Music with a message — unity, bigotry, frustration — there’s no wonder Brother Ali is called a street preacher.
He disagrees.
“To preach, in my mind, is to tell you what you are supposed to be doing, or what you’re supposed to be thinking, or what you’re doing or thinking isn’t right,” he said. “And I’ve never ever done that — not one line, nothing, where I’ve ever done that. It’s just my feelings toward things.”
Brother Ali will grab the mike on stage at the Industry, 211 Iowa Ave., at 6 p.m. today with Evidence, Toki Wright, and Bk-One opening. Admission ranges from $15 to $16.
The rapper came to fame in the underground hip-hop scene a few years ago after emerging with his autobiographical rhymes. He spread his story of divorce, being an albino, and blindness. Many different people identified with his turmoil — something Brother Ali didn’t even expect.
“Initially, I just wanted to be the baddest rapper who ever lived,” he said. “But the people who I’ve always looked up to the most are who made me believe in something — or made me want to grow as a person. Music that was trying to expand me.”
On his new album, Us, which dropped Tuesday, Brother Ali has expanded beyond his personal message and delivered other people’s anecdotes. He wrote the record hoping listeners could connect with the lyrics as well as they did in the past.
“I wanted to tell stories of different walks of life — like a drug dealer, or a kid who’s gay in an All-American Christian conservative family, or people who live in the hood,” he said. “I wanted to tell all these things in a personal way in order to tie them together — the humanity in all these situations.
That’s why I called the album Us, because my former albums were about me, but this one’s not about me — it’s about us.”
Some consider Brother Ali’s label, Rhymesayers Entertainment, as the next big record label in hip-hop music — and he feels fortunate to help spearhead that.
“Rhymesayers has always grown organically and naturally, and we take the next natural steps, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do,” Brother Ali said. “Whether that means we’re going to end up being a huge label or whatever. It’s going to be whatever the natural thing is for us to do.”
Industry booking agent Doug Roberson points to thoughtful lyricism as the main reason for Rhymesayers’ success.
“It’s a lot more intelligent — it’s not about gin and juice,” Roberson said. “They’re addressing some social issues and other things that are helping the world, doing what Dylan did to pop music. He gave it a lot more relevance instead of creating cotton-candy throwaway lyrics. They’re just trying to write songs that mean something.”
Beyond the complications of labels, lyrics, or rhymes, Brother Ali simply wants to bring people together. He points to Us’s cover artwork — featuring black and white silhouettes of an eclectic group of people — as a reminder that we all are the same.
“Human genetics and DNA are 98 percent identical, so you’re dealing with 2 percent of genetics and DNA that’s different,” the rapper said. “But those [2 percent] are the smallest details, but those are things we choose to focus on. Everybody has something to bring to the table, and everybody has a story to be heard. Some of the main people with stories we can learn the most from are the people we listen to the least.”