Finally, after eight years and four albums, the Oakland-based agit-prop hip-hop group the Coup have gotten some nationwide attention. Unfortunately, it’s for all the wrong reasons. The planned cover for their new release, Party Music (75Ark), depicted the duo (MC Boots Riley and DJ Pam the Funkstress) with detonator in hand standing in front of an exploding World Trade Center. The events of September 11 turned their revolutionary posturing and clever pun (the Coup are gonna "blow up," get it?) into a horribly prescient image. On September 12, their label released an apologetic press release and substituted a less offensive image — a flaming Molotov martini on a bar.

The album, however, has not changed a bit. It’s a firestorm of anti-corporate shit talk, rabble-rousing rhymes, and ghetto storytelling that sounds like a mixture of Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton’s class-conscious black nationalism and pimped-out Oakland rapper Too Short, whose slow-rolling G-funk inspires the Coup’s jeep-ready beats. And in some ways, Party Music feels even more relevant and important now than it did before September 11.

It’s not that Boots Riley speaks specifically about global terrorist networks, but unlike most contemporary rap, both underground and mainstream, Party Music recognizes that there is a world outside hip-hop’s internecine battling, and it engages society at large in a way that few rap albums do. The decadent, materialist posturing of folks like Jay-Z and the bitter, anti-mainstream whining of underground acts like Dilated Peoples ring especially hollow these days — life is short, man, make those words count!

Boots, on the other hand, has no shortage of provocative ideas, opinions, and topics. Ever since 1993’s Kill Your Landlord (Wild Pitch), the Coup have been speaking out for the black and broke, continuing with their brand of hip-hop radicalism long after the stance went out of style. After all, Boots is an admitted Marxist who once included lefty icon Noam Chomsky and radical organizer Saul Alinsky on a recommended-reading list. On Party Music, the self-proclaimed "proletarian funkadelic parliamentarian" tackles corporate greed ("5 Million Ways To Kill a C.E.O.") and police brutality ("Pork and Beef") with a direct, conversational flow that sounds laid back even when the lyrics wind into quick-tongued couplets. There hasn’t been a group with such a talent for political sloganeering since the heyday of Public Enemy. "Ride the Fence" lays out his views in simple terms: "I’m anti-imperial, anti-trust/Anti-gun if the shit won’t bust . . . I’m pro-overthrow of the hip-hop nation . . . pro-prophylactic yet procreation."

If all this sounds a bit too heavy, then take note of the album title, Party Music, which combines their political affiliation (as in Communist Party) and their rap MO into one double-duty slogan. The politics never get in the way of the pop, and the Coup unleash the atomic dogs on Party Music, turning out deep, sticky, live-in-the-studio funk that’s fitted with fist-pumping hooks for the fellas ("Everything"), ass-grinding grooves for the ladies ("Ride the Fence"), and sing-along R&B hooks for the old folks ("Heven Tonite").

And though their good-time G-funk separates the Coup from the aggro attitude of fellow polit-hop agitators like Rage Against the Machine and Dead Prez, Boots’ lyrics also escape the trap of many pop ideologues: self-righteous rhetoric and one-dimensional posturing. Using humorous one-liners and sharp storytelling, he portrays a world of broke-down cars and minimum-wage jobs, of people who need food on the table, not socio-political philosophies. But it’s not all poverty and oppression and exploitation in the world of the Coup — there are also tender notes to Boots’ daughter ("Wear Clean Draws") and stories of teenage lust ("Nowalaters"). Call it party music for the people, the working-class blacks who will never know the silk-and-champagne fantasies of a Hype Williams video. Or as he says, "Got a house-arrest anklet, but it don’t bling-bling/Got a homie with a cell, but that shit don’t ring."

But will those same folks who ride the bus with Boots in Oakland ever listen to this album? Long a favorite among critics and bohemian types, the Coup haven’t yet achieved the reverse-crossover audience that their music begs for. Ripping through an incendiary set at the Middle East last Saturday, Boots counseled a young, shaggy, and primarily white crowd: "You got to get up right now/Turn the system upside down/You s’posed to be fed up by now." Somebody get this man on BET.