Brother Reade

The rising hip-hop stars are all about the ladies — in a good way (interview continued from the fall 2007 issue of Venus Zine)

By Catherine Disabato
Published: September 4th, 2007 | 3:30pm

Outside of Hollywood, Los Angeles is a sprawling amalgamation of secluded neighborhoods. Nestled in Echo Park is hip-hop duo Brother Reade, which consists of childhood friends MC Jimmy Jams and DJ Bobby Evans.

The duo met in their early teens in rural Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where they played in a punk band together — Jams on vocals and Evans on drums. The punk thing never really stuck, and the boys slowly slipped into another of the great outsider music genres. To Jams and Evans, the transition was a natural one. “It was something that kind of happened in tandem for us,” Jams says. “The skill sets are a little bit different, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot of the same rhythmic ideas playing an instrument as rappin’, and it’s a lot of the same arrangement ideas in theory for writing songs as making beats.”

Though the screeching vocals and spastic drums faded into smooth rhymes and energetic beats, Jams and Evans never gave up punk politics and DIY aesthetics. In fact, Brother Reade created a zine to go along with their new album, Rap Music, aptly titled Rap Music Zine. “We always made zines,” Jams says. “[It’s] just like a childhood habit. We think it’s funny how intact the original ideas of doin’ things yourself and building something real and genuine in a community-based way, how intact that is even though what we’re doin’ [musically] is so far a field stylistically from what you might think we would be doin’.” The zine focuses on their life in L.A., and the PDF is available to download for free from their Web site, brotherreade.com.

Along with dynamic beats and quick-flowing vocals, Rap Music contains a running discourse about a hot topic in hip-hop today: mistreatment of women. “I feel like a lot of [what these rappers are saying] is fantasy,” Jams says. “I don’t even think that there’s a reality to what a lot of what rappers’ sayin’ — it’s kind of like a certain gross over-articulation of the facts. But we’re always in charge of whatever fantasy we’re putting forth. But rappers who stick up for the ladies — Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, and Brother Reade — are few and far between.”

During his full interview with Venus Zine, Jams expanded on his childhood in North Carolina, his relationship with the genre, and his reactions to misogyny in hip-hop (he also apologized for Evans’ absence, explaining that he had been up late DJing the previous evening).

What is hip-hop to you and how would you define it?
Jimmy Jams: All right, just jump right in. What that actual word has meant to music has changed a couple different times, since I’ve really been aware of rap music. Defined, it’s the music that came out of the parties in the late ‘70s and the early 1980s in New York. It kind of became its own solidified thing and spread across the world to be one of the main voices in pop music in America, and then the rest of the world just followed suit. Loosely, that’s what it is. For me, it’s obviously a lot deeper than that, but I might need a little more guidance before I get started talking about [what hip-hop is].

A lot of the beats and rhymes on Rap Music are very modern, but they also have an old-school feel. It’s reminiscent of Enter the Wu-Tang or even Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. What are your greatest influences in the history of hip-hop?
Those two that you named are extremely flattering; it’s always nice to be compared [to that]. We kind of hearken back to that time. Part of the reasons for calling our record Rap Music is that that term isn’t even employed and it’s a little bit dated, but it’s kind of classic in a way. It’s not really like a retrograde thing. There’s a lot of rap like Paul’s Boutique, like Wu-Tang, that’s been made, that’s really timeless. The rap that’s timeless to me [is] Eric B. and Rakim, Slick Rick, or even Raekwon records, or what Ghostface was doin’ last year. There’s a certain strain of rap that’s really timeless. When I feel like I can resonate with something — like I can play it for somebody from two or three generations after us and they’ll still understand what’s good about it —that’s what inspires me the most.

As an artist in the late 2000s, what is your relationship with the history of hip-hop — especially since hip-hop has changed so much from those original parties in the ‘70s and ‘80s?
When people really wanna honor and exalt those old records and that mindset, they get a little too caught up in that and the rose-tinted view of history, wishing that they were living in another era. But we don’t really feel like we should be. Brother Reade is not an anachronism. Brother Reade is part of what’s happenin’ right now. Also, what’s happenin’ right now in rap music — especially coming from the South — is a great time in rap for me. A lot of the really good artists are coming out of the region that I’m from. Growing up, we didn’t really have that. We didn’t have, to the degree that we do now, people that you could call local, that you could look up to. We were always lookin’ to New York. Now, my relationship to it feels even better. I grew up loving hip-hop music and loving rap music, and there were never people that talked like we did or that in any way had a lifestyle like us. I’m really thrilled, personally, because [it’s] just like more people came to the party and a lot of those people happen to be from Atlanta. That’s a lot closer to home, literally.

How are you interacting with hip-hop as it’s goin’ on right now — both the hip-hop that gets played on the radio and the hip-hop that’s coming out of the underground scenes all around the country?
As far as the independent music scene or whatever, I’m not positive because I’m not completely aware, but I think that it’s such a niche and multi-faceted thing right now that there’s not as much of a unified front. It doesn’t feel like there’s one connected, however-many-people, thousands-strong, of underground listeners and musicians that are all sort of on the same page. It’s even more niched-out as per the labels.

The East Coast kids don’t really listen to what the Southern California kids listen to. Underground rap in America seems really spread out to me. I feel like within those niches, there’s people making really lasting records. We live in Echo Park, and that’s the same neighborhood as Madlib and Jay Dee. We’d see these legends on the corner. I think those guys are really doin’ something serious, something beautiful. Jay Dee, obviously, is gone now. Those divisions have more to do with what people want to do with their careers. I feel like there is something potentially the same between a classicist, big rap record, like the Black Album, and with anything that couple be done in the underground, anyway.

It’s so hard to get too specific, because you don’t wanna necessarily say anything bad, but so much stuff isn’t even important. Popular music is always flooded with examples of stuff that is just extraneous. Labels are just rollin’ dice, hedging bets or whatever. There’s always some sort of synergy between what’s goin’ on, on the major, really intense marketed sales level, and what’s goin’ on in the underground.

There’s not necessarily a huge Southern rap underground. Because in the South, a lot of guys don’t have that academy of hip-hop. My friends in New York grew up knowin’ a bunch of guys that had vinyl out, and that went on WKCR every week and whatever. Those guys could sell records, do appearances and a ton of shows without even dealing with a label, but in the South there wasn’t even an organized scene. It’s always been a dichotomy that was tough for me.

[Brother Reade] sort of come from nowhere — we make what we like in our records to sound like what we like, what we want to do. We came out of left field. I don’t feel like we really fit in with any of the underground scenes that are established; it’s not like we’re part of this or that crew or whatever. When we’ve met some of the other people that we may have looked up to — like some of the New York perennial crew or some of the L.A. ones — there’s always a serious respect. I just don’t know if we’ve fallen in with any of that, exactly.

You met Bobby when you guys were playing in a punk band together. What’s the journey been like to get to where you’re at now?
The funny thing is that we were always doin’ [punk and hip-hop]. When we were in that band together, we were young teenagers. One of the first times Bobby Evans and I hung out, I drove and took him to get tables. Musically, in places like Winston-Salem, all the music kids are into everything, ’cause they all have to pull together, ’cause you don’t have a lot of kids. You can’t really niche out; you have to have a community. There’s only so many live venues that are goin’ to have stuff that’s not goin’ through Ticketmaster or Clear Channel stuff, or big booking agents, and radio-station promotion. On that grassroots level, it makes just as much sense as if we would’ve gotten into any other thing else.

I like punk and hip-hop, so it’s cool to see those connections there.
Isn’t there that classic photo of Chuck D. and Flava Flav wearing Minor Threat T-shirts? I think ’83 is a big year for both of those genres, and [they took place in] some of the same cities.

There’s definitely a connection there, with the ideas of outsider art and counterculture, and making art for people who aren’t in the mainstream life. Both music forms reflect something outside of the mainstream.
The crazy irony is that something that’s loosely based on hip-hop or rap and something that’s loosely based on punk [are] pretty much fueling the whole of major records labels’ output now.

I am a female fan of hip-hop, and I often run into strange territory, with regards to the way that women are sometimes treated in the scene. I find that, especially in mainstream radio-rap right now, there is something like mandatory misogyny. I really love the music, but I also hate and cringe at certain lyrics, certain ways that women are treated by this music. How do you respond to that? What is the role of women in your album?
That’s a tough one. Goin’ along with what you say — about the mandatory misogyny and cringing and stuff — that whole thing is bigger than I can even speak of. As a rap artist and as a male rap artist — as if there weren’t enough of those, that’s what I choose to be — I’m similarly hyper-sensitive to that whole equation. I would prefer a different fantasy, in certain terms. You think of stereotypes of women in songs and the roles that they can have. For me, writing about women is always shaky ground. I’m gonna do the best I can, because its been done wrong so many times, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been aware of. [It’s] just a “here’s go nothin’” sort of thing. At the end of the day, I’m really also committed to aesthetic first and really wanna take into account everything that I think about and then just let it go and make some music.

It’s critical for listeners to decide what [the “Marcie Song”] is or what it’s about, but to me it was just a story that I’d been puttin’ together for a while, and this picture of a character that I had developed in my mind. When I heard the track, it was really important that I put it to that song, and [them music and lyrics] came together really well. I have my own run-down of where I think the song is limited, but where I think the song is maybe an improvement on some depictions of femininity in rap music by men. I almost feel like the response to that whole scene can’t even necessarily come from male voices. I will write what I want to write, and what squares with the way that I was brought up. My mother is way into my music, and I like to make music she would like sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. I think there are people around that are really setting other examples. There are a couple of rappers, that seem attached to more critical communities, that are doin’ their part [to put a different representation of women in their music], but I don’t think that they hold the main voice.

The lyric in “The Marcie Song” — “It’s the muthafuckin’ end of my sexist phase” — is really poignant to me. In the song, a male character meets a girl named Marcie, and he is identifying that there was this sexist time in his life, but after really becoming invested in Marcie he rejects that history. I think that listening to that made me thing and made me feel really optimistic, because you can reject sexism, you can get over it.
Sometimes when people wanna tackle social problems in their songs, they [distance themselves from the issues]. A lot of that [lyric] to me was admitting [the sexism] in the first place, admitting the limits of that, or admitting the tone of your perceptions. It’s like my sexist phase. I think about these things a lot, and I also get reactionary, because I think some of that distancing is dangerous, especially because at the end of the day, there’s not as many female rappers as there are male rappers. Men are largely in charge of the story in rap music, as far as what the discourse is sayin’. To totally distance is giving a false impression that you’re not a man, [that] you’re not influenced by the very male discourse, too. I got knotted up, what I think, and totally walk all these lines in my head, so I have to just let it go and hope that what I say is respectful.

Tell me about the zine you wrote to go along with Rap Music. It’s really personal to your life in LA. Why did you decide to distribute that information in that form?
It goes back to the punk thing. I was at a show last night at the Troubadour, and my roommate was selling zines; it was just real natural for us. We have a tight-knit scene in L.A., and we have a tight-knit scene in Winston-Salem. People [from Winston-Salem] have all these misconceptions about Los Angeles. They think that the five-mile radius of Hollywood is representative of the entire city. We came here and found a really great community of a bunch of kids. We’re just goin’ to all kinds of shows, seeing a bunch of really good artists, hearing a bunch of great records, and just havin’ this real sense of community. A lot of times when a band does somethin’ like move to Los Angeles, they try to work industry channels. They’ll be like, “I’m waitin’ tables and then at night I’m goin’ out, and my agent blah blah blah.” Where I come from — I didn’t even really grow up in Winston, I grew up in a really rural town called Smithsfield, North Carolina — I would just really hate for there to be an impression that that [L.A. scene] was where we were coming from. We’re in L.A. ’cause our friends are here. We’re just doin’ a bunch of DIY parties and havin’ a really good time.

The zine is kind of like a personal letter written to those may 500 people or 1,000 people who would know [us] on a first hand basis and have been there — I’m either trying to explain and bring people to those parties on east side of LA that they can’t make it to, or I’m winking to the people who’ve been there. [It] felt like the moment to punctuate the point of this record. Now that this record is over and packaged, that [zine], in a thousand words, is what it means to us.

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