music is about, or art in general has to be about passion. And, um, So much of music throughout the last hundred years at least, once folks that have been going through struggle got access to being able to make recordings, those recordings touch the folks that listen to them no matter where they're from, what their background is. that history of struggle that those things that folks are coming through being represented in music has created creates that passion that you want from something, which is like, and so I think there is something to art that comes out of black culture, which is a culture that is created that much of It is connected to struggle.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Movie took a turn. I liked it. And so I've always artistically wanted, I need people to understand that I need to push boundaries and that's in my music as well. So it's a risky thing. So knowing that it was a risk, some folks that were talking to us about distributing it were talking that part up like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, just the regular old, like, well, the market for this is limited, you know, what they mean by that is that it's mainly black caste.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's not just that people haven't seen a film with as radical politics of this. And after 20 something years of being an artist, I've realized that it can't just be about what I'm talking about.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're so pretty. Yeah. But that she blade out how she thought they could make everyone else understand that as well. and that they had that goal. That meant that they would take a risk because the movie is beyond the themes in it. It's stylistically Aesthetically and just plot wise, it's a very different kind of film.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, well, I wanted it to have a theatrical release because it is a film that is about the experience and experiencing it with other people around. There were a couple people bidding on the movie, but Anna Perna, which is Megan Nellison's company. I don't want to say it's just her because there's a lot of great people there. Megan called me and she was like, she felt like this movie was a piece of cinematic history. Which of course any director is going to pay? I'm listening.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I probably would have taken money from almost everywhere, anywhere. But I think that. You know, Netflix would probably have been the last choice because I wanted it to be in theaters.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now it's at 17 something million and they think it'll leave US theaters at 20 and then we'll do international and This is typical.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, there was some trepidation about me not having done a film before, which is understandable. I joined the, then I got into the Sundance filmmakers lab where you actually shoot All that. And the main investor group, which was Nina Yang Bonjovian Forrest Whitaker's company, they saw it. And I think that that was part of their decision-making process. And yeah, and”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you actually be able to, if I'm going to put in this little amount, are you going to get enough? To make the movie, he's never made a film before. What can we do? So, all of those things then apply for the sundance screenwriting lab. They accepted it, which is a prestigious thing. And I went to the lab. So that gave it a little bit more than actually Sundance. They have a thing called the Catalyst. Sundance Catalyst program. They have a weekend where basically everybody goes there, gets drunk to the resort. Over a three-day period, 12 projects that they've picked, you know, basically pitched to a room full of 60 investors. And we met all of our investors except for one there. And because I'm used to performance, then I was able to tell the story in a funny way. So I just got up there and told the story.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tight as it can be before I put it out. He read it and he said what he said publicly later, which was this is one of the best unproduced screenplays I've ever read. He published it. Yeah, he's a screenwriter and more known as a novelist. And he published it as its own paperback book and bound with the McSweeney's quarterly. And that went out to 10 or 20,000 people in 2014. And that made people take it seriously. And so I joined SF film filmmaker and residence program. They kind of gave me office space. So I was like, okay, now I can, I'm around people that are getting their movie made. And so that was inspiring. And I met a couple producers, Jonathan Duffy, Kelly Williams, who had done some stuff that had gotten into Sundance before and George Rush, who's out here. And then now I'm a filmmaker in residence, and now I've got these.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, you know, like, yeah, of course you want to make a movie. You also want to have a clothing line, you want to, you know, have a chain of stores or whatever. Them signing on made a few people be like, oh, maybe at least it's funny. Right, so a few more people started reading it. Giving me feedback, but Dave Eggers, I ran into Dave Eggers on Valencia Street just on the street, walking with a friend of mine named J. Otto Sebold, who actually did all the titles on the movie and is known children's author. And I said, hey, I have this script. And by this point, I thought, okay, I'm just going to put this out on the internet. People read it and it'll be known that I did it. And I said, would you read it? Give me some notes because I want it to be as...”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it ended up being like the letter in invisible man because although people be like, oh great, cool. The quality was suspect.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So first, David Cross and Pat Oswald, who play white voices in the movie, they were the first ones to sign on and say, we're down with this. So when I started writing it, I thought because of my music, I could get a lot of people to read it that were. I'm a musician with the script. It ended up being”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so if you're a family, nobody's keeping track of, you know, hopefully like you did X amount of dishes for this long and you did that. You can have a setup where people can work together like that. But if you have a household where one person is getting all getting the profit and making everyone else do the work, then that's a whole different thing.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it's a model that Besides regular chattel slavery in the US, it's been here, but you had the coal mining towns that did that. So you kind of get, you stop understanding what the value of your labor actually is. Because they have other prices and there's the company store and all of that sort of thing. Not that that would necessarily Have to be a bad thing, but you have no control. Over anything else in your surroundings and increasing.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting babysat there. And obviously, that's a first world, that's a very high end problem to have. But I'm just wondering if you see any parallels sort of between the... The kinds of environments that you're seeing, kinds of industries in the Bay Area that have changed kind of the place where you live”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. Well, yeah, when I saw it, and I think a lot of other people commented on this too. The pitch of the company taking care of all your physical needs, right? So that you can stay there more. And just you are the labor for the company. That's what a lot of people see in some of these big tech companies that offer you everything, right? Places like Google, you can eat there. You can have your kids.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out there. And the thing is that These companies pretty much already exist, except in other countries, you know. And we say other countries, but we mean they exist in this country, but they're geographically settings in other countries, wherever they're doing it. U.S. companies are some of the corporations that are buying that labor”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worry is a company that advertises itself to, has two modes of advertising. One that the general public sees and one that these telemarketers do. And the one that the general public sees is a company that basically takes care of your needs, that you move into their live workspaces. Which are aesthetically luxurious looking, you know, uses some of the hits some of the notes of what is supposed to be luxurious. They have chandeliers and. Maybe velvet. That was the intention. And yeah, you live in their live workspaces. You work all day and you don't have to worry about being unemployed. Housing or food And so they represent themselves as just handling those problems, which in this world, there are people that see it as slavery in our... Trying to expose that worry free, then of course markets itself to companies as the cheapest labor.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly, exactly, which I thought was interesting. And I thought this is sort of, it reminded me, you know, even though you're not a techie, it reminded me of the kind of things techies think of, and they make sense to them at the time.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. But what's interesting, when I was watching a movie, I was thinking, oddly enough, of a movie that I recently watched again, Network, which suggested a lot of ways media was going to go in the future. And at the time, it was put out. Everyone said, oh, it'll never get like this. And if you go back and look at network, everything created in that movie exists in modern media. In lots of ways, except for the maybe the execution on screen, which I think I'm just waiting for essentially. And one of the things when I was watching this movie was, yeah, I could see someone creating a company like that and people willing to be part of it, which was, although it's a satire, obviously.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can analyze, there are certain people that will be cultural critics that will talk about the intonations of the fishing songs and why they did these sort of things, but they're purposely trained to not look at the fact of why that's a fishing village in the first place.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To all these things. And it all comes down to how we survive. Like everything in life, everything in history. Is about how we survive, our culture and everything is grown out of that. I've said this before. If you want to know why certain villages had fishing songs, it's probably because they were a fishing village.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has the same themes like my music I have. For instance, a song about wanting to lay in bed with your significant other all day. And my point in that is I have to ask myself why is that? What is it about? Is it just about sex or is it about controlling your time? Is it about who controls your time? And what kind of say you have, and what do we have left on this earth? What do humans have except time? And whether they get to decide how to use it or not. I mean, matter of fact, prison is all about time. All of these things are about time You know, I wouldn't say that my stuff has the same theme. I think the theme is life, but I have an outlook on life that tries to connect the dots to all of these things. So I'm not, whereas a regular love song would be just like, oh, baby, I wish we could spend the day in bed together.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what irony is built on. That's what all of these things are built on. So with this company and with what my point is, I'm exaggerating the point that I'm making with this company. People don't get a wage And everything is for the profit of the folks that own the company. And, you know, it's just an exaggerated, slightly only exaggerated version of what's happening. And so that's where that comes from is like, how do I always in my music because although”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, with all of these things, I think with comedy, with drama, with horror, with, and with just plain political analysis, all you're doing when you're doing these things is heightening contradiction. Right, you are highlighting the contradiction and pushing it forward so much so that if I were to ask you, what's the problem with the tech industry today? And you were to sum it up in a paragraph long thing. You'd be leaving out so many details that what you're really doing is.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, true. Fair point. Fair point. Fair point. That's a fair point. But what were you, talk about the movie itself? Where did the idea for this company come from that you would create this company where your main character works as a telemarketer?”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for me, and I noticed ads I was writing the script and I get someone to read it, it felt to me like they were watching my movie. I also like the scene descriptions and everything that I put in there, I tried to make it so that it was a good read. So that it felt fun. Not just a manual to create a film. It was.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that point, I knew that I had enough fans from music that even if I didn't get the film produced, I could get people to read the script. So I had an audience no matter what. Not necessarily business folks in the music, in the film business to read the script, but I could put it out and have.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I also wanted to be excited about it because I think after doing that, I felt not as excited about music. So this was, you know, and I started writing, I downloaded final draft.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Collectives and being artists are, and I'm talking about myself, are very ego-driven. And so that collaboration left me wanting something else because we were better, me and him were better friends when we weren't trying to work together to create some music. And so I wanted to do something that, you know, it was just all for my brain and, you know, and I got to say the way things, the way you wanted to do it. So, and”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, much I don't mind. Yeah Much of our life is about looking at things from a certain perspective, you know. When I was 17, whatever, yeah, I think, but when did I say, okay, this is, I'm really going to do it. I think, so I had another group called Street Sweeper Social Club. That's me and Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. That setup was Tom producing the music and me making the lyrics. kind of for everything I talk about people working together.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Bay Area, much less Oakland. Anyway, that song on the album goes into another song called Freestyling at the Fortune 500 Club. So it goes from that song to that which is freestyling at the Fortune 500 Club is one of the Rockefellers, one of the Gettys and Trump figuring out how to rap at a party. And then that gets broken up by a group of people who come and mess up the party, and that's called taking these. So anyway, that's just stories and everything.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for some of my songs, they were like eight minute long story songs that the label was very frustrated with because how do you put that on the radio? So for instance, we have a song called Fat Cats and Bigger Fish, which is a song about a pickpocket who is conning and stuff and ends up switching clothes with his cousin who's a waiter at high society party. And they think they look alike. So they switch clothes and he goes in there and he's pickpocketing. And while he's pickpocketing, he overhears. The mayor of Oakland talking to Coca-Cola, the person that owns Coca-Cola bottling about a plan for gentrification. At the time, of course, when this came out in 1994, I was said to be like a conspiracy kook to think that someone would be trying to gentrify.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, you know, there were a few MC Hammer Digital Underground too short, so record labels were like every record label had to have a group from Oakland and we just happened to be there and our records were selling locally. And I had taken the information that I knew about campaigns from doing grassroots campaigns with radical organizations and applied that to my music. So our posters were everywhere in the Bay Area, even if you weren't. Ever gonna buy any music? You were like, What the hell is this poster doing? And so we got signed to Wild Pitch EMI records. And I'm focused on that for 20 something years. But at the same time, our music was always known for being, they always called it cinematic, which I don't know what that means. Yeah, exactly. It meant that I described what things looked like.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went to film school at San Francisco State. At the same time, I was doing music. And it happened to be like many companies are mechanical. So the music industry is no different. If someone has a hit with a green jacket, they're going to look for people with green jackets.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I started out. My grandmother on my mother's side ran Oakland Ensemble Theater. I got involved in theater kind of, maybe through that. But then at the same time, and my teenage years, I joined. Radical organization that was helping to support farm workers who were creating a farm workers union in the Central Valley and McFarlane and Delano that area. And there was also in that the legend of Teatro Composino, which had been around in the 60s and helped to organize. And so I had this idea of theater and actually kind of wrote my first raps while writing the high school play. Realize that theater, or I don't know if I realized it, but I decided that theater was too small for what I wanted. For the effect that I wanted to have.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your success, which is a long time in coming. You've been around a long time. No, me too. Let's talk a little bit about what you yourself and what you've been doing, how you got here. I don't mean to say you're old. It's just that you're like. How did you get to this?”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we could, but it is, in fact, one. And we also have joined me in the interview, recode reporter Shireen Gaffare. Hey How are you doing? Good. So, Shireen is the one that got me to have you here. I'm very excited.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as the founder of the Recode Podcast Host Union. The only problem is that I'm the only member because Peter Kafko won't join. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair, we're thrilled to have Boots Riley, the writer and director of Sorry to Bother You. It's a social satire about capitalism, race, technology, and more, business. He's also the lead vocalist of the hip-hop band The Coup. Boots, welcome to Rico Decode.”
2018-10-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Sorry to Bother You' director Boots Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT