The Coup delivers music with a message

Since the Coup's last album, ''Party Music," was released weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, America has launched two ongoing wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal made headlines; and Hurricane Katrina left more than a few government officials all wet.

Which is another way of saying Boots Riley, leader of the ferociously political hip-hop duo, has a lot on his mind these days.

''With everything that's gone on, I think people are feeling empowered to make changes," Riley says during a recent telephone conversation. ''And our music is always trying to tell listeners that you are the ones to make change. It's not going to be some super revolutionary, it's not going to be some new version of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. It's you. Nobody can do it better than you."

For more than a decade, no group in hip-hop has been better at delivering daring agitprop served up with a relentlessly funky, break-ya-neck beat than the Coup, which performs tonight at the Paradise Rock Club. While much of mainstream rap remains preoccupied with cars, guns, and women, the Coup, which includes turntablist Pam the Funkstress, has always preferred a more expansive worldview -- it's Frantz Fanon meets George Clinton. Their lyrics address both the daily struggles of average folks and how their untapped inner strength, born of frustration and disenfranchisement, can lead to change.

''If things were right, they'd be one of the biggest hip-hop groups in the world," says Frankie Morales, a member of AllHipHop.com's Ill Community. ''What's great about them is they've never lost sight of what's important, and they won't compromise just to get on the radio."

The Coup's fifth album, due next year, will be called ''Pick a Bigger Weapon," because, as Riley puts it, ''Obviously what we've been doing [to change the world] ain't been working."

''We have a song called 'We Are the Ones,' and I talk about everything that's been going on on a day-to-day basis. It's about people going to work and their jobs don't pay enough, trying to pay rent and not being able to do that," he says. ''All those things are affected by the larger macroeconomics of the system. I just want people to be aware of what's going on, and how to make things work for us."

Of course, the Coup, formed in the Bay Area in the early 1990s, didn't introduce politics to hip-hop. In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's ''The Message" helped rap evolve from good-time party music into something that could have a sociological impact, with what was essentially a political commentary detailing life in the inner city. Even N.W.A's ''Straight Outta Compton," in the early years of gangsta rap, nodded toward a sense of street reportage, with its members as correspondents from a forgotten war zone that happened to be South Central Los Angeles.

Public Enemy further fired imaginations with such landmark albums as ''It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" and ''Fear of a Black Planet." Yet, as hip-hop's popularity increased, its political pulse slowed, almost to a halt. Socially conscious rap was marginalized, and the mainstream was flooded with intellectually unchallenging music.

The Coup released its debut, 1993's ''Kill My Landlord," just as gangsta rap was securing a foothold it has yet to relinquish. And despite critical acclaim, radio wouldn't touch the band's music. It was the same story for the group's next two albums, 1994's ''Genocide and Juice," and 1998's ''Steal This Album."

The Coup's last release, 2001's ''Party Music" received a lot of attention, but for all the wrong reasons -- an album cover that, ultimately, was never printed. As originally designed, it featured a shot of Riley, with a guitar tuner as detonator in his hands, igniting New York's World Trade Center towers in a cloud of smoke and flames. Conceived months before the terrorist attacks that destroyed the iconic skyscrapers, it remained on their publicists' website just long enough to upset some people. (The cover shot was changed to a flaming martini glass filled with gasoline.)

Riley describes the original cover shot as ''a metaphor for the destruction of capitalism." Still, even as the Internet buzzed with criticism of the group -- often by people who knew little or nothing about its music -- Riley says he never considered lessening the Coup's political fervor.

''We have to do what we do, and hip-hop is the most intellectual art form on the planet," Riley says. ''There are more ideas per second spit out in your average hip-hop song than in volumes of -- to be sacrilegious -- James Brown, and we aren't about to change that."

At the same time, Riley is adamant about keeping things funky. The Coup remains one of the few hip-hop groups that relies on real instrumentation as opposed to samples, and that organic energy gives the duo's music a potent kick.

''It's a full-funk onslaught, and the music is always a big part of what we do live and on record," he says. ''It's bass-line thick, and we like to combine the live element with the boom and slap of hip-hop. Nobody wants to hear a political message over bad music, including me. I mean, I might have a great idea or a great message, but if the music's not tight, it's not going on the record."

The Coup, with Lifesavas and D-Tension featuring Moe Pope, play at the Paradise Rock Club tonight at 8. Tickets are $15. Call 617-652-8800.