Q&A with Brother Ali

A lyrical artist like Brother Ali should be considered more of a hip-hop philosopher rather than an emcee. The Rhymesayer artist is set to release his upcoming album, Mourning In America and Dreaming In Color this week and has a lot to say. He took the time to speak with Urbanology Magazine about the upcoming project, as well as his new tour, to let his fans know what he has been up to and what to expect.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO NAME YOUR UPCOMING PROJECT MOURNING IN AMERICA AND DREAMING IN COLOR? It kind of came together, because I was in a place where I was really blue and feeling heavy and weighed down by a lot of stuff in my own personal life. But really the climate and the situation socially that we have right now, it’s really troublesome – so much despair, so much pain, so much death. It seems like the public conversation is going in the wrong direction. We’re really caught up talking about ornamental things and not really talking about root causes for a lot of the pain. I really felt like Obama had the right message and was the right candidate in ’08. I contributed a lot of time and money and energy into speaking and canvasing, knocking on doors and all of that and the direction that things have continued to go since then just left me feeling really helpless in a way and not sure about what to do about what was going on and so I said I was going to make an album called, Mourning In America and shift the conversation to things that I thought should be talked about. Now, while that was going on, I also had personal reasons for that too. In 2010, I spent 10 months on the road; I married and had kids so that almost broke my family up. My father passed away and my good friend and label-mate passed away, both while I was on tour… All of these things going on at the same time were adding to that feeling as well, so at the end of that year, I made my pilgrimage to Mecca and really felt like I had a new chance to kind of re-align my life to what my priorities are. I decided that I wanted to take a year off the road, go home and make an album and do the things in the community that I always wanted to do… Just re-claim my life a little bit, so I came home and did that… I came to this sense of hope that in this bad time that we’re in, a lot of people are falling into poverty, but at the same time, we are seeing people now who used to feel like they were above all of this pain, now they’re in it and there are new alliances being made between race and class that I’ve never seen happen before; seeing people work together now, because the situation has put them in proximity to each other. So I said, forget Mourning In America, I’m going to make an album about the possibilities out here and I’m going to call it Dreaming In Color. Overtime, I realized that they were both necessary; dealing with the pain and suffering and also the hope and the possibilities for change all on one project.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THIS PROJECT AND THE MUSIC YOU HAVE PUT OUT IN THE PAST? This is my first album that is mainly a social/political album, where in the past, everything has just been really personal. I had political moments on other albums and I had personal moments on this album, but the theme shifted, definitely.
WHAT EXCITES YOU MOST ABOUT PUTTING OUT THIS NEW PROJECT? There was a period in rap where you were literally only allowed to talk about four subjects and I think we’re starting to see a re-surface of people, not necessarily categorized as conscious or political, but we’re just seeing the kids that are coming out now are just smart and insightful people. I feel like there’s more space to talk about music now. I think the timing is really good.
WHAT DO YOU MISS MOST ABOUT BEING ON TOUR? The tour life is the time that you’re on stage, which is a spiritual and transcendental thing if you put all of yourself into it and try to do it in an artistic way, connecting with the people on stage. Our following, they call it a cult following, but it’s really a personal connection that we have with people.