Bulletin Board Archive

Topic: Brother Ali interview

1. Apr 25, 2006 05:27pm by StikFiga - "i could never be a thug, they dont dress this well"--Malice of the Clipse
   kinda long, but on point. So do you remember the moment when you decided to go all in with this rap stuff? I think that stuff like that grows. There’s not one second where… That’s why the Eminem movie is bullshit, because I don’t think there’s one determining factor whether you make it or break it, you know what I mean? It’s not like that. I understand why you have to make it look like that in a Hollywood movie, but it’s not like that in reality. I mean, I always wanted to do it, and I always put that first. I probably didn’t even think about it then, but in school, if I was writing a song, I wasn’t gonna stop for homework or going out with my friends. If I was writing a song, I would finish that song before I did anything else. I would study the Ice Cube album, and I wouldn’t do anything else. And I know there was a time when I was going to stop, right after Biggie and 2pac died, mainstream rap just got really bad. I mean, mainstream rap has always been kinda bad, not all of it, but it’s been a mixture. But the underground used to be… Jeru the Damaja, Brand Nubian, that used to be on BET and MTV! You would see underground on tv. They didn’t play it on the radio, but you could see that shit. And then you would have Biggie and 2pac, who were amazing emcees, completely legitimate hiphop people, who would take the whole underground with them, and pull all these other people in too. It was amazing and it was genius. So they were mainstream but they were still real, you know what I mean? The only person who’s been able to do that since then, really, is Jay-Z. I think he’s one of the greatest emcees of our time, and that he’s the greatest emcee of his generation. I put him right up there with Melle Mel and Krs-1 and Rakim. To me, he’s up there with them. And I was just like, “I don’t know how to do this! I can’t…go like that. I can’t take that chance with a record deal and getting screwed…”. It just left a bad taste in my mouth. So I kinda quit. I stopped listening to new hiphop, and started to listen to old soul and blues instead. And some real old school… I mean people think that Run DMC are old school, but there are like 10 years of music before them, that is really hard to get. So I was digging into that, and I kept writing raps for fun, but I stopped performing. Then I had a friend who I met through my job, and he was the most enthusiastic hip hop person I’ve ever known in my life. He’s like 40 years old and has been involved since the really early days. And he gave me a tape, with Gang Starr’s “The Moment of Truth” on one side and a mixture of Atmosphere and Beyond on the other side. And… that tape made me feel like “yes, hip hop is beautiful”. I fell in love with hip hop all over again, based on those… Basically, what Atmosphere was doing on their first two albums, and Gangstarr’s “moment of truth”. So then I felt that I had to meet those dudes, and I met them, and I started to do the Rites of passage thing, and I started performing again, and I was like “yeah, I can do this myself! Don’t even worry about who likes you!”. Cause they had a lot of fans who were in punk rock and so on… But they were making their own music, and they were doing their own shows, and they’re going on tour, and they’re just doing it! They weren’t participating in anything, they were doing it themselves! (...) Yeah, it definitely is. What’s frustrating to me is not that I have a label, I mean I get called emo rap because I’m down with Slug. But I don’t care… I know what I am. Maybe I am emo, I don’t know. I don’t think so, and Whipper Whip doesn’t seem to think that I’m emo rap, and all these other motherfuckers doesn’t seem to think that. I did a show with Big Daddy Kane, and everyone was like “you were killing it”. They weren’t like “oh, that was good emo rap”, they were like “that’s fresh! That’s fresh!”. So whatever. My thing is that people aren’t listening to music for themselves. They’re not listening to music and being “do I like this and why do I like it?”. Instead they are like “if I listen to this, then what is that going to say about me?” They get their identity from it, rather than just listen to what they like! I mean, I like a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with my identity. I like Led Zeppelin. I mean, it has nothing to do with who I am. But they have a break up song, saying “I’ve gotta ramble (?)”. And that’s just so fucking ill to me. I didn’t grow up on that, but it’s just dope. And a lot of these kids are like… they don’t want to listen to Jay-Z, because “they’re underground”. So if I admit that I like Jay-Z, that means I’m not underground. And some people are like “I like Anticon better than Rhymesayers”. Or “I like Rhymesayers better than Def Jux”. And it’s like… man, like the music you like, man! I mean it shouldn’t matter which label I’m on. Sage Francis isn’t on my label! Does it matter? I mean damn, just open your soul up to music and ask yourself why you like the stuff you like! What makes you feel something? It’s about what you feel! I read the interview in the Village Voice where you talked about white kids that only listened to white rappers, and how a lot of the underground almost is racist in a sense. Do you still feel that way? It’s not racist in the sense that… When people hear “racist” or “white supremacy” they think about skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan and the people that used to throw bricks at Martin Luther King. And it’s not that kind of racism, it’s not to that degree. But the thing is, that especially in the US, but all over the world, quote unquote white people – and white is a made up thing, I see that more and more when I travel. When I go to Europé and see French people and Italian people, I wonder when all this shit got lumped in together of being “white”. And I wonder who came up with that idea. Not God, God doesn’t make white people. God makes people and you come where you come from. But especially in the US, we’ve got this idea that there are white people and black people. And black people’s name changes all the time, you know black people, negros, African-American, colored, all these different names, but we all know who we’re talking about – the people that came from Africa. And the thing is that white people are taught from so early on that they are superior to people who are not white. And that doesn’t mean that they act out or anything, it’s just that most of them think that they are intellectually superior, they think that they’re more creative, that they’re morally superior. They just think that they’re better quality human beings. And they may not be aware of it, but it comes out in every way they deal with people who aren’t white… The way that they talk, the way they make laws, the way that they hire jobs, the way they treat co-workers. Even in conversations, even if you have black friends – and most white people say that they have black friends but they don’t really have that. Michael Moore said that friends are people you go on vacations together with, you go to their house, they come to your house, and your kids stay with them when you go away… And white people doesn’t do that with black people! Not in the United States. One of the more subtle ways of how this shows is that white people don’t really feel comfortable around people who aren’t white. They’d just rather be around other white people, cause when they’re not they have to start to look the world from a non-white point of view! And it’s very disturbing to do that, cause then you have to start admitting that you have white privilege. That you have it easier because you’re white. That you maybe still are a part of the problem. And that’s what’s so evil about racism, that you are treater better and have more opportunities because you’re white, even if you don’t want to be treated better! And you can’t help it, you can’t escape it! And so many people try to escape it, “I’m part cherokee indian, I’m russian”… you know, whatever. In the United States, you’re white. So… white people didn’t listen to hiphop, as a group, when it was all black. And white people didn’t listen to hiphop when it was all about Krs-1 and Rakim. They would not listen to Big Daddy Kane and Melle Mel. Not in big numbers, I mean there was a small number that were listening to it. And there was an even smaller number that was trying to be a part of it, but almost none. When you went to hiphop parties at that time, you might see one white guy at the party… and he got beat up, for being there! But he loved it so much that he just went anyway, you know? And if he tried to rap or DJ he really got beat up! He could write graffiti though, they’d let him do that if he was the shit. They let you breakdance if you were the shit. But it was such a small group. And the thing is, that when gangsta rap came out, that was the underground of that time. NWA was the underground when they came out. That wasn’t about knowledge or growing and revolution and identity and pro-black. It was about acting crazy and being dumb. And white people didn’t like seeing black people talking about revolution and power and growth. But when gangsta rappers came out and started talking about shooting people, and drinking and selling drugs and getting laid and running from the cops and having money, white people were like “hey, this is cool!”. Because of that, white people started buying that shit. White people started buying gangsta rap, so companies started making more music like that. When only black people were buying, Public Enemy and BDP were big. White people were buying Ice T, Ice Cube, NWA… so the companies started going in that direction. And that is the main reason why mainstream rap today is ice, bling bling, fucking bitches, having a car. That shit. White people did that. They did that to music. Black people didn’t do that, hiphop itself as a culture didn’t do that. White people’s buying power did that. Ehm… And it’s something very different between living in the richest country in the world and being the poorest person in that country… and not having any opportunities… and making it yourself, outside the system, getting rich. Like Jay-Z. That’s so big, so incredible. So when Jay-Z is talking about his chain, you know he’s saying “I’m not a business man, I’m a business, man”… that’s so big! A white guy in America saying the same thing, that isn’t the same, cause that’s like “yeah, so what? That’s what you’re supposed to do!”. So that’s one part of it. The other part is, and Murs said it so good in his song, “This is for”… That yeah, white people started listening. But then they didn’t feel that they were a “part” of hip hop, the culture… Until they look at Slug, and go “okay, he’s white” – which isn’t really true, but they say that – and they look at themselves and they go “hey, I’m white, I can relate to this. I can be a part of this”. And then they look at Sage Francis and say “he’s white, I can be a part of that. He represents me”. And they look at Aesop. And Eyedea, me, El-P, and Cage… and it just goes on and on and on. And Murs said it: you can’t say that these cats aren’t dope, you can’t say Aesop Rock isn’t the shit… But these kids, they used to think that rap was all about what NWA was talking about, that rap was all materialism, misogyny, violence. Now, they’re listening to Sage Francis and Aesop Rock and being like “they’re talking about something. They’re talking about knowledge, and changing things!”. And they think that white people made that up! They don’t realize that Sage Francis was the one white guy at the party, that was getting beat up! Hell, Sage was probably beating motherfuckers up, hehe, but he was that one white guy. And when he started rapping he didn’t think he was going to rap for all these white kids! He was going to fight his way into hiphop, but it just worked out this way… That these white kids are “all about the culture”. And now they want to judge Jay-Z for not being real hiphop. And they want to judge Ludacris, and judge Lil Jon, like they’re not real hip hop. Like “I’ve been ignoring hip hop all my life because it was a black thing, but now I’ve been involved for five years and now I have the right to say what’s real hiphop and what isn’t.” It’s just so unfortunate, and that’s my thing. It is what it is, and I’m not mad at anyone that’s involved just now. It’s a comfort level thing… I mean, it took me forever to get into rock, because I thought rock was only for people who hate brothers, and that rock is a white guy thing. So it took me forever, and it’s still really hard, but I start to see where a lot of these guys are coming from. And I never would’ve done that if it wasn’t for Slug, really. So I’m not mad at these kids that are getting involved, because I feel that a lot of their minds are opening up a little… some of em are not though. I’ve had people coming up to me going, “yeah man, way to put it up for the white kids!”. It’s only happened twice… I signed this girl’s cd, she bought a cd… this was like my first month of signing autographs and I was like “yeah, this is great”. So she gave me her money and I’m all happy and shit, and she’s like “yeah man, way to put it down for the white boys… my brother’s a white boy and this is just great”. So I took the cd back and gave her back her money and was like “you’re not allowed to buy my shit! Not from me. You’ve got no right to listen to my shit. I can’t control whether you go to the store and buy it, but you didn’t get this from me”. So there are some people who aren’t changing and aren’t caring. They wouldn’t go see a Dead Prez show, and they wouldn’t go see a show where there were a lot of black people. But the ones that are, I’m glad! I just wish people would embrace the culture more, and not just listen to us, but go back in time and find out what made us do what we make. Although, the flip side of the coin is that we make music and they listen to it, they really care about this and they support us and they give us the opportunity to live nice lives off of it. So I can’t be mad at them. It is what it is…I’m still happy as long as I get to do my thing. And all these years of getting better and honing my skill… and constantly put in an effort to be better, it has gotten me somewhere. You haven’t collaborated a lot with other artists…. When I got with Ant… I used to be in groups, but it wasn’t really like… You know when you’re in high school you’re in groups cause that’s what you’re supposed to do, but it wasn’t like we had visions about what we wanted to do. We were just friends and we did music together. But every time anything got serious with music, it was when I was solo. Because most people don’t think that hard about music, most people don’t really put themselves in their music. Most people just do what other people do and try to ride off with someone else. I never wanted to do that, so I was always by myself, until I met Ant. And me and Ant really worked 50-50, everything is shared. I mean, I have my words and he has his beats, but the way the songs are coming together, vision wise and all that good shit, is definitely a 100% team thing. And when him and me started to be really close friends, I started to feel that I didn’t want to do music with anyone I don’t really feel as a person. So, me and Slug worked together a few times, because that’s my friend, and it just sounded right. There are some guests on my new album, but they’re all people I’ve met and have a relationship with. I respect them as artists and they show me respect. All of them are older than me, they are people I look up too. I don’t really want to make music with my peers. I like their music, a lot of shit out there is fresh, but I won’t go out of my way to make songs with them, cause this is my music, and my music is my thing! I have a song with Grand Puba from Brand Nubian, and that’s someone I’ve always loved and looked up to since I first heard his music. And even before he heard me play he was talking to me, and showed me respect. And then we built a friendship. I also have a song with Prince Whipper Whip from the Fantastic Five. That was a little bit different. I always wanted to do something with him, but I didn’t know him. But I tracked down his phone number and I called him and I was like “Hey, I make music and I’m a big fan… And I’ve got this song that I kinda based on their routine from Wild Style, and it would be great if you would do something”. And we started talking on the phone a lot, built a friendship, and I flew him to Minneapolis. And we hung out, we did the song together, we did a radio show together… And when the guy who owns our studio had a birthday party we went to that and freestyled at his birthday party for like an hour, rhyming, doing old routines from the Fantastic Five. It was cool. So fucking fun… It’s been quite a long time since your last album. Yeah, way too long. It’s been two years… So why is that? Right before I put out the Champion EP, I went out to this really long tour with Atmosphere, almost three months. During that time… You know I was married, and I really realized that that really was a bad situation for me. I was married to a person who had a lot of emotional and psychological problems, and I always tried to help, we were together for almost ten years. And I really started realizing that the better I started doing in my life, with the music and feeling more happy and stable in life, the more me and her were falling apart. And for me to stay with her, I would have to move backwards, to get back to that old sick way of living and thinking. And I couldn’t do that! So when I got back from the tour, I moved out, got divorced and went through that whole process. And it was a really ugly process, I got custody of my son and that was hard to do. I’m glad that I did it, but it was a really hard thing to make happen. And during the time of that, I got in another relationship, I moved a few times. I just had to basically rebuild my life after that. So there was like a year-period of time that I didn’t make any music. I was going through all this shit and I didn’t know how to write about it while it was going on. For the most part I had to wait, or maybe not had to, but I did, wait until I landed again. And then it took me a while to get back into the flow of it, you know? So it wasn’t a very creative period. I still toured and rhymed, but I didn’t write anything, you know? I mean, how do you go through all that shit and then go “yes yes y’all, to the beat y’all…” I couldn’t write rapper’s songs, I knew I had to write about what was going on, but it was almost impossible to collect my thought while it was going on… Doesn't it feel strange to perform the most personal songs from your old album three years later? Esp. when so much has happened? I still mean them. I wouldn’t play something I don’t mean… and if things have changed I change the songs. Like the songs I’m performing now, if there was something about my wife, I change that up. Switch it up. But it’s always fun to play places I’ve never been to before. Like Europe. Except the Hultsfred festival and when I played in France with a free jazz band, I haven’t been here. But it’s going to be so fun when the new album gets out, so that I can perform those songs. Will it be very different from the previous albums? I don’t think so. Haha. I’m probably supposed to say that it is, like “this is like…” “the best one I’ve ever made”… Hehe, I think it is though! But you know, some people will think it sucks because they’re so into “Shadows on the sun”. But this album isn’t “shadows on the sun” no matter what I do! I can’t do another “Forest Whitaker” or another “bitch slap”, you know? You just have to keep doing songs! (about ANT) That’s the thing with Ant: he’s always getting better, and he’s always making you better. You have to keep up with him. And that’s the thing with the three of us: the three of us are basically a group. We have the same approaches to making music… We always push it forward. But the thing about Atmosphere, or one of the things about them, is that they’re always changing on you. They’re always, even from their first record, they are doing curves on you. So they could never do anything that sounded like Seven’s travels, it had to be different. When I was talking to Slug and Ant they were like “man, you have to hear the new Brother Ali album, it’s the craziest shit you’ve ever heard!”. You know… expectations are high. That’s okay. I’m not scared. Haha. But ehm… My new album is a lot more musical. I started playing with this band which is a gathering of very high caliber musicians… and they play free, improvised jazz music. And I freestyled, beatboxed, singed over what they were doing. And that gave me a much bigger appreciation for music, you know… So we have live musicians playing on this album. But musically there’s much more going on, it’s not just samples in a loop. Lyrically there’s a lot more of me... It’s called “The Undisputed Truth” and I just really tried to put myself into those songs… If I made a song about a feeling I had I wanted to pack it with every emotion I’d ever had about that subject. So that when you listen to that song, or when I listen to it, I want to feel that it’s everything I felt about that subject. Even if I can’t say it, I want you to feel it. Like, I have a song about my divorce, and I want you to really feel how it was. It’s not like “fuck you bitch!”… which is way to easy, and it has been done. And that’s my whole thing, that people approach things the exact same way over and over and over again. If someone makes a song about his ex girlfriend they’re either sorry that she left them or they hate her. And my thing is… that it’s different! I mean, I feel good, man, that I made a break-up song that’s not like that. I have a son about my son, and everybody has these songs about their kids… the same sappy shit, but mine is real! I think I wrote a song about a kid that’s different than any other song about a kid that’s been done before. And I don’t know if it’s the best, I’m just saying that it’s mine! All these other motherfuckers are copying each other, not all of them, but most. And I’m not like that. And that’s what I’m proud of more than anything else… You produced your first album “Rites of passage” yourself… That wasn’t really my first album… I started rapping live, at talent shows and school dances and shit like that… and eventually people were starting to ask me when I’d have something that they could take home, cause the same people were coming to watch me all the time. They would start to memorize my songs by watching me perform, but I didn’t really even have them. All these other groups had their cd:s and their albums, and I was like what the fuck ever, so I decided to record them. I don’t want to call it an album though, it was just some songs I recorded. But that was around the time I met Ant, who really encouraged me to do everything myself: he was like “your beats are good, your rapping is good”, so that’s why I made everything myself. And I put everything on a tape, so I didn’t consider it an album. (...) So that was basically how I got with the Rhymesayers as well, by bringing it to them… cause I didn’t believe that they needed someone else! They had so many amazing emcees and b-boys and graff writers and the whole thing… I just brought them that tape and was like “can you give me some advice on this, what do you think, should I put it out or…?” and they were like “we can put that out for you”, and I was like “huh”. And we started talking, until they were like “do you want to be a part of this?” and I’m like “yeah, of course! But I don’t just want to be a part of a thing, I want to be a part of everything the whole way”. And ever since then it’s been on. So do you still produce? I do… I’m not that involved in it though. I don’t study it. I just think it’s fun… But as a producer, do you give Ant feedback?` Yeah, yeah.. A lot of the times I might go “hey, why don’t you change the snares”… or something like that. There’s one song called “Sleep walker”, where I play the bass lines. Little stuff here and there. But it’s equal, cause Ant knows so much about rhyming… he’s like “why don’t you say that instead of that? Like that instead of like that?”. But I don’t focus much on my own beats. I think there will be a time when I’ll do that, and then I think my beats will be really good. I’ve got a lot of friends in Minneapolis and they’re all like “give me a beat, give me a beat!” and I’m like “why? They’re not even that good!”. Haha.