Boots Riley, the Oakland-based director and rapper behind the Coup, cuts a distinctive image, both on and off-screen. You really can’t mistake him. In person, it’s the sharp, Trojan helmet sideburns. In his films, it’s a saturated, absurdist rendition of the Bay Area that exists just left of reality. His characters exist in a capitalist mire, even if they don’t know it or want to admit it. There’s bosses exploiting and workers toiling, and occasionally, there are others, in the shape of Steve Yeun or hot punk girls, working quietly to transform the relationship between the two. (In a Boots Riley movie, the answer to most problems is, inevitably, a union.) In just three projects—2018’s Sorry to Bother You, the miniseries I’m a Virgo, and now I Love Boosters—Riley has crafted an extended universe that’s instantly recognizable, in part because it’s not so different from our own.
If Sorry to Bother You was about the fortunes and follies of trying to assimilate (told through the story of a Black call center operator’s precipitous rise to success after he adopts a “white voice” at work), then I Love Boosters, his latest starring Keke Palmer, is about the people who never bother—or were always excluded. Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who boosts and resells full fits from monochromatic boutiques presided over by a galactically supervillainous style mogul, played by Demi Moore. Then, Corvette discovers a device with the power to change everything.
That’s the simplest way to put it because, frankly, there is a lot going on in I Love Boosters—including but not limited to retail wage slavery, fast fashion, car chases, death by orgasm, sci-fi portals, dialectical materialism, tilted skyscrapers, stop motion animation, and a veritable clown car’s worth of gags. It’s a densely layered, semi-psychedelic style that Riley adopts when realism just won’t do. Much of this, the director says, is inspired by the sprawling Afrofuturistic theatrics of George Clinton, the mastermind behind the music collective Parliament-Funkadelic. While Clinton and his merry band of collaborators took to the stars in the ’60s and ’70s in search of liberation’s eternal groove, Riley is searching for a different kind of future that, in 2026, feels no less sci-fi: an equitable society in which everyone’s needs are met.
So, Black music’s great futurist and Black cinema’s most vociferous narrator of the present hop on a call together. What do they do next? Debate A.I., of course.
You’ve taken a lot of time off since your last movie. Why was this the next project to do?
Boots Riley: I always have a lot of things cooking, the same way I do with songs. I’m working on one here, another there. This one came from those false stories about the rise in crime. Jacobin found out those stories are directly a result of police unions hiring publicists to spread the idea that boosters are the scourge of society.
I wanted to make a movie that talked about the service that boosters provide and the way that they hold communities together. A lot of people who are actually helping their community survive are regarded as villains.
It reminds me of what you were saying about sagging pants. And a lot of times there’ll be an older person saying to a younger person, “Pull your pants up. What are you doing?” And you told me that when you were young, that was what the Italians did.
George Clinton: That was their MO. And when I started seeing it in what, the ’80s, ’90s, early 2000s, it started to remind me, when style comes in, people just take it as a style and don’t know the history of it or where it comes from. But we can make almost anything cool. We can trip and fall and turn that into something cool just by the way we catch ourselves and make it look like a brand new move. What influenced you—I call it “funky.” Ishmael Reed called it just “groove.”
Riley: That’s my boy, Oakland.
Clinton: I know. That’s that same Black move that we use to turn anything bad. You do it with the right rhythm, it’s survival.
Riley: You just keep doing it till it turns into a rhythm. I often quote this interview that I read of yours. I don’t know if you remember it. I think it was with Rolling Stone right after “One Nation Under a Groove” became a hit. I’m gonna paraphrase you, correct me where I’m wrong, but you said, “Just a couple years ago, they were saying our music was white music.” And I always bring it up because for us, for my generation, Parliament Funkadelic was the epitome of Blackness. I bring that up in terms of that question: What is Blackness, and is it ever one thing or is it always moving?
Clinton: It’s always moving. Even what they call rock ‘n’ roll was Black music in the ’50s, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, before Elvis, all that. Rock ‘n’ roll was Black. But by the time we got in the ’60s, that was called rock.
Riley: In the ’70s too. And then when you listen to the sound of Philadelphia, Teddy Pendergrass, that’s just white pop music from the ’50s with somebody Black singing over it.
Clinton: Yeah. Motown had made R&B really pop by then. Teddy Pendergrass was a continuation of Motown. By the time Pendergrass and all them did it, whites were more into R&B at that time. It started being accessible to pop stations, easier than it was prior to that. Everybody went from Philadelphia, Teddy, the O’Jays, everybody left Philadelphia and went to CBS, so it became pop. That was R&B moving on up.
Riley: When people ask me my cinematic influences, I’ll say Parliament-Funkadelic. And a big reason is the collage, the layering of stuff. Sometimes y’all would have a lead guitar over an accordion with some gospel under it, and then you doing spoken word over it, but it all felt like a thing.
Clinton: You just said the word, a thing. Yeah. We called it a “Parlia-Funkadelic-ment thing.” We knew that it was no particular era of style. I knew I was packing music on top of music on top of music on top of styles because I’ve lived through all those styles, and it’s fun to see the generations come and go and to revisit them every now and then.
Bernie [Worrell, founding P-Funk member and Talking Heads touring keyboardist] playing his classical rehearsals in the middle of a R&B song. That’s funny as hell.
Riley: You get a good keyboard player playing on a gig, you know they’re gonna hit that.
Clinton: I watched a lot of Star Trek during my years. I was on the holodeck all the time. And now sampling and all that… since we did “Flashlight” with Bernie, I have no laws or rules against A.I.
Riley: We gonna have to debate about that.
Clinton: That’s what I’m saying. I know there’s gonna be a big political discussion.
Riley: When I listen to music or look at a piece of art, it’s not about how technically good it is or how it sounds, it’s about the passion of the artist. And A.I. can’t do passion.
Clinton: But we can do passion with A.I.
Riley: Eh, maybe.
Clinton: It only feeds on what we give it.
Riley: Maybe, but it makes decisions for us, and those decisions have to come from passion, not from a calculation. But I can only disagree with you because I respect you so much.
Clinton: The new generation, they gonna have to disagree and come up with new futuristic stuff and how it’s gonna be part of the business.
Riley: They’ve put a trillion dollars into A.I. right now. But I haven’t heard a single A.I. song that I like—and millions of people have made an A.I. song. If you could name an A.I. song you like, maybe. But think about all the artists they could have given a lifetime of money to.
Clinton: I think it’s a tool. It’s not to be done by itself. It’s like a pencil or paper. It’s just another tool that we can use to go where we’re going, and the future is going there.
Riley: Oh, I’m not against technology.
Clinton: Yeah, I know.
Riley: Because you know what? There’s some humans that make decisions like A.I. does, right? I mean it in a bad way.
Clinton: It’s gonna learn anything that we put in there. That’s what it’s gonna mimic.
Riley: I should introduce you to [computer scientist and writer] Jaron Lanier. He was telling me how to break it down. He’s one of the people that did a lot of work that is the bedrock of A.I. [including early virtual reality headsets and gloves]. And he doesn’t believe in quote-unquote “A.I.” He’s saying the technology we have isn’t actually “artificial intelligence.” There are two camps of scientists: some are trying to call this some sort of artificial intelligence, and some are saying, “No, this is the product of a lot of people working together who don’t know that they’re working together and aren’t getting paid for it.”
He said in the ’40s and ’50s, there were these two groups of sci-fi writers. One group of sci-fi writers are mainly folks that we don’t know about, who talked about advanced technology as just a way to help humans work together, right? You see products of them working together, but it’s not its own intelligence. But other writers, including one of the most famous, Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, said that that same technology actually defines intelligence. And so Jaron’s argument is not that this technology isn’t there, it’s the way that we look at it.
He’s saying that if we had a world in which everyone had what they needed, then people could look at this as a collaborative tool. But right now, it’s being sold as this thing that does everything all by itself.
Clinton: I can hear us trying to wrestle with that. Where would Roddenberry fall in that?
Riley: I don’t know. I love Gene Roddenberry. My guess is he would be on the human collaboration side, but I don’t know.
When you were writing Boosters, were you thinking a lot about A.I.?
Riley: It wasn’t on my mind in particular when I was doing it, but one thing people have said about it having all of those different elements is it’s definitely not something that A.I. would write. That’s the goal, right? Making something that somebody hasn’t done or can’t just use A.I. to do. So much of when I listen to Parliament-Funkadelic is like that. Like thinking of having that backwards hand clap.
Clinton: It felt good. We knew it was wrong, but we felt good. While we were mixing it, I told them, “I want to be able to run my hand over the record and feel the thump of the hand claps.”
Riley: Oh, damn.
Clinton: That’s how loud I wanted it to be out of the mix. It was intended to make it that edgy. And not only that one, “More Bounce to the Ounce” and “Knee Deep,” I think all of them use the same theory on the hand clap.
Riley: Everybody’s getting smooth now.
Clinton: Oh yeah they smoothed it back out in the mixing.
Riley: No, I’m talking about creating things: everybody’s getting smoother. I think that’s what I get from y’all. I always say that when I’m making my films: “I want them to be janky. I want you to feel like somebody put it together.”
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