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Ali the Prime Minister: Big Poppa is Notorious
by INDEPENDENT STAFF
August 2004
What strikes fear into the heart of Ron “Ali the Prime Minister” White as he walks, sullen-mouthed and Versace sunglassed, down Tenth Street just after 1 a.m.? The cops? The probe? The bulge of the keys to his Lexus GS300?
“There's nothing to fear but God,” he says, but just for good measure he pauses to let the tall man who may or may not be following him walk past, ahead. Out of eyeshot. “You know what?” Ali continues, walking again. “I actually don't fear black people anymore. I used to fear black people. I thought they were after my money, out to rob me, out to take advantage of me.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, he adds, “And I used to fear the Feds.”
It is the Feds, after all, who have made his father, Ronald A. White, the city's most notorious black man, listening in on the White family's cell phone conversations, leaving business cards at the White family's various houses, finally, late this June, charging him with enough counts of fraud and conspiracy to put him away for the next 555 years.
But his son, Ali the Prime Minister, does not fear black people, or the Feds, any longer.
There is only one thing in the world he is afraid of.
“On the day of Judgement Allah will decide whether all of us have been righteous.”
In preparation Ali, who also goes by ‘PrimeMini', or just ‘Mini', has given up premarital sex, pinot grigio and cigarettes. It would not quite be accurate to call him “humble,” but he is inscrutably serene. He has a kind of peace.
It was Allah's will, he realizes, that his upbringing was, like that of his father, a constant altercation between “streets” and suburbs, “rock and a hard place.” But where Ron White the Elder led a gang in the Richard Allen homes and later became the leader of the ultra-exclusive revenue source that is providing I-dotting and T-crossing services for the city's official pleas for Wall Street loans, Ron White the Younger was more of a follower. The youngest of three White children growing up on the right side of Germantown, Ali trailed his older sisters in the achievement department and, first inspired by a Cool G Rap album he heard in the fifth grade, he became a dillettantish “student of the streets” across the Avenue in the more dilapidated section of “the G.”
The streets were not the most merciful of tutors. Although onetime Temple Law School Dean Carl Singley described Ali's father as a man who “never stopped being a guy from the streets in his mind,” and the elder White himself has blamed the federal probe on prosecutors' inability to “understand African American culture,” Ali could not as seamlessly reconcile his class with his race. His friends from the G weren't always his real friends; his girlfriend was even less so. “She just saw what my family had and she wanted that,” he explains. Ali himself could not provide it, however. So after she gave birth to his son and he went away to Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, she began courting men in more lucrative lines of work. “I don't know who she's seeing anymore,” he says now. Ali's mother, Aruby Odom-White, a psychiatrist whose stakes in a dozen airport concessions drew the interest of federal investigators earlier this year, found time to raise their son Naim.
For his part, Ali was embarking upon that middle-class rite-of-passage, the collegiate finding of the true self. He was learning more about hip-hop, purchasing a sampler and some studio time, recording tracks. His sister Santi, who was writing songs for an up-and-coming “cerebral soul” singer Res, emboldened him to pursue life in the music business. He befriended the minister Mason “Mase” Betha, the rapper with middle-class roots who left the music industry to pursue a mathematics degree, found a non-denominational church, and officiate at hip-hop industry weddings. Although Ali's infatuation with the streets had long endured, he had met in Mase a rapper who understood what he himself is now beginning to understand:
“What you had going on in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s ... the 50s ... the 60s, the 70s, the 80s and the 90s ... you had a drift. A drift away from chastity, from purity … ”
“Ali!” The man with dreadlocks in line outside Old City's Red Sky on a recent Sunday night lit up, his warm smile and firm handshake for the moment seeming to send a loose electron of good vibrations through the rigid, dress-coded molecules aligned around the velvet rope.
“Oh, this guy Ali, he was the master!” the man tells his friend. Red Sky's bouncing team, which has already granted Ali water-bottle-only access to its admittedly-empty-but-ordinarily-bottle-service-only V.I.P. lounge tonight grows visibly annoyed. “He knew how to do business! Ali, man! Call me, okay! It's been forever!”
“That's a guy from G.F.S.,” Ali explains matter-of-factly as we head back to his car, referencing the Germantown Friends High School from which he graduated in 1996. “He was talking about my skill with the ladies.” Ali smiles the distant smile of a man who has more important things to which to tend these days than ladies, a man who tonight aired thoughts such as, “It's like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah out there,” and “What I really want to do is build a mosque,” and “My personality is infinite.” One trait that Ali and his father share is demonstrable skill with ladies. Although he stands a mere 5'7”, Ron White the Elder won the affections of myriad girls back at Richard Allen and even at 53 was holding down relationships, celebrating anniversaries and entering into business partnerships with two women.
But Ali was slightly taller and his emotions slightly more fragile than those of his father, and few of our early conversations did not involve a reference to Naim's mother. “A shout out to my baby's mom, ‘cause that hurt, bitch,” he railed over an extended Coldplay sample on “Mamadrama,” the first album he recorded upon returning to Philadelphia—and his unfaithful girlfriend—in 2002. The same album recounts his experience working as a popcorn vendor at the Philadelphia International Airport. The job came courtesy Ali's father, who former aviation officials say unofficially ran concessions contracts at the airport, was, as food service positions run, fairly sought-after. It did not, however, win the respect of Ali's baby's mama.
These days, to make money and release the creative energies untapped by writing lyrics such as “But see I'm all about the money, silly bunny, and me giving you money, it sounds too funny”, Ali paints shirts. He has painted hundreds of T-shirts and feminine wifebeaters for his eponymous clothing line, motto: “For those who are a little more abstract.” Ali shirts are painted with Tulip fabric paints, as is the style made popular by the local T-shirt company Miskeen, but as Ali says, his T-shirt designs are more … abstract. Some of them say, “Fear Allah,” but Ali says he does not want to “turn off” prospective customers of other religions. Now most of the shirts are decorated with clusters of squiggly lines. He has no plans to hire other painters. “I'm trying to keep it real exclusive.”
As his father has gone through the unique experience of reporter call after FBI interview after reporter call after incriminating headline, Ali has mulled numerous theories and parallels to his dad's predicament. “It's just like Martha Stewart,” he said at one point in March. “A woman who bakes cakes getting punished for the people she knew.” Later he said his dad was “being punished for helping too many people.” After he began devoting more of his time to Islam, an FBI agent left a business card at his apartment, and Ali proclaimed the whole thing a “War on Islam.” (Ali's father is by some accounts a Muslim, although he is less devout than his son.) But by the time Ali was ready to let people hear his latest disc, he seemed to be taking his father's ordeal with a sense of humor. “Should I call it ‘Al-Harraam (The Forbidden) Ali the Primeminister as Sam Rothstein'? Because it kind has a Rothstein kinda theme to it,” he polled a list of his friends in a June email. “But ... don't want to alarm the FBI (smirk).”
Ali eventually titled the album The Last Days Before the Deen, the Last Days Before the Indictment —the first clause referring to his conversion to strict Islam and the second, of course, to the probe. After this album, Ali says, he will no longer use profanity.
"Maybe if I double that / Hit the block hard Bring the triple stack / then I'll be kosher Dickhead, we like cosa notra But all the fiends like coca coca Lovers, I get uptown loca But all these bitches like stroke my chocha."
Ali admits Last Days does not represent where he'd like to be right now; it's more, he says, a final love letter to the streets and the mobster lifestyle he once found so enticing. “I want to start being ahead of the curve in my music,” he explains. Right now, he estimates, he is as much as a year behind the curve. His plans to start performing spiritual hip-hop actually dovetail pretty well with the crest of the current curve being molded by another college-educated, middle-class reared God-fearing rapper, the ubiquitous Kanye West. “I would like to write a response to ‘Jesus Walks,'” he says, explaining that it is important for scripturally inclined hip-hop listeners to know that Mohammed, too, walked.
But, scratch that: Ali does not need to be ahead of the curve. Only Allah, after all, knows what the future holds for him. If it is Allah's will, he will figure out the curve. It is more than enough, he says, to remain righteous.
And he would really like to sell enough T-shirts to move out of Germantown as soon as possible.
“It took me a long time to figure out that the streets were one big nothing,” he says. “Because, you know, black people can make anything look so graceful.”
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