Boots Riley in conversation with Alexis Madrigal
Filmmaker and musician Boots Riley discusses art, labor, capitalism, and his singular path from frontman of The Coup to director of Sorry to Bother You.
Why we picked this
Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You is one of the few films of the last decade that uses surrealism to make an argument about labor and race — hearing him explain how he got there, in conversation with a journalist who thinks hard about technology and society, should be something.
Boots Riley spent decades making left-wing hip-hop with The Coup before directing Sorry to Bother You, a film that arrived in 2018 and remains one of the most formally strange and politically sharp American movies of its era. The story of a Black telemarketer who discovers the secret to success — adopting a “white voice” — escalates into something involving labor strikes, horse-human hybrids, and a critique of tech-bro capitalism that landed harder than most earnest documentaries on the subject.
At City Arts & Lectures, Riley sits down with Alexis Madrigal, journalist and co-founder of The Atlantic’s technology vertical, for a conversation that spans music, film, organizing, and the persistent question of how art can do political work without becoming a pamphlet. Both are Bay Area figures who think seriously about the relationship between culture and economic power.
The evening is part of City Arts’ season-long focus on artists who are doing something more than entertaining — people whose work asks audiences to see the systems they live inside.