Boots Riley

If we created a society based on love, it would be a society without exploitation. ”

I always have thought that part of being involved with life is the same thing as just wanting to kick it with your friends, and being involved with life on a deeper level is wanting to change the situation that you're in. ”

That existential crisis is something you rarely see portrayed by black characters; the idea that people think about their own existence and that they have hopes and dreams is taken away from people of color in their representation. ”

There's the part of me that's the organizer, part of me that's the artist, part of me that's the person who, even with those two things, wants to figure out what my place in the world is. How to engage with it and whether my life has any meaning. ”

What I like about music is that you make a song, you've got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life - they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It's in their world, and it takes on its own life. ”

I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there. ”

Music is first for me. How the music makes me feel, it's like energy. It has to match my life. What's happening around me or to me. That's where it comes from. ”

I want my music to be not only representative of other people's lives but also contributing something to the struggle that people are going through. ”

Sometimes my influences are really on my sleeve. So I just make sure to wear a lot of sleeves. ”

If what you want is actual change, then what has to be built is a mass movement that is militant and can use direct action to slow or stop profit. A movement that can do that can demand whatever it wants. ”