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See Something Say Something

Episode 38: Beauty Is The Splendor Of Truth, With Brother Ali

See Something Say Something

Ahmed Ali Akbar

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8550 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2017

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brother Ali's been on a break from making music — in the five years since his last album, he's travelled the world, studying up with traditional Islamic scholars and deciding whether hip-hop was still his purpose in life. The end product of that was his most recent album, All The Beauty in This Whole Life, his most spiritual work yet. Ali talks to Ahmed about prioritizing beauty, struggling with judgement within radical and mosque communities, and how KRS-One is a hip-hop sahaba. Plus, Ahmed reads some listener mail.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey everybody, I'm Amadale Yuckber, and this is See Something Say Something.

0:04.6

This week we're going to be talking to rapper Brother Ali about how he came off of a five-year

0:09.2

hiatus from making music to produce his most recent album, and we're going to respond to some listener mail.

0:15.4

If you see something, you better, you better say something.

0:21.6

Nothing at all, nothing at all.

0:26.6

So Brother Ali is a Midwestern rapper who's been on the scene for over a decade and a half.

0:33.6

He's just released his first album in five years, All the Beauty in This Whole Life,

0:38.1

and by his own admission, it's a much more spiritual album.

0:42.3

And he credits that to what he's been doing during the break, studying and developing relationships

0:46.4

with this very popular group of American traditionalist scholars who are conversant in traditional

0:52.8

Islamic learning but also can talk academia and liberation

0:56.6

theology. And we wanted to catch up with him about that experience. Welcome, Brother Ali. Thank you.

1:04.2

I'm happy to be here. So you released your album in May. Cinco de Mayo. It's a really personal

1:09.2

album. There's a lot of stories that

1:10.9

You know sort of like chart your life

1:12.5

The first song, pen to paper

1:14.5

You tell the story about KRS 1

1:17.2

Giving you the autobiography of Malcolm X

1:19.3

When I was 13 I met KRS

1:21.8

You put me on a stage suggested

1:23.7

I read up on Malcolm X

1:25.2

Why do you keep coming back to it? How did it impact you? Why do you keep coming back to it?

...

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