From left: MC Jimmy Jamz and DJ Bobby Evans
Brother Reade
Issue #33
The rap duo is all about the ladies. In a good way.
By Catherine Disabato
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
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 rock 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 the 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 afield 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.
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