Brother Ali was blackballed over Palestine. Now the rapper is back with a new album.
Twenty-five years after his debut, legendary underground rapper Brother Ali is still challenging American imperialism — no matter the cost to his career.
Hundreds of people pack into a mid-sized concert venue on a cool November evening in San Diego, California. Headlining the concert is hip-hop artist Brother Ali, who is promoting his forthcoming album Satisfied Soulafter rising to prominence more than two decades ago. It’s the final leg of his first tour following what he describes as a year-long industry blackout for his boldly pro-Palestine stance.
“I had a full year, a full calendar year, without a paid show for the first time in my career,” Brother Ali tells Analyst News. “I’ve lost individual things before – I know it’s because of the message. But I’ve never had the faucet turned all the way off like I did last year.”
Halfway into Brother Ali’s performance, a string of bluesy chords begins to play. He addresses the crowd as he prepares to perform his iconic 2007 track “Uncle Sam God Damn,” a searing indictment of America’s entrenched capitalism and imperialism that led to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seizing his funds and Verizon dropping him from a scheduled tour.
“We wrote this song 17 years ago as a show tune,” Brother Ali yells. Over a year into the genocide in Gaza and mere weeks after the re-election of Donald Trump, a sense of revolutionary defiance hangs in the air. “Now we’re living in the show. It becomes more real every day!”
Long before Trump’s presidential aspirations, before Black Lives Matter and the war on terror, Brother Ali stepped on the music scene in the early 2000s as a fresh-faced emcee. As a noted community activist and an early member of Atmosphere’s Rhymesayers Entertainment hip-hop collective, the acclaimed Minneapolis-based independent record label. Brother Ali quickly gained a reputation as one of hip-hop’s most outspoken and profoundly authentic artists for his biting critiques of the U.S. government, white supremacy, and treatment of the working class. Along with his revolutionary politics, Brother Ali’s albinism and legal blindness have made him one of the genre’s most unique, distinguishable, and enduring emcees.
And making it a full year without support from the music industry has only strengthened him.
“I spoke out, I said what I wanted to say, I made the music I wanted to make,” Brother Ali says. “The whole industry walked away from me, including people that love me...I know that they love me personally, but it’s talking about Palestine. But I survived it. I know that I can survive without the music industry participating even a little bit. We can do it.”
Nothing but the truth
In 2000, after several years of making homemade hip-hop in Minneapolis’ independent music scene, Brother Ali recorded a 17-song self-produced demo tape in a hotel room by himself, Rites of Passage. By 2007, he hit a career-high with the success of his sophomore album, The Undisputed Truth. The critically acclaimed album catapulted him from the obscure depths of the underground hip-hop scene and onto mainstream stages.
The album was boosted by the track “Uncle Sam God Damn,” a scathing critique of the U.S. government and American imperialism released during the post-9/11 W. Bush era and at the height of the disastrous Iraq War.
“It was my first song to go viral, it was one of the first underground hip-hop independent songs when YouTube first came around that started getting millions of views on its own, and it wasn’t being played on MTV or BET,” Brother Ali recalls. Today, the music video has more than eight million views on YouTube.
The raw lyrics could have been written yesterday. “Welcome to the United Snakes / Land of the thief, home of the slave / Grand imperial guard where the dollar is sacred and power is God,” Brother Ali drawls over a bluesy beat. “Smoke and mirrors, stripes and stars / Stolen for the cross, in the name of God / Bloodshed, genocide, rape, and fraud / Writ into the pages of the law.”
But there was a price to pay for his honesty. Brother Ali says he was soon dropped from corporate-sponsored tours and events, and that the Department of Homeland Security even intercepted and held funds for the Australian leg of his Undisputed Truth World Tour.
“It’s been 18 years of that, off and on,” he says. “I’ll go through periods where they completely leave me alone.” Despite those ups and downs, the veteran emcee has consistently maintained a steady presence over the decades, releasing new music, touring regularly, even performing on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and at popular festivals such as Coachella and Glastonbury.
But Brother Ali says he faced the greatest pushback yet from the mainstream music industry after voicing support for Gaza since Israel’s genocide in 2023. Since the beginning of his career, Brother Ali has long advocated for Palestinian liberation and used his music to speak out against Israeli apartheid in Gaza and the West Bank.
“I went really hard on social media after Oct. 7,” Brother Ali says. “I posted a big Palestinian flag, and I was just like, ‘Do not forget that these people have been occupied. There have been countless atrocities. They’ve been kicked out of their land, and they’ve been raped, slaughtered, and massacred, with all of the biggest governments in the world backing it up.”
Not only did Brother Ali see all of his social media platforms shadow-banned, he says, but the original distributor for his eighth studio album abruptly pulled out of a deal to distribute both Love & Service and the forthcoming Satisfied Soul. Brother Ali believes the distributor’s unceremonious exit was due to both his and producer unJUST’s unwavering support for Palestine, especially given that company executives were making posts in support of Israel at the same time.
“They’re a major powerhouse in the industry. It’s a company that I’ve done a lot of business with over the years,” Brother Ali tells Analyst News. “We spent a lot of money to start the manufacturing and the publicity, thinking that we’re going to have this distribution partner – and then they just ghosted us.”
Despite having weathered controversies over the years, Brother Ali says he was unprepared for the media blackout he received in 2023 and throughout most of 2024. The veteran emcee even hired a publicist in an effort to see if he was being blacklisted in the industry.
“In our biggest live touring and performing market, the biggest show promoter in that market did a lot to try to make me be quiet and to not talk about Palestine, to not talk about Gaza,” Brother Ali says. He and similar rap artists, including past collaborators such as Immortal Technique, Atmosphere, and Tech N9ne, have performed upwards of 150 shows in a year and – under normal circumstances — could easily do 200 if they wanted to, he says.
“I’m a really well-established and very reliable touring artist. But I didn’t perform one single show for a solid year, and it’s because of insisting on talking about the Palestinians.”
With a new record label and distributor, Mello Music Group, on board, Brother Ali’s ninth studio album reunites him with long-time collaborator Ant of Atmosphere, who produced the entire 17-track record. Satisfied Soul is the duo’s first full-length collaboration since 2017’s “All the Beauty In This Whole Life.” Brother Ali describes the album as a return-to-form project that brings back the duo’s “classic sound” and features what the two artists do best: creating high-level rap music over traditional beats.
Brother Ali’s new Satisfied Soul album comes out Feb. 14, 2025. (Mello Music Group)
The album also promises to dive even further into themes explored by Brother Ali in past projects such as self-reflection and unflinching critiques of the status quo while remaining rooted in hope and defiance. Brother Ali released the first five songs to stream for free following the conclusion of his tour, while the remainder of the album will be available upon its release. “I’m just happy and grateful, so we ended up just making an album about feeling that way,” Ali says of the title.
Satisfied Soulis set to be released on Valentine’s Day — the anniversary of the day that Brother Ali took his shahada and converted to Islam over 30 years ago.
From KRS-One to Malcolm
“Hip-hop is what led me to Islam,” Brother Ali says. “I fell in love with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. I was like, ‘These people seem to be connected to something that’s universal and true, and it seems to have done so much for them. But America thinks it’s the enemy...what are they so afraid of, and why do my heroes seem to believe in it so much?’”
Born Jason Douglas Newman in 1977, Brother Ali hails from a white family in Madison, Wisconsin. From the beginning, his life was filled with adversity. At a young age, his parents separated, and his family moved frequently throughout the Midwest, eventually landing in Minneapolis. Born with albinism, a genetic condition marked by little or no melanin pigment in the skin, hair, and eyes. Brother Ali found himself the target of bullying and teasing from a young age.
“I was always a new kid in school, just really feeling alone, like an outsider, feeling like I didn’t have any place to fit in,” Brother Ali recalls. “I had a really particularly bad year with just being dehumanized and spoken about like I wasn’t a person because of looking different, and also the disability stuff that comes along with it.”
But even as his family tried to help him hide his unpigmented hair and red eyes with hair dye and tinted glasses (an experience specifically chronicled in his song “Pray For Me”), Brother Ali found belonging and acceptance within the Black community. It was a critical juncture in how he viewed himself and the world.
“All of the important people in my life from the time I was like seven, eight years old on and were Black, and I didn’t have a community before that,” Brother Ali recalls. “I went to school, and there was a Black woman who worked at the school that used music to teach me about culture, history, race relations, and things like that.”
She taught Brother Ali about the “Black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s when Black artists began wearing afros and natural hair, he recalls. “She said, ‘You know, in order to be free we had to accept ourselves and learn to love ourselves the way we are and not change our appearance to look more like the people that were oppressing us and that had enslaved us,’” Brother Ali says. “That really resonated with me.”
By the time he was a teenager, Minneapolis, like many other cities across the country, was in the throes of the crack cocaine epidemic. Witnessing the crime and gang violence that was afflicting many inner-city neighborhoods during the early ‘90s, as well as the disproportionate over-policing of communities of color during the “tough on crime” era was a crucial early lesson for Brother Ali. “The way that the world is in America to white people and to nonwhite people is not the same, and there’s wisdom associated with that,” he says. “That started me on the understanding that different people are experiencing the world differently. So I think that started me down the road of expressing myself like that.”
Heavily inspired by the Afrocentric messaging and references to the teachings of the 5 Percenters and the Nation of Islam peppered throughout the lyrics of various hip-hop artists during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, rap would eventually bring Brother Ali to Islam. During an encounter with rapper KRS-One, who was lecturing at a local college in Minneapolis, the acclaimed Boogie Down Productions frontman recommended that Brother Ali — then just 13 years old — read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a recommendation which set a young Brother Ali on a life-changing trajectory. At the age of 15, Brother Ali took the shahadah and converted to Islam.
“Hip-hop music, in the beginning when I got into it, was not mainstream — only a certain subculture of people really listened to it, and what everybody believed about it wasn’t true,” Brother Ali says.
“So my whole life is just finding so much beauty and truth in places that people misunderstand. It’s feeling already out of place, and then finding a home in places that my country and society don’t necessarily respect or appreciate. [That] has just been the story of my life.”
