BIG DEAL FOR LEE REED
New album Before and Aftermath is Reed’s first solo effort to gain international distribution
Lee Reed has always been Hamilton’s semisecret musical treasure — an anarchist rapper living in a not-so-rap town, railing against injustice and inequity.
The few who heard him knew he was special, always wondering why his brand of anti-capitalist rant hop hadn’t reached the wider audience it deserved.
Well, we don’t have Reed to ourselves any longer. He just released a new album — “Before and Aftermath” — on a hip underground label in the United States called Strange Famous Records. (Currently, the album is only available digitally, but Reed hopes soon to have CDs and vinyl available in local stores.)
The label owner, a respected American rapper by the name of Sage Francis, is singing his praises loudly.
“This guy means what he says and there’s no wavering when it comes to his mission statement of smashing the state and crashing the band,” Francis announced on his label’s website. “It’s mean. In the best way that ‘mean’ can be. Functionally mean. Political hip-hop can often come across as a put-on or as if the MC is pandering to certain niche groups, but Lee Reed is the genuine article.”
Big words of praise, that go on for a full page. In Francis, Reed has found a friend with lots of influence. This doesn’t mean Reed is going to get the same kind of exposure as Drake — star status is the furthest thing from Reed’s mind — but it does mean that his voice will be heard in key markets across the continent.
And, yes, Francis is right, Reed takes his politics seriously and has helped organize the current rent strikes in east Hamilton. He’s performing Thursday, Nov. 8, at This Ain’t Hollywood in a fundraising show to help tenants fight rent increases in Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa. Reed also issued the five-track “Steal City EP” recently dedicated to local gentrification and tenant issues.
Reed, 45, has been a fixture in the Hamilton music scene for almost 20 years, first in 1999 as the bombastic frontman for the experimental rap-rock band Warsawpack. He was known then as Lee Raback and the band released three albums on the Winnipeg-based G7 Welcoming Committee Records, touring the country until breaking up in 2004.
Since then, he has worked solo releasing three self-produced albums under the stage name Lee Reed and performing in clubs, mostly close to home.
Reed met Sage Francis in 2015 after a club show in Guelph. Francis was the big American headliner. Reed was an opener. Francis didn’t think too much of the rappers he had seen in Canada ... until he saw Reed.
“He got up from his merch table and was standing in front of me, staring at me the whole time, front row,” Reed said about Francis. “We talked after. It was cor-
dial. We exchanged contact info and later that year he was the feature performer at the Canadian slam championships in Toronto. He called up and invited me to dinner. It was that night he proposed this deal. He’s a legend, an OG, an original gangsta. He’s a slam poet, an independent rap artist who carved out his own lane. You can hear the poetry in it. I would have opened for Sage Francis for beer.”
The new album contains plenty that will keep old Lee Reed fans happy. The lead single is a track called “Get Mad,” which features a sampling of the late actor Peter Finch’s Oscar-winning
“mad-as-hell-and-we’re-not-gonna -take-it-anymore” rant from the 1976 film “Network.”
Reed says he’s looking forward to reaching out to new fans in the United States and has already noticed a dramatic increase in his social media followers. He’s not optimistic, though about obtaining a visa to perform in the United States, given the radical nature of his politics.
Europe, however, is another matter. “Northern Europe really loves the kind of hip hop I do. They love old-timey sounding hip hop and the message will play well in the squats of Europe. I’ll be definitely doing squat tours of Europe — Berlin, Hamburg and Amsterdam — and I could not be happier about it.”