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The Revolution Will Be Danceable - A Conversation With Lee Reed & Test Their Logik pt 1 by Hubcap Walter on Mixcloud
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| Lee Reed, Givin' Er |
What’s your name?
Testament: We tour under “Test Their Logik” I’m one half, I go by Testament. He (referring to his partner in crime) goes by Illogik. (The server brings us our beer) Cheers. (raises glass)
To a good show. Where are you guys coming from?
T: We just did a show in Merrit, BC, last night.
Cool. How long have you guys been touring together.
T: We [Test Their Logik] met up with Lee in Vancouver. Test Their Logik, as a group set out from Toronto and toured to Vancouver. Now that we met up with Lee we’re going to interior BC and the prairies.
Where are you headed to in the prairies? Are you heading to Grande Prairie area?
T: No sadly, we’re headed to Smithers BC tomorrow, and making a few more stops before getting to Edmonton.
Where are you guys coming from?
Illogik: Toronto.
OK, Test T heir Logik, and Lee Reed are all from out east, but met up in Vancouver to work their way back.
Ill: Yeah, Test and I are from Toronto, and Lee is from Hamilton.
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| Testament (left) and Illogik (right) of Test Their Logik |
So how did the folks at CFUR radio know to book you.
Lee Reed: Probably through a mutual friend. This guy named Tehreek, he went by Mother Tehreeka.
All right.
Lee: I met him in Hamilton. He moved to Victoria, then at some point came to Prince George. Pretty sure he had a radio show at CFUR. He’s moved back to Hamilton and does shows out there now. We all know him well.
Well that explains the connection. So you guys drove the whole way out west, hitting venues all the way along?
Lee: Actually these guys have been on tour a lot longer than I have. I work a pretty regular office job, so I flew out to meet them in Vancouver.
Test: I’ve been on our Colony Collapse tour since January 1st. This is pretty much a continuation of that tour. We got back from South Korea and spent about 2 or 3 days in Toronto then hit the road again.
South Korea eh? What’s it like over there right now?
T: Cold. I guess it’s cold here too. (laughs) Lots of struggle and lots of occupation going on though. They recently elected their first female President, [Park Geun-hye]. She’s the daughter of South Korea’s former dictator turned President [Park Chung-hee]. So it’s pretty interesting right now.
Holy shit yeah. Looks like it stands to get more interesting too. I know Lee is pretty political in his music, what about Test Their Logik?
T: Yep. A wee little bit. (smiles)
Lee: (laughing) A lot more than I am.
I can’t wait to see this show tonight.
(To Lee) You were born Lee Raback, correct?
Lee: That’s right, Lee Raback.
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| Lee Reed (left) and host of a local post-modern music festival (right) |
Is your stage name, in part, a homage to Lou Reed then?
Lee: In part. When I stopped with Warsawpack and knew I was going solo I toyed with a bunch of names really. I liked the idea of using my real name, or a least a real name. After bouncing a few around I liked “Lee Reed” a lot mostly because of the Lou Reed connotation. I love that his legacy was more respected, than honoured with cash.
Yeah, he almost avoided mainstream popularity entirely. It’s amazing that he could have easily jumped into the spotlight and had it all, but simply chose not too.
Lee: It is incredible.
You keep your headquarters in Hamilton?
Lee: Yep, I work there, I live there, and it’s a good place to make music out of. A lot of great music comes out of there.
A pretty strong music scene exists in Hamilton doesn’t it?
Lee: Yes, very strong. A lot of great venues exist too; some host live music 5-7 nights a week. For a city that size it probably manages to host more acts compared to other similar places. It’s a great place to make music out of as well, because it doesn’t have much of a media structure in place like Toronto, Vancouver, or Montréal does, it relies much more on word-of-mouth to relay quality music. So it’s an honest place to make music, not a lot of pretension.
Hamilton has a little more blue-collar to it than most art scenes.
Lee: Very much so, it’s also a small enough place that you can really get to know people. A lot of cross-pollination happens between people. They collaborate with each other. You see it more often now with the hip-hop artists. Every guitarist in Hamilton is part of 2½ bands. You know what I mean? A lot of the really good front-people are part of multiple projects as well. Hamilton has a very hybridized music environment.
So you would say you have an HQ, you’re not necessarily a ramblin’ wanderer of Canada.
Lee: No, I would like to do that though. At some point, if I thought there was enough support, I would tour a lot more than I do now, but it’s hard. Traveling with these guys (Testament & Illogik) makes it interesting. They’re a lot more vagabond about music than I am, especially Testament. He constantly travels, plays, and distributes books and info. He doesn’t just do shows, but presents at book fairs and workshops as well. Rambling across the nation is something I’d like to do, but… small steps. I’m just getting into the idea of playing out of town and seriously taking music on the road. The couple years I’ve just played around Hamilton and southern Ontario. So I’m just starting to get back on the road again.
Do you guys write as well? Publish books or any type of material?
Test: I’m part of a publishing collective called crimethinc. I mainly make material related to anarchy and revolution.
Does that involve manifestos, poetry or…
Test: A little of that, poetry comes out too, covering current events and the world of resistance. Books also come out, some detailing different practices you can use, when engaged in struggle. More poetic content comes out the collective as well. The most recent book is an analysis of present day capitalism, including the different positions people play up and down the capitalist structure. It tries to debunk a lot of mythologies around work, and how you’re mutually conditioned to work more and more…
Right on, I’ll have to look that up.
Test: We’ll have a lot of books here today.
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| MJL |
Nice! Just as a sidenote, have you guys ever crossed paths with The Minority Justice League out of Winnipeg, MN?
Test: No! But I’d like to. Winnipeg has always been a tough hub to get into. It’s a crazy place, but so hard to link up with people, an insular scene.
I’ve heard of wild shows. The band looks like they’re ready for insurrection with balaclavas and openly express support for people like Subcomandante Marcos and Zapata, among other things.
Lee: Cool.
I hear the audience doesn’t know what they look like because of the balaclavas, though I don’t know how true that is.
Test: Very cool. I’ve been toying with the idea of adopting a new stage name and only performing masked up. It’d be extremely difficult remaining anonymous though.
Absolutely, once you reach a certain level it’d be a constant effort remaining anonymous. It’d have to change at some point but props to them for trying.
Lee: I’d be too sweaty (laughs). I can’t even wear a hat.
Test: (laughs)
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| Warsawpack |
Has your work with Warsawpack ceased?
Lee: Well sort of. Yes in the sense that the band broke up. I still make music with some of the guys though. The DJ [Aaron Sakala/Realistic] has worked with me on every project I’ve been involved with since then, both recordings and live shows. I play with the drummer regularly, Matt Cormier, he’s my brother-in-law. He’s been with my sister for about 8 years now.
So he’s actually hard to avoid even!
Lee: (laughs) I jam with him a lot. Matt and I jam with Fiore, the bass player. Fiore lives in my house right now. We’re all pretty close still. [Simon Oczkowski,] the tenor sax and keys player is a general practitioner, a doctor now. [Adam Bryant,] the baritone sax player is a nutritionist, and the keyboard/guitar player, [Ajit Rao,] is an architect. He builds models of projects for corporate displays. So I don’t see those guys as much, but the other 3 guys I see all the time.
When exactly did Warsawpack split, and was that when you started going solo?
Lee: No, we split up in the spring of 2004. We split up following a tour. We were faced with the stark reality of doing really well, and that success still not equaling enough cash to cover anybody’s cost of living. We made more money than we should have, sold tons of merch, packed shows, and it was really great, but we weren’t going anywhere because it was impossible to parlay that into a living for 7 dudes.
Yeah, that was a big ensemble.
Lee: So we had a choice. There was some serious debate for a couple months about whether we should just continue doing it for fun and bust it out a couple times a year for shows, but the core of us were against that idea because we were playing like 5 times a week. Whether we were gigging or jamming, we were playing all the time, and we knew that it would become shitty if suddenly we played once every couple weeks or a couple times a month. The act would just suffer. We figured we’d rather go out while we were still good than fizzle out and die of shittiness (laughs).
It was a while before I started doing stuff by myself. I played a bit with the DJ from Warsawpack, [Realistic,] and another guy I knew from Toronto for a couple years, but it was real slow going. We’d only get together about once a month or so, and we played maybe 10-12 shows over 2 years under the title “Peoples’ Republic”. It was good, it was fun, but it was super slow going. I’ve been doing Lee Reed since the final months of 2008, put out a demo in 2009, and I’ve been uh… (his brain races through the past 3-4 years)
Rocking in the free world ever since?
Lee: (laughs, probably at the word “free”)
Anyone not coming to the show tonight stands to miss out on a Canadian Hip-Hop heavyweight. You’ve Shared the stage with Bad Religion, Feist, Death From Above 1979, Das Racist… which I imagine must have been interesting…
Lee: Yeah it was hilarious!
Buck 65, K-Os, Alexis On Fire, Protest the Hero, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that I should know about…
Lee: Those are some big-name highlights anyway yep…
My question is, “What do you have on your schedule this year?”
Lee: As far as gigs go, I haven’t been out west in 10 years. We’re crossing that off the list. I’ve gotten to go places with Test Their Logik I haven’t been able to go to on my own or with Warsawpack. My biggest plans this year though, have a lot more to do with getting some more recording and back-end work done. As far as shows go, I hope to get on the road again in the fall, either come back here or perhaps to the east coast. I might try to apply for all those festivals this year, that I haven’t done in a while, like Pop Montréal, and Halifax Pop. Some of the fall shit. To tell you the truth though, I mostly have a lot of back-end work to do. The space I’ve been playing at for the better part of 10 years, we got kicked out of, so we have to find a new spot to play and record at. That’s going to be a bit of work. I want to get the stuff I’ve been working on with the drummer from Warsawpack (Matt Cormier) off the ground and gigging, hopefully by the fall. So there’s a lot of stuff in the works. I just released an EP, available for free online during the duration of the tour. It’s available on my bandcamp page along with my other recording. Some singles are coming out as well. One is about Harper, we’re putting it out when this summer of sovereignty heats up. I’ve got a lot of stuff to get ready in order to get back on the road again.
What’s your website again?
Do you hear that people? (Yes I’m talkin’ to you). So your tour has brought you from out east to the west, so far, did any major hot spots come to your attention on the way?
Lee: Well like I said these guys have played a lot more shows than I have this year. I’ve been with them since Friday night when we started playing in Vancouver, which was a great show with some good folks. Victoria was also amazing. Denman Island though, thus far has been the highlight to me. We played for a fierce crowd in a log cabin.
Sounds awesome!
Lee: It was a riot! Last night we played at the Culture Centre in Merrit to a lovely crowd of people. That was really nice. A lot of young kids there, a lot of youth. We had our own hype person come up on stage with us and do some tracks. She was a 6 year old girl named T.
That’s incredible.
Lee: Yeah, she was 6 years old. It was great.
Test: We may have a last minute thing coming through in Vanderhoof tomorrow. We’ve got Edmonton, Saskatoon, Brandon, Winnipeg, Kenora, Grassy Narrows, and potentially Thunderbay.
Well if you find yourself out west again later on this summer, CFUR may have a recording studio set up by then. Stop by to lay down a few tracks if you like.
Lee: Good to know.
What’s the name of this tour?
Lee: The Colony Collapse Tour
Test: It’s kind of interesting because it started with just me, in Australia. Then it progressed to Test Their Logik as a group going from Toronto to Vancouver. Now it’s Test Our Logik with Lee Reed going from Vancouver to Ontario. When we get to Ontario… who knows. There might be 8 of us! Maybe on the way to Québec or somewhere.
Maybe in Winnipeg you’ll pick up the Minority Justice League. You never know.
So do you guys intend to burn or demolish any, or all, parliament buildings you come across on tour?
Test: (laughs)
Lee: (jokes) There’s a trail of burned building in our wake. No. Police should make room in their prisons (laughs).
Do you have a colour preference for their cells or anything like that?
Test: (jokes) Classic black & red.
Lee: Yeah black & red.
There’s no Parliament building here in PG, but City Hall isn’t too far away just so everybody knows.
Lee: Is it flammable though?
Test: It’s a log cabin (smiles).
Just the innards are flammable, you don’t want to ruin the structural integrity or anything like that…
Lee: Oh no.
Someone has to be able to occupy it again afterwards…
Lee: Yeah (a little twinkle in his eye)
Ok, so maybe then. If the crowd inspires you enough
Lee & Test: Yeah maybe (laugh).
(To Lee) So I’ve heard you’re an anarchist. Do you either confirm or deny this?
Lee: I am. I would say that I am an anarchist. In the spectrum of anarchy/disorder I’m not as ardent or hardcore, perhaps, as a lot of people I hang out with. I’m a lot older. I’ve accepted some reality. I have a pretty regular job, bills, rent, and a home. I take part in the economy probably more than a lot of my anarchist friends do, but I support the community a lot, especially in Hamilton. I do a lot of work for, and with, the community, possibly more in the last couple years compared to previous years. I’d say I’m fixing on getting back out [of the system] and getting completely free again. There are some financial things to undo in order to get there again. Regardless, I definitely agree with anarchist living, anarchist tactics, and what it is most of the anarchists I know are trying to accomplish. The anarchist community and the anarchists I associate with, inspire me more than anything I’ve ever experienced. Both what they aim to do and what they’re actually doing are very aligned. There’s actually a fantastic anarchist community in southern Ontario right now that I’ve been getting to know a lot better. So yeah, I definitely am [an anarchist], but you’re going to find people like the guys I’m traveling with. They are far more living the anarchist ideal than I am, and I learn a lot from these guys every time I’m with them. That’s part of the reason I enjoy traveling with them.
What advice would you give to someone looking to join the anarchist lifestyle, movement, or a community.
Lee: Keep yourself out of debt. Keep yourself free of ties to the capitalist structure. Build alliances and relationships. We all need to rely on each other from time to time. At times you may be doing well and someone else may need your help, and vice-versa. I would also say get out to [anarchist] book fairs. They’re probably one of the best places to meet new people if you’re just getting into anarchism. It’s spreading like wildfire in Canada right now, so it’s not too hard finding communities of anarchists in just about any city, or town even. They’re everywhere nowadays.
Test: (smiles) Anarchists are everywhere.
Lee: They are everywhere. So follow your nose, it always knows.
They are everywhere. The nose knows.
Lee: The nose knows (smiles).
Test: We have a pungent smell (laughs)!
Lee: That’s what I really meant (laughs).
Speaking of smells, can you explain your connections, and affections, towards falafel sandwiches?
Lee: Falafel sandwiches sustained me for a really long time.
A nutrient chickpea mash…
Lee: Yeah. It’s basically like vegetarian fast-food, and it’s a very popular dish all across the Middle East and North Africa.
Are you a vegetarian?
Lee: I’m not right now, no. I would say I’ve spent the majority of my adult life as a vegetarian, but I’ve probably been eating meat for 3-4 years. When I’m traveling with these guys, far less, which is great.
It’s good to be able to cut down.
Lee: Yes. It is for sure. The falafel to me though is like [canned] beans, or some types of Mexican food. It’s very cheap and I like very spicy food. I lived on [falafel] for many years.
Your bread and butter?
Lee: In a lot of ways it was yeah. It was my sandwich, my hamburger, my fast meal.
Falafel: The official sponsor of anarchy.
Lee: In some ways (laughs).
Test: (smiles) They were serving falafels on Tahrir square during the revolution.
There you go (smile).
Lee: I’m known among my friends as a connoisseur [of falafel], so people won’t really trust the quality of a falafel without my consent. “Have you had that falafel yet? Is it any good?” Then I’ll break it down for them.
So it seems to me that Canada and the rest of the world sees the shores of anarchy closer now than in decades, perhaps hundreds of years. Do you think Canada, and the rest of the world could benefit from anarchy?
Lee: I really do. I used to not think that. They told me I would become a little more “chill” in my old age, and it’s actually been the reverse. I’ve become more radical as I’ve gotten older.
Really?
Lee: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s because the world is not on the trajectory that it was on before, when I was younger. I mean it sort of was on the [same] trajectory, but things are now a lot worse than I imagined they would be. Food scarcity, water scarcity, air quality, water quality, equity, living equally, in this country even, the more I look into it the more I realize how destitute we are, how enslaved we are to banking and capitalism. It’s very apparent to me that banking and capitalism could give 2 flying fucks about us.
I’ve come to the realization that we need to live in a manner that doesn’t look for economic growth, in a manner that doesn’t rely on cash, we need to live in a manner that places human needs & necessities ahead of capital, and of the economy. Anarchy, and anarchism, is the only way of life that I’ve come across that successfully recognizes that, and plans to spread.
It [anarchism] doesn’t have an open path to some kind of corpocracy, as opposed to democracy.
Lee: Yes exactly. To me, living in the manner that you would like everyone else to live, is something that I’ve learned from anarchists in Southern Ontario. Leading by example, leading by doing. It’s empowering, it’s inspiring, and it’s happening all around us. Younger people know a lot more about nowadays than when I was a youth. The wisdom of it, and the good that can come of it, is starting to become apparent. People are seeing the results of direct action, the results of anarchist communities taking control of their own destinies and succeeding. They’re feeding themselves, they’re happy, they’re not working 10-hour days for nothing, they’re collectivizing, and they’re building around common needs to help each other survive in a world that’s increasingly impossible the survive in the way government tells us to. Who can really afford the dream that our grandparents, or parents had? You can’t afford a fucking house. You can’t afford to pay your bills. You’ve got families where Mom & Dad are both working overtime every week, they have no benefits, one little hiccup in that like an illness or car accident derails the family and can take them out of the game.
You can enter the cycle of poverty so easily.
Lee: Yeah, exactly. I hate living on that precipice. It bothers me, and it bothers me that that is what’s fed to us as normal, and a normal way of life. I think my chances of having a good retirement are more contingent on building great human relationships, and a place where I can exist without the need of money. I think I have a better chance of living a ripe old age that way than I do trying to save within this system we have that stresses austerity, cutbacks, and yadda yadda yadda while people are making record profits, buying record expensive shit, and pooping all over the world.
Killing people at record rates with record efficiency…
Lee: Totally. Destroying communities, destroying landscapes, destroying biospheres…
Record deficits…
Lee: Record devastation. I see anarchy as one of the only viable, and proven, alternatives to all of that. No one else seems to be stepping and saying, “Let’s do it this way instead.” That’s what I love about anarchy. They step up and say, “You know, we might not have the exact solution, but starting tomorrow morning we’re doing it differently. We’re going to find a solution and we’re going to find a way to do this.” The DIY (Do It Yourself)) ethic is really refreshing after being told repeatedly that, “You can’t do it this way,” or “you can’t do that,” or “you shouldn’t do that,” or “Oh! That’s stupid.” Anarchists don’t talk like that. They do [instead].
Would a gradual and paced transition be better than rapid and violent revolution?
Lee: Hmm.
Or does it even matter? Would you say any anarchy is better than no anarchy?
Lee: I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that’s going to occur suddenly, and take place everywhere. It’s the sort of thing that occurs by: a smaller community doing things to better themselves, then succeeding, then people learning form that success and replicating it. An anarchist revolution wouldn’t want to go to Parliament, take over, and start running the Parliament. (End of Pt1)
The Revolution Will Be Danceable - A Conversation With Lee Reed & Test Their Logik pt 2 by Hubcap Walter on Mixcloud
Yeah that wouldn’t make any sense.
Lee: They would be more interested in, wherever it is that they’re from, making sure that they’re all eating, all secure, free from police and military harassment, and taking care of their lives.
It’s kind of a funny question because I’m not sure there is such a thing as an anarchist revolt in the sense that there is a coup, or a political party swept to power through violence. I don’t think it would happen like that. For the most part, any violence that occurred would arise from anarchists defending their own space, or their rights to speak their minds, or to protest, but I can’t see anarchists getting involved with a concerted violent uprising in Canada. I don’t think it would occur like that. I suppose there are places [in the world] where that could happen, but I don’t think it’s like that here. I think the way [anarchy] would succeed may take some amount of violence, but I think you’re talking more about defense, property destruction, and defense of principles as far as relationships to capital, your own land, your own water, and your own air. So if defending that quality-of-life is to be called violence, then for sure there will be violence. As far as a large party of anarchists getting together and taking over Parliament and things like that, I don’t see in Canada’s future.
Is there anything you want to add to that, Test?
Test: Anarchist revolution to me, is… diverse. There are so many ways in which anarchists revolt. There are so many ways in which anarchist communities subvert power, build relationships on mutual aid and reclaim that power. I think a full-out anarchist revolution would see that generalized to the broader population. Everyone would start finding ways to live with relationships based on mutual aid and cooperation, instead of competition and domination. [The revolution] would look like workers taking over their workplaces, deciding whether or not they want to work in them, and then maybe continuing to produce something that’s useful for their communities. It would look like native people taking back their lands, and practicing a healing process. It would look like everyone, individually, empowering themselves and fighting back against any kind of oppressive relationships that have been imposed on them. It would involve some violence, but a lot less violence than we’re all exposed to on a daily basis. The current callous and cold mechanist system inherently involves violence, as it puts profit over humanity in terms of its values. I don’t think this “instant violent revolution” could ever bring about anarchism. I don’t think that that is desirable at all, unless we are all working on changing our own personal relations, and changing the power dynamics inherent in society like sexism, racism, and all other twisted and repressive behaviors that we’ve conditioned in to.
Unless that happened, a violent overthrow of current order would result in a system just as bad replacing it. That old-school 19th century idea of “violent overthrow” or “revolution” is not really useful. It’s been played out a lot of times around the world, and we’ve seen that it doesn’t always lead to freedom. People actually get disillusioned a lot of the time. People fight, they put their lives on the line, then at the end of the day they deal with just another boss. The new boss replaces the old boss, a new bureaucracy, a new system of control, etc. A successful anarchist revolution, I think, would have to be a combination of a multiplicity of efforts, a generalization of a value system placing people over profit, ecosystems over the economy, and of community over control. Once those value systems are spread through the process of [leading by example and] actually taking action—not just the theoretical, “communities have to learn how to defend themselves, repress efforts to control them, and reclaim space from the institutions of domination.”—it’s going to be a gradual process, a bumpy ride for sure, but I look forward to all the ways I will participate in that process (grins).
Lee: We should also note that [the revolution] is danceable (smiles). Always good, completely danceable, beats.
Test: The revolution might not be televised, but it will be danceable (laughs).
Lee: You can download the soundtrack for free (grins).
Anarchy tends to lend itself to other types of organization once it’s instated. How would one prevent this from happening in order to preserve the anarchic state, or would such action even be necessary? In short, would you be opposed to some kind of order, within this new anarchical society?
Lee: I’ll first say that it’s sort of a misconception that anarchy means a complete lack of order. It’s just sort of a reorganization principles and order, to me anyways. I understand its Greek word roots meaning, “without order” or whatever the case may be…
No government, but order isn’t necessarily the same thing…
Lee: Yes exactly. Discipline, organization, planning, education, sharing of information… anarchists are amazing at this. They’re very organized people. That’s the only thing I would want to note about that [question]. What [anarchists] don’t want, like Test said earlier, is systems that are run by domination, exploitation, or placing any group of people above another group of people based on race, sex, class or anything. So in that sense it seems like it would be a destruction of the present order, because the present order relies on exploitation, domination, and class war.
(sarcastically) All those beautiful things we’ve come to know as “normal.”
Lee: To me, anarchists aren’t necessarily fighting against organization or order. They’re fighting against this organization, and that order, and the way this is structured.
Test: A lot of people think anarchy means, “no-rules.” Really the word means, “no rulers.” We could all consent to a set of guidelines to which we’ll run our community. We can enter into agreements such as, “I’m responsible to my community in these ways, and the community is responsible to me in these ways…” We could set up general rules and guidelines of behavior in the community in a consensual, nonhierarchical, anarchist way. That’s very different than government or rulers, and it should be noted that there have been anarchists elected into parliaments during different revolutionary periods, such as in Spain. Anarchy isn’t just total chaos, anarchy wants a new way, a more human way, a more equal way of distributing power and resources, of meeting our own needs and the needs of our communities. It actually comes very naturally to people. If you look at how humans have organized themselves throughout history, we’ve been living in anarchistic communities for the vast majority of our specie’s existence. It’s only been, maybe, the last couple thousand years, through agriculture and industrialization that resources, power, and decisions have flowed to a smaller and smaller class of people. This system was never consented to. This is something that’s been imposed upon these lands that we live in—against the wishes of people who were living in fairly anarchistic ways—by [types of] people who are now billionaires and royalty. These very violent orders have gone around conquering the world and imposing “property” relations on the earth.
Anarchy is like a potluck, the same as any situation large or small in which people give freely of themselves, and the sum of everyone’s efforts is worth more than its individual parts. Everybody has something to bring to the table. People already know what anarchy is, it’s the best moments of our lives. It’s giving freely, it’s cooperating, and it’s the moments that we cherish, that are what anarchy is. The parts of our lives that we hate belong to capitalism: domination, going to work, doing these things that we don’t want to do, being dictated to, being controlled on the streets, harassed by police, and coerced into decisions that we wouldn’t make freely. Anarchy is really spreading those bubbles of freedom, those little [cherished] moments. We know how to interact with each other as anarchists. Every human being knows how to do that because it’s hardwired into our DNA and our psychology. That’ show we’ve existed for the vast majority of our time on this planet. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to believe that we can go back to that.
Well said.
Lee: He’s got some flow (smiles).
How do you feel about the various pipelines slated for construction in the near future? From the tar sands to Kitimat…
Test: That’s not going to happen.
You don’t think so?
Test: Really? Fuck no.
What about the one going East?
Test: Gateway isn’t going to happen, Keystone XL is like 50/50, Line 9 is another 50/50. [Line 9] is another struggle, an uphill battle, but I don’t think gateway is going to happen. There’s a lot of opposition; it’s pretty much been dead in the water for a while just because of how much opposition there is to it. I think [Gateway] is almost a smokescreen because we’re going to put all our effort into stopping it, and they’re going to start building pipelines in other places. I personally think that the tar sands are done. They’re not going to get to expand, and we’re going to actually stop the pipelines. Sadly, there’s a lot of fracking happening in the USA creating a glut in oil right now, so the Keystone line doesn’t make much sense anymore, economically speaking.
Too much opposition to Enbridge’s gateway will lead to them to try re-routing pipelines like Line 9, but they’re already bursting and spilling all over the place. More and more communities are going to get upset with it. There’s a growing opposition this direction. The lower level effects and the bigger picture of climate change looming on the horizon will force our hand on this one. I personally think that, by any and all means, everyone that is invested in there being a future should be doing everything they can to stop any new pipelines, any new hydrocarbon intensive developments, and that we should be finding alternatives. I think that alternatives are going to come out of more small-scale initiatives and community minded initiatives. The “big grid” idea needs to go. We need to decentralize power, not just political and social power, but actual electrical power. We have to decentralize production of that power. We lose a lot of power through grids anyways; there are all these other alternatives. I’m not too worried about a lack of oil. I think we’re gonna’ learn how to live a lot better without it. I think we need to shut down the pipelines and stop any expansion to the tar sands as soon as possible.
Lee: I would agree. I’d also add that I think Canada has to take a good hard look at itself and realize that it has no business looking down its nose at anywhere else in the world. If anything, we are the most despotic, shit-hole of a nation there ever was, and I think the tar sands really bring that to the forefront (laughs). I think Canadians may be waking up to the fact that they’re really no better for the earth than the Americans, or the British, or any other sort of imperial powers were. The other thing about [the tar sands] is that it’s really tied Canada to its behavior, worldwide. We are now seen on the world stage as polluters because of the tar sands. In addition to that, it’s put Canada under the lens with our relationships with other places in that sphere of resource extraction. I think a stat said 70% of global resource extraction, like mineral extraction, firms are based in Canada. We’re the ones going to places like Mexico, Columbia, and Chile. It’s Canadian billionaires and trillionaires doing this to the earth.
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| Test Their Logik |
Yeah, we’re forcing people off their property so we can come in and mine it…
Lee: I think the tar sands are opening peoples’ eyes to that sort of thing, more than anything that’s gone on in the last 20 years anyway. Canada is finally getting the scrutiny it deserves on the world stage. I think that’s bothering some Canadians who might not have been as aware of their role in nature’s genocide worldwide. We like to think of ourselves as pretty “outdoorsy,” because we have a lot of outdoors to shit on. I think that awareness is one good thing to come out of the tar sands; it has kind of galvanized some peoples’ vision of how Canada could be. We have the ability to heal and to make amends with our First Nations peoples. Imagine if they were the stewards of our land. We would have the greatest place to live out of anywhere if it were held to their standards instead of our own. I can’t really recall a time when Canada was as reviled on the world stage.
I’m sure [damage] happens in regions all around the earth as people deal with Canadian companies and situations created by Canada, but the tar sands are so enormous, so epic in scope and damage, that they can’t be ignored. Meanwhile here’s Canada going to climate change summits talking like Reagan. We are the cutting edge of climate change denial, and clinging to the old ways. I think the tar sands, like Test says, are a real tipping point both from a grassroots and a world perspective. The tar sands can’t go on; they’re not sustainable. It’s crack rock! We’re like a crack head searching through the carpet for little flakes of coke that might have been lost the night before. It’s not going anywhere.
To me, personally I feel like the tar sands aren’t as big of an issue compared to what we’re doing in continents like South America. Things like actually displacing people from their land with threats, killings, or economic starvation. These are exactly the same practices [employed by] American Companies, Multinationals, the British Empire, or the entire history of people taking advantage of people to get what they want, in Africa or wherever you want to point on a map…
Test: And the reason all these companies base themselves in Canada, is because Canada gives them even more protection than the USA or Britain would. A lot of these companies relocate to Canada because they are more protected from their crimes than they would be anywhere else.
Lee: Canada won’t extradite them to Mexico [for example], if they’re killing people there
Test: They won’t allow anyone from other countries to sue in Canadian courts. Even in the USA, [foreigners] can sue in the USA’s courts from the Alien Torts Claims Act. There’s so much more protection for [the companies] in Canada. Also, there are incentives. Mining and exploration companies in Canada are basically treated like charities. You get a tax write off by investing in them. There are these things called flow through [shares]. Companies can pass their tax break on to their shareholders, which allows you to invest in companies that are making profits and then actually receive a tax break on your investment. The scenario looks like a charity donation; it’s that extreme.
Yeah, Canadian mining companies are horrible with what they’re doing around the world. Especially despicable, are the murders, displacements, mass ecocide, destruction of waterways, but I think that’s starting to happen more and more here too. [We’re] pushing and pushing more and more into indigenous nations’ lands and forcing extraction. Also a lot of companies got their start pillaging First Nations’ lands here, then they expanded by pillaging everyone else too.
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| Testament |
As if there’s not enough room here…
Test: I think, especially with tar sands expansion and their ideas of pipelines, a new mining boom happening here in BC, and fracking… all these other ways of refining, trying to destroy the earth in order to take money out of it, I think we’re going to see more and more of that group-violent nature of resource extraction and capitalism rearing its ugly head in our own backyard. It’s going to be a long decade to come, of struggle against those projects. People need to get ready for that, get ready to protect their own waterways, environments, forests, and build solid relationships with the First Nations, of whose land you live on. Those groups of solidarity are going to prove crucial in the years to come. If you want to have clean water and clean air, those alliances are paramount.
There are certain initiatives happening in the Arctic right now with the Inuit there. They’re working towards self-governance, and organizing the structure themselves. [The government] wants the Inuit to govern themselves but maintain a connection to the Canadian government. In a sense we’re not the ones imposing the rules on the Inuit anymore, but their government still has to adhere to Canadian laws and regulation. It’s totally experimental [and I can’t pretend to understand it,] but maybe in the future it’ll all work out…
Lee: I guess it will just depend on whether those rules included complete capitulation to mining, or petrol refinement, etc. because you’re not really governing yourself if you can’t control whether your food, water, and air is poisoned. You can’t really call that self-governance. There’s no real sovereignty in not having control over the quality of what goes into your own body. It’s be nice to think that they’re writing they’re own rules but I’d be pretty surprised if the Canadian government would let anybody write rules that would in any way disrupt their apparatus.
Some of these governments, I think, have already started developing their own resource exploitation in areas like offshore drilling, and things like that, to support their government so that they can provide for their communities.
Test: I think you’re nailing it on the head there. I think that this is more of an incentivizing factor. If we give, let’s say Nunavut or North West Territories, more control over resources, it’s an incentive for rapid resource extraction because those governments will then reap the benefits. The result is a further colonization, that’s very very sneakily pushed through as decolonization in the [guise] of handing power back to different nations. It’s an incentive for rapid resource extraction, and it’s more convenient to do it that way. They’ll let the First Nations keep most of the profit, but overtime it builds up the structure for more control and power through capitalism and the Canadian state. It’s a tricky game that they’re playing, these people aren’t dumb, they know what they’re doing.
Do you guys think that if constructed properly—and I mean utilizing the most advanced and proven technology, fail-safes, materials, observation systems, routes, etc.—and under radical postmodern regulation, these pipelines we talked about earlier could actually benefit not only the economy, but Canadians, and even the environment?
Test: That is the most ridiculous proposition I’ve ever heard.
Lee: (laughs) Yeah. I don’t know how that would happen.
If you were to take the capital gain from such pipelines, and invest it into things like alternative energy, fusion…
Lee: But they don’t. They don’t invest into anything.
Sure they don’t, but what if they did?
Test: They won’t.
Lee: (laughs)
What if the people [the public] made them?
Test: The imperative isn’t there. Capitalism only rewards greed, cutting corners, and a [big] bottom line. I think it’s very naïve to think that we could actually do something like that.
What if we could take control?
Test: If we could take control, then why even have a pipeline? Why not immediately go and start building the alternative.
Where do you get the resources to build the alternative then?
Test: But the thing is you don’t really need this pipeline. The pipeline isn’t helping you get resources, it’s maybe helping you get money.
Well exactly.
Test: I don’t think money has to be the dominating factor in the development of alternatives. The development of alternatives shouldn’t be based on money. We should be looking at it from a long-term view. We’ve hit “peak money.” Money is just like oil (laughs).
It looks more and more worthless all the time, yeah.
Test: I don’t think money has a future just like I don’t think oil has a future. We need to start finding ways to organize outside those systems. It’s not even up to us as citizens to decide whether or not this pipeline goes through, it’s up to the people who live along the route of that pipeline. It’s especially up to indigenous people to make that decision. Also, at the point of production, it’s up to the First Nations around the tar sands who are being poisoned daily by what already [developed]. I don’t think that we can build a clean green future on toxic sacrifice that is genocidal and racist. (laughs)
Lee: Its’ not building anything equitable. It doesn’t work. It’d be like saying if we could just eat enough cancer we could find the cure.
I would like to think that if people were in control of their own communities, we wouldn’t be looking at pulling everything out of the ground just for money and make pipes in order to get it to the other side of the world, (laughing) because that’s not sustainable no matter how you treat it.
Yeah, I get it. My only hiccup with anarchy comes from the advancement of technology. I just don’t see how you can get organized enough to put in the time and research to get things like fusion and other alternative energies. How would the generator, and then wind turbines ever have been developed without capitalist incentive?
Lee: Capitalism has prevented technology more than any other force has. You think about planned obsolescence.
That’s very true.
Lee: We used to have a light bulb that would last 200 years, now we have a light bulb that burns out every 8 months.
Sure. It has taken different directions as well…
Lee: Right, but what your saying is that the way we do business promotes the advancement of technology and new ideas…
To a certain degree yes, it’s definitely limited.
Lee: I disagree. I think it quashes advancement.
Yeah, Nikola Tesla could have given us unlimited, wireless, electricity in the 1920s but it didn’t happen because JP Morgan (a capitalist) couldn’t figure out how to put a meter on it.
Lee: [Yes,] but it happened in every industry, even down to present day computers and whatnot. Real innovation occurs in university laboratories, which don’t need to be funded by businesses. If we weren’t so busy giving tax breaks to corporations so that they could make the fanciest new wireless device, then we may be finding free energy, cheap cures for diseases, things that actually matter. Fuck how thin you can make a television, or at what age a man can get a boner, or how many follicles of hair you can sprout, capitalism [guides] science in such a stupid and demented way. I think anarchists would be much better stewards of science and innovation, much better.
Test: If you look at technology there’s anarchistic developments happening all the time. Open source software for example. Hackers.
Lee: Hackers are some of the most advanced computer users in the world.
Test: Anarchists developed things like Twitter. It was a huge innovation for things like large street level, demonstrations. Send out a quick tweet about something and everyone sees it right away, then knows what to do.
Lee: Capitalists invented micro-scrubbers for face-wash and all sorts of other “useful” shit like that. I don’t think innovation I tied in any way to capitalism. In fact capital brings it down, capital finds a way to take innovation and sell it to you in pieces. They know exactly how it could be 20 years from now, but they’re gonna’ break it down for you in 2 year chunks and sell you 10 of those to get there. By the time they get there, they’re already squashing the free versions of it. They’re already suing people over patent laws that prevent us from all having free food, energy, and living.
Test: They don’t want us to be free [from it], that’s the thing.
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| Lee Reed |
They want us in debt.
Test: Capitalism rewards the most ruthless competitors.
Lee: Technology should be organized around community, and shared need. Not around capital. We might not be able to build the Hadron Collider, but do we really need that? Wouldn’t it be better if we made one inoculation to give to every child on earth that prevented them from dying of diarrhea or other stupid preventable diseases? We should be organizing around those principles, and that’s never going to happen while organizing under capital.
Do you think something like fusion could happen through an anarchist society, or do you think that it would require some kind of mass capital infusion being invested?
Lee: Well that’s what we don’t know. Capitalism doesn’t want to find a cheap way to do those things. Capitalism is stupid in that sense.
Yeah, you need capital sponsorship to get anywhere with it under the current system, and fusion doesn’t sound like a lucrative investment.
Lee: We don’t know how technology could be organized outside of capitalism because capitalism has taken everything great about technology, fenced it off, called it their own, and broken it up into little shitty pieces and made subsidiary companies. Tesla had wireless electricity, pulled form the air. Where is that? Than man died in obscurity with his patents taken by General Electric. That guy wasn’t necessarily an anarchist, but lots of Serbians at the time were.
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| Nikola Tesla |
Test: The DIY ethic was there for sure!
Lee: There was DIY, trial and error, and it was high thinking and self-taught in a lot of ways.
Test: Some of the best innovations have come from anarchistic behavior and anarchistic intellectual pursuits, people thinking outside of the box, people not doing what they were told, people being innovative and curious. I think that’s what actually drives innovation, this anarchistic behavior we have.
The desire for something different…
Test: In terms of fusion and these bigger technological questions, I think that’s going to come up to whether or not it’s in everyone’s best interests. People are going to make those decisions. Maybe we won’t need to develop new technologies, maybe people are going to be very happy actually scaling down the level of technology in their daily lives, living simpler, living more communally, and doing most of their communication face to face, not on an iphone over facebook.
(laugh) Sending each other pictures of their cock.
Test: (smiles) Exactly. people might find that they’re a lot happier and they’ll make those decisions. If people feel like there’s a need for fusion, they’ll find ways to organize it and make it work, probably a lot better, a lot quicker, and more efficiently than our current system.
Lee: We’re in the midst of a technological revolution, and how would that be guided by anarchist thinking? If research and technology wasn’t in the hands of companies, but in the hands of people in universities who were working with public dollars or pooled resources [how would that inform their work?] Suppose all of Canada was a giant enclave of hundreds of thousands of anarchist communities? You can bat in some of the major cities where there’s more urban anarchists living, but they would be finding ways to get their resources together to do that type of big research that requires big machinery and big [effort.]
Anarchists aren’t necessarily afraid of [technology.] These are your hackers, web designers, software developers. They’re clued in and just as capable of using scientific processes as capitalists are. It’s just asking how they organize their results, the products? If we were not trying to make money off of it, we would find ways that we would all benefit from it. Technology now, the really cutting edge shit, who does it really benefit? Suppose they come up with nanotechnology that allows people to live cancer free to age 400, you can best believe that those fuckers are living in a walled in compound somewhere near Denver or something. They’re not going to be out and among the general population living this high-tech fantasy. It’s not like that, and I say fuck em’. We shouldn’t have this priority of living longer and higher quality lives until we can ensure that every person on earth doesn’t die of starvation. That should be goal #1, there you go. Before anyone is allowed to live past 100, everyone else should be living to at least 50. I think capitalism organizes things in a way that just divert awards to fewer and fewer people at the expense of more and more people.
Test: People that need scientific innovation the most are worthless to capitalism, so that’s not where [benefit] goes. It goes to people who can pay for it, which is why you have so much money going into (laughs) sexpos.
Of all the races, the human race is the most unfair, and disadvantaged one around.
Lee: In a lot of ways, yeah.
Do you think the internet would have came about in an anarchical system?
Test: Well it didn’t come about through a capitalist system, that’s for sure. It was funded through military, and designed to be more utilitarian than profitable. This is why it’s an anomaly; it was not designed for profit or market but for communications and utilitarian purposes.
Lee: Anarchists quickly learned how its language worked and how to do better things with it.
Test: The capitalists are now trying to shut it down and control it.
Thank God [anarchists] got on the bandwagon faster than most capitalists did [or things like SOPA and FIPA would have been instated long ago]. [Anarchists] are already present, a step ahead of those attempting to reform the internet, and saying “NO.”
Lee: It’s certainly the best defense against the more corporate internet. Would it ever have been born under their thinking? Again I bring it back to [the point that] we’ve never been given hundreds of years of our own destiny to say whether we could have or not. All we do know is that the anarchical thinking and actions we’ve seen are successful. So, I would assume that we would’ve built a better internet by now (smiles).
All right, approaching the end of the wire. I’ve held you guys here for quite a long time. I’ve heard that you [Lee] learned a lot about politics from hip-hop, specifically artists like KRS-One and Chuck-D. Would you care to elaborate on that?
Lee: I learned a lot about history from them. Maybe not so much directly, but enough to glean pieces of information I would look into and get more of a story on. I grew up in a small town in Northern Ontario until I was about 17. I was one of the only people in town that would listen to hip-hop at all. There was me and 2 other guys.
I had no exposure to Americanization, really in a lot of ways, or to the day-to-day struggle of poverty. Where I grew up is poor, we certainly didn’t live so well, but it was a different kind of thing. It wasn’t as institutionalized, or enormous, as it is in urban America. The poverty of rural Ontario is its own little problem, but compared to hearing about interacting with police, being afraid of police, stories of how to deal with police. That stuff was completely new to me. I remember the idea of, “not trusting authority.” It’s articulated in punk as a very, “Fuck You! I’m not gonna’ do this! I Don’t like you or your rules!” Where as hip-hop, because it’s so verbose and requires so much wording, was a lot more nuanced and had a lot more back-story as to why we shouldn’t trust police or why we shouldn’t trust politicians. It got more into the background of the black condition in America, tracing history back to slavery or that sort of thing that I don’t see in punk with a few notable exceptions. There’s some really intelligent punk, sure, but the punk that was around when I was a kid was very visceral. Hip-hop was like a nuanced reading of how the world was compared to anything I’d ever heard.
You have a little more space to elaborate in hop-hop.
Lee: Yeah, and all early hip-hop was revolutionary. Not necessarily expressly in its content, but in its form. It jacked stuff. It’s where sample based culture wasn’t necessarily born, but where it took its roots. It essentially stole and appropriated printed and copyrighted things, twisting and changing them to make new music out of it. Throwing your own voice over old soul records spun with different drum breaks that were punching your nuts. It was completely new. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember, but when it was born everyone thought, “Oh this is a fad. It’s gonna’ die. It’s stupid. I don’t know why anyone listens to this.” But I knew. I knew that it was changing music forever. It just resonated with me. I think those guys connected to my young brain and made me want to look more and more into things.
Through Public Enemy I learned about the situation in Israel. They don’t speak to much to it, but Professor Griff got kicked out of the band because of it. “Professor Griff got kicked out of the band! What the hell is up with that?” It was because he was so closely related with [Fairkwon Pharoah Con] and they got in trouble with some of his anti-semitic remarks. And I was really into Professor Griff. I thought he was awesome, he was like the head of the S1Ws, he was rad! His first solo album came out and I got it. It’s very much about the situation with Zionist apparatus in Palestine and Israel, and I had no idea about that stuff and I don’t think I would have got any exposure to it until I was maybe in University or something, and I was just a kid. This guy was flying PLO flags and I thought, “Why would a black dude from New York care about what’s going on in Israel?” I didn’t get it until I started looking into it. That’s why I say it gave me a lot of history and perspective. It made me want to know, “What is he talking about in this line here? I know this song so well but what do these 2 lines mean?” I wanted to find out.
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| Public Enemy w/ the S1Ws |
What formal education do you have?
Lee: I have a Bachelor of Arts in theatre and film.
Nice. That translates well.
Lee: Yeah I like performance. I always have. It wasn’t necessarily what I meant to do. I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I went to school and it was what came easily to me and I just took it as my major.
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| Lee Reed is gonna' getcha! |
Lee: It has more to do with mentors and mentorship, as opposed to a mentor. That, sometimes, is a 2 way street, sometimes a cascade or free flow from above, and sometimes you guiding somebody. That process for sure. A lot of people have come into, have left, and continue on with, my life that inform my thinking. I’ve always known that I never liked dogma, or associating with people who were unwilling to change their position or their thinking when confronted with truth or alternatives. I’ve never really been one to dig into dogma or dig in my heels and say “I’m this!”
Knowledge is a really give and take process like that.
Lee: Yeah it is. My worldview has evolved and changed. Like I was saying earlier, I was always told that I’d become more peaceful and calm in my old age and it’s really not the case. I’ve definitely become more radical and confrontational in my old age both in my music and my personal life. That’s from relationships that I’ve built and had along the way. Like these guys. I’ve learned a lot from these guys, about the process of how they make music, how they connect with people, and how they organize to get on the road. In turn I teach them what I know about the music biz. That’s my experience with anarchists. They’re good at figuring out what you might be able to show them, what you might know about, how you can help, and how they can help you. that’s been part of my attraction to it. So I’d say it’s a long list of mentors (laughs). End of Pt2
The Revolution Will Be Danceable - A Conversation With Lee Reed & Test Their Logik pt 3 by Hubcap Walter on Mixcloud
How far across the world have your words taken you?
Lee: I’ve traveled pretty extensively, but [as far as] playing shows I’ve been to the States twice, and across Canada 4 times. Testament and Illogik have gone all over with their music though.
(To Test) You’ve been to Korea, Australia…
Test: We just got back from a tour that brought me, solo, to New Zealand, Australia, and [South] Korea. Illogik and I went out to Europe for a tour of 45 cities in 13 countries. We’ve toured to Mexico. I’ve gone and done shows in Palestine, performed in Africa though a show in Egypt got cancelled because the revolution kicked off. People were more interested in fighting police than listening to me rap about it (laughs). We’re still planning more tours for the future, but we’ve done Turtle Island—which is Canada, USA, and Mexico—quite extensively. I’ve toured across Canada at least 4 times and we’re looking forward to more places in the future. We’re just getting started really (chuckles).
Right on. Where’d you like to go next? Do have any major goal in mind?
Lee: Yeah. We’ve been talking with some other artists—from where we’re at in other parts of the country—about opening a radical hip-hop label maybe early 2014. I learned a lot from working with G7 when I was doing Warsawpack, about the business model, how it works, what succeeds and what doesn’t. I still have access to those guys and talk to them pretty regularly. I’m gonna’ go after that process and I think it’s something we can do even better given how involved we all are in our own music. We’re looking at collectivizing our efforts on the backend, the sort of business side of music. Things like getting press, publicity, ad budgets, design and web presence and that sort of stuff. By centralizing that a little it could give us all more time to just focus on music. In the process we’ll hopefully see a lot more cooperation between groups. Things like this, getting on the road together, but also helping each other with recordings. We know a lot of live musicians that are down with the scene and we’d like to get them involved. So we’re looking at collectivizing. We’ve been discussing it for some time but I think this year we’ll be building towards getting it going by next year.
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| Testament drops bombs, Illogik fuels up. |
Do you have any goals as far as activism goes?
Lee: This year is gonna’ be great as far as Idle No More (INM), and solidarity goes. I’m really excited about that. The INM events that have occurred in Hamilton were fantastic. I got to play one of them, participated in marches, we blocked the 403 highway for a little while—one of the major arteries in Toronto—and all the activity around indigenous solidarity has been really exciting for me. I look forward to summer of 2013, ICE. I believe we’ll have a chance of seeing the ouster of Stephen Harper. I believe we have the chance to see the next federal election involve a lot of real issues, (smiles) not that it’ll get me voting, but it’ll get some of the correct stuff on the ballot. It’s a very exciting time for activism. As you can get from the music I make, I’m pretty pessimistic, but I’d say the last 2 years I’ve been way more optimistic about our future than I was in previous years even though things are getting hairier, more ridiculous, and stupid. In regards to what might seem insurmountable, I’m constantly confronted with well put together, thought out, and organized resistance with plans on how things can work better, and with people who are really doing it. That’s just going to grow and grow, and this year is going to be a very big growth spurt. I think the Canadian powers that be will experience a serious growing pain in their ass.
Test: We’re definitely in a very interesting decade to come. I think we’re gonna’ see things like the Arab Spring, Idle No More, Occupy, and other generalized worldwide phenomenon happen in an ever increasing fashion. It’s really interesting how they’re increasing in frequency and scope. From going to Occupy, to Idle No More… who knows what’s next? We’re living in interesting and exciting times, the global system of power, control, and domination is cracking. Cracks are starting to appear everywhere. People are losing their fear all across the globe, and that’s really important.
Lee: People are already living as though they’re dead. People are already existing in a post-modern world, we’re just slow to pick it up.
Test: We have a lot to gain. It’s a fight, [alongside] as many people who are willing to do it, to make those gains.
So you just dropped a new EP. A collaboration with John P. Can you tell us what you wanted to achieve with the record?
Lee: I’m slowly building towards getting back into playing with live musicians. In the time that I’ve been doing hip-hop I’ve made connections with tons and tons of great producers. So what I’m going to be doing over the next couple years, is every few months I’m going to put out an EP the producer I like working with. That would be expressly hip-hop, probably 4 or 5 tracks, for the most part just doing downloads of them online.
So we’ve got more to look forward to?
Lee: Oh yeah they’re will be a lot of those actually. They’re all Hamilton guys [I’m working with.] There’s a bit of a renaissance in hip-hop going on in Hamilton right now. A lot of good hip-hop is there. It’s sort of tapping these guys I’ve known for years. I’ve known John P for 12 years or so. He’s a host at McMaster Radio 93.3 CFMU. He hosts a long standing radio program called “In Tha Kut,” it’s been on for about 15 years. There are a lot of guys like that I’ve known for years and enjoy working with. While in the background, I’m slowly learning how to get a more live sound off the ground. I’m gonna’ continue putting these little projects together with producers I like to work with.
How long have you know, or been working with, John P? Do you go back a long ways?
Lee: Over 10 years. In my full length album “Emergency Broadcast” he did 3 of my favorite tracks. He did the beat for The Bank, Same Old Same, and Bazooka Rap. They’re all solid tracks, it was wise to start with him. I’m gonna’ do one with my boy Realistic, some other ones in the works I don’t wanna’ jinx, but a lot of Hamilton cats and a couple people from out of town.
Right on. So glad you guys came to Prince George.
Lee: No problem man. Happy to be here.
I really appreciate it. I’m glad you strayed a little further from the Medicine Line than most people do.
Test: We came up here on our last tour too and it was great.
So glad you came back. We love it, f%ck!n’ love it. I hope you come back soon though I might further North by then.
Test: Let us know how far north you get and we’ll keep the tour going northward (grins).
I don’t know about the oil thing though, I’m from Alberta. I’d probably end up bringing my own up there with me and burn it on my own property.
Lee: Don’t ask for the rebate just ask for the extra oil.
Damn right. Have a great show tonight and don’t let The Man get you down.
Lee: Nice.
Test: See you there.
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| Lee Reed, Rockin' The Joint |
