Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters' Turns Shoplifting Into a Revolutionary Act
Keke Palmer leads an all-Black-woman shoplifting crew in this brilliant, surrealist comedy about corporate exploitation.
Twenty years ago this past April, filmmaker Boots Riley and his Oakland hip-hop band The Coup released their fifth studio album Pick a Bigger Weapon. The 13th track of the revolution-minded production is a little song called “I Love Boosters.” The song is Riley’s ode to the (usually) Black women in the Bay who steal clothes from department stores and “And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale”:
“For some of y’all folks, this stuff might phase ya / This ain’t the way the society raised ya /
But most of it was made by children in Asia / The stores make money off of very low wages /
The next time you see two women running out The Gap / With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack / Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat / If you have to say something, just stand and clap.”
Now, Riley has turned the song and its central thesis of corporate exploitation of labor as the real thief and burden on society into the genius new film of the same name, I Love Boosters. Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, the head of an all-Black women booster crew called the Velvet Gang. The opening of the film mirrors the first verse of Riley’s song, where a man goes into what he thinks is a woman’s apartment looking for a hook-up, but it turns out that the place is full of boosted clothes and shoes in all sizes that she’s selling on the low.
Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige round out the gang who have become a thorn in fashion mogul Christie Smith’s side, whose department stores they’ve been robbing blind.
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