Over a career that has spanned almost two decades, rapper and producer Brother Ali has consistently entwined and then unbraided his personal life and his politics. His catalog has oscillated inwards and outwards accordingly. He’s never ditched social commentary, but there are certain Brother Ali records that feel like deliberate self-care. At one point on his new album, he concedes, “If I’m trying to get out here and protest/Let me first save the world from my foolishness.” Five years after the emcee turned in a record that felt like an active duty report from the front lines, he’s flipped the spotlight back on himself, thumbing through his life in intimate detail.
All the Beauty in This Whole Life finds Ali rekindling his long-running collaboration with Atmosphere producer Ant, and together they’ve crafted a purposefully uplifting sound. Throughout, Ali focuses on familiar topics: his family, his religion, his travels. Ant’s production is sparse but effective, dovetailing a few instruments at a time into basic soul and boom-bap numbers. At worst, the music sounds painted by numbers, but Ant still has plenty capacity for inventive, funky simplicity. It’s a style that fits Ali, who raps from his belly and puffs his voice up and out of his chest, stringing together sneakily sing-song couplets.
“Own Light (What Hearts Are For)” brims with direct but triumphant turns of phrase: “I know who I am, I know whose I am/On your wings I fly, in your shoes I stand,” he raps. Other songs reach for the same effect and miss the mark, like the mundane “Can’t Take That Away.” Ali’s poeticism snowballs into corniness, as he spills, “I love you and there’s nothing you can do it about it/I love you right through all your human problems.”
Other songs leverage a darker edge in sound and subject matter. For all his dramatic catharsis, Ali rarely laments his own existence, but on “Pray for Me,” he recounts his tormented childhood struggle with Albinism in depressing detail—from the trips to the salon his mother arranged to dye his hair to the specifics of the schoolyard taunts he endured. On “Dear Black Son,” he speaks directly to his son Faheem over a murmuring piano beat. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing diary Ali has dedicated to his firstborn, providing explicit guidance as much as lovingly hoping for the best. “I can’t protect you like I want to,” he raps.
There’s an occasional return to proselytizing that can run dry. On “The Bitten Apple,” Ali preaches about the damages of pornography, and on “Before They Called You White,” he breaks down the social construct of whiteness in America. Sometimes his lucidity can feel like a lesson plan, and once his point is made, it’s hard to reason returning to the track. The opposite is true of a song like “Uncle Usi Taught Me,” in which Ali finds himself stranded in Iran after speaking at a conference, only to return home to suspicious TSA agents (“Imagine my exhausted embarrassment/Got back to America, they interrogate me like a terrorist”).
Ali is at his best when he doesn’t have all the answers, and nothing draws out the uncertainty more than his most self-reflective songs. On “Out of Here,” he sounds lost, trying to come to terms with his own life in the context of the suicides of both his father and grandfather. “Every man before me in my fam/Died by his own hand/How am I supposed to understand my own role in the plan?” he wonders. This kind of raw humanity, which is sometimes eclipsed by his political ambitions, is much welcomed on All the Beauty. “I’m a man not a brand,” he raps at one point, seemingly reminding himself as much as listeners. *All the Beauty *jolts that sentiment into perspective. It’s both sharp-tongued and warm hearted, an LP-length memoir that dabbles in political manifesto. But it comes over like an album Ali made for himself, and he sounds better off because of it.
