Albino rapper trumps race with rhymes
July 18th, 2007 by Sam
When he was starting out in the rap business, Brother Ali quickly learned how much skin color matters.
“I started sitting down for interviews and journalists would say, ‘Are you black or white?’” recalled Ali, who is albino. “I’d ask them, ‘What do you think?’”
For the record, Ali is Caucasian. But his lack of skin color made it easier to create ambiguity and avoid the label of white rapper — a tempting proposition for a man who grew up feeling accepted by black kids and mistreated by his white classmates.
“It’s not like black kids didn’t make fun of me, but it was different,” said Ali, 29, who was born Jason Newman. “It wasn’t done in a way to exclude me. It wasn’t done in a way to make me feel like not even a human being, not even a person.”
It was through friendships with black people, first in Detroit and later Minneapolis, that Ali found the two outlets that have helped defuse his outsider rage — hip-hop and Islam. That, in turn, has helped him create music that’s reaching an ever-widening audience: Rolling Stone magazine recently praised his “super-agile flow” and proclaimed that his new album, “The Undisputed Truth,” should “go down as one of ’07’s best rap records.”
But Ali said it’s not about making hit songs. His rhymes are his release, a way to process a rough childhood and reach out to listeners who’ve suffered in their own ways.
“What I’m saying is real from my heart, and so if it connects for somebody else, that’s a real connection we have no matter who we are,” Ali said. “What I’m saying is real to me, so if it means something to you then what we have is a real thing.”
“I’ve always been a big kid, a chubby kid,” said Ali, who is also legally blind, a condition common to albinos. “I had this long white hair, and I didn’t really have the greatest clothes. I just looked strange.”
But Ali discovered early on a love for performing and dancing, which he was never afraid to showcase at school assemblies and events. It was a way, he said, to call attention to himself for something other than his unusual appearance, and he was a good enough performer that it helped him find friends who were similarly interested in break-dancing and hip-hop.