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Brother Ali – Telling the Truth
THE MAN IS ABOUT HIS FAMILY, POLITICKING ON A GLOBAL SCALE, PUTTING OUT GOOD HIP-HOP. BUT MOST OF ALL BROTHER, ALI NEWMAN IS ABOUT TRUTH – THE DANGEROUS TRUTH. A HIGH-CALIBRE WEAPONRY OF KNOWLEDGE FIRED INTO ANOTHER DOPE ALBUM. ROUNDING OFF HIS US TOUR, NEWMAN RAPS WITH RIP NICHOLSON ON HALLOWEEN, WITH NO TRICKS OR TREATS.
Brother Ali interviewed for Rip2Shredz // Street Press Australia // Hiphop.sh@ 08.00 AEST – 31st October, 2012
Hey man, thanks for taking the time out. What’s going down?
This is the last of the US tour, the last tour for over two months and this is the last show.
How is it all going for you?
Amazing man, really, really good.
As we open this interview on Halloween, is Brother Ali more trick or treat as an artist?
Neither. I’m the truth. I don’t got no tricks involved at all. You know, treats are tricks. Pop music is a treat. Pop music gives you want they want. the job of a pop artists is to observe what you want and give it you whether it’s good or not. Whether it’s drugs or driving drunk, and a pop artist will make a song about that. Whatever’s the popular thing, that’s what they give you even if it’s something bad for you as long as you respond. What i do is neither of that. I provide the truth.
WHEN YOU WERE GROWING UP STUDYING YOUR WHITE HISTORY DID YOU FEEL A SENSE OF BEING ASHAMED OF THAT HISTORY?
I don’t think we as individuals ought to be ashamed for something that we personally aren’t doing. The reality is that we should feel ashamed if we live in this society that gives us this unfair advantage and we don’t do anything to try to counteract it or work against it. Because whether we want to or not, because we live in a racialised class system that’s highly competitive that gets ahead by hindering everybody else that if we don’t nothing and collaborate with it and we practise it every time. So the question becomes, do we allow it to continue that way or do we actually love people and do we care about people more than we care about this unfair and unjust advantage we have. So the degree at which we allow ourselves to be a part of that, a silent party to that then we should feel ashamed. if we dedicate ourselves to an honest assessment of who we really are with a real situation in the world, then we can acknowledge the truth and tell the truth and make ourselves soldiers in the war for justice, then there is nothing to be ashamed about. The reality is, doing nothing is collaborating. But we chose not see it and only see what we wanna see. The reality is, in order for us to acknowledge the truth and tell the truth we have to assess who we are because so much of the system is based on a lie about ourselves and based on a lie that somehow we are superior to people who don’t look like us. And that we are morally and intellectually superior, that our knowledge is better than their wisdom, that we’ve caused progress within the human family is based on a lot of lies. And those lies are directly applied to the assessment of ourselves, to the picture we have of ourselves. The rest of the world doesn’t see it that way and that’s the self-projected image that we have of ourselves. We have to reexamine who we are. So i think when people talk about shame or guilt, i think that’s fear of just seeing ourselves for the truth of what we really are. We’re human beings just like everybody else who have inherited an enormous legacy of, you know, suffering and pain. We have a long road ahead to gain our humanity and to rejoin the human family again. With the hope that the human family will accept us back in the family because we left.
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