April 26th, 2007
Brother Ali burst onto the Minneapolis hip-hop scene in 2000, when he released his cassette-only demo Rites Of Passage. He soon signed to Twin Cities label Rhymesayers Entertainment, which has released his two acclaimed records, Shadows On The Sun and the Champion EP. It's been three long years since hip-hop fans heard from Brother Ali, and during that time, Ali divorced, became homeless, and fought for custody of his son. He addresses these and other topics on The Undisputed Truth, produced by Ant from the Minneapolis rap duo Atmosphere.
The A.V. Club: This album sounds a little more accessible than your others.
Brother Ali: We were really going for feeling first on this album, because of the topics we were dealing with. I was covering things like my divorce, and getting custody of my son, and kind of rebuilding my life, and things like that. I wasn't exactly sure how to approach those things. But I definitely wanted it to feel the way I feel about them, I wanted the music to feel that way. So rather than take a really heady approach to it, we really wanted to capture the mood above all else.
AVC: Was it a challenge, to find the right feeling for those themes?
BA: Not as much as I thought it would be. I did start out trying to think my way into them. A lot of people have divorce songs, and they're like, "Fuck you, bitch, I can't stand you, and I want you to die." But when you go through a breakup like that—I was married for 10 years—you only feel that way for the first two weeks. That's not the way that you live your life feeling. So I didn't want it to be like that. Ant had these pieces of music that would really remind me of the way I felt about things like my divorce, so when I heard that music, something clicked inside me, and I knew how to approach it based on the mood of the music. The song "Walking Away," I wrote in probably a half hour.
AVC: "Walking Away" is pretty generous to your ex-wife.
BA: Yeah. And there was a lot of things I could've… I had a lot of material, man. [Laughs.] I could have really made a terrible song about her. But you don't want to walk away hating someone, you want to just be like, "Man, this just didn't work with us, hopefully I was just seeing the worst in you." Even for her, I really do, I really hope that she's in a better situation, and that someday it can bring out the better side of her, and she'll be able to be happy. But it definitely was never gonna happen with me.
AVC: On Shadows On The Sun, you say you're "a cross between John Gotti and Mahatma Gandhi," and on The Undisputed Truth, you say, "I'm Howard Stern meets Howard Zinn." Do you work to get both those sides of you on each record?
BA: Not particularly. Ant has played a big role, both for me and in Atmosphere, in making sure that his rappers' personalities are really reflected in the music. That's important to all of us, but I think Ant sees it as his job. When you make music with one person, and you kind of grow together, you end up talking in the songs the way that I talk to him. I feel like I'm writing those songs for him, in a way.
AVC: Most of the press about you mentions that you're albino. Does that bother you?
BA: Early on, it bothered me. I didn't have any distribution for Shadows On The Sun, I just kind of went on tour, and that was my distribution. So I really wasn't prepared for press. I'd never really done it. It's different, if you have to write 115 stories about musicians, then you're looking for something to mix it up a little bit. So I guess I could see that. But there were stories where [being albino] was the whole story. And I was kind of concerned that it started to look like this was a gimmick I was trying to play up. I felt like I went out of my way to not do that. I wasn't gonna not mention it, but they made it sound like it was the key thing to everything I was doing, and it's not.
I will say this, though—when I first came into this and started touring and becoming friends with all these underground, independent rappers, I started being floored that there was an entire scene of mostly white rappers who had mostly white fans. And there was a lot of publications covering them that never talked about hip-hop and never cared about hip-hop until there were white artists making credible hip-hop. And it seems like that was the point where a lot of them got interested. They were kind of deifying these people, like they invented hip-hop. I think those guys are great, I have a lot of respect for them, but let's not get carried away. Where's the balance? If you're talking about these people, there's still an entire realm of amazing artists that's not being talked about. So I started wondering, is this an underlying weird racial thing? I'm albino, my family is white, but I was really raised, and taught my important life lessons, by the black community. It's weird to have these writers be like, "What race are you?" I'd be like, "Fuck you, why is that so important to you? Why did you ask me this?" But then, I'd just be like, "I don't want to talk about that." There was a time as a teenager when I was like, "I'm not white." Because being white is a religion that you either believe in or don't believe in. Of course, in the world, I'm white, I get white privilege and all that kind of stuff, so it's like, lately, I've been having to go on record. A lot of these guys aren't going to get it unless you make it that simple for them. So that really bothered me, and I think it's really tied to the albino thing, because if it weren't for that, that question would have never come up.
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