"NO OTHER AMERICAN WHITE KID TOOK THEM AS SERIOUSLY AS I DID..."

"You said you were in 207? 'Cause I knocked on the door and no one answered."
"Yeah, it should be," Brother J replies from his hotel room in the atrium of the Holiday Inn in Lawrence, KS. "Hang on… …my bad, brother its 407." "It's all good."

I'm standing in the lobby and I can seem peering over the balcony now from his fourth floor hotel room and I take the stairs up. He greets me at the door with a hand gesture, patting an open palm to hischest.
Inside the dimly lit room lies a few open beverages, an assortment of luggage and papers, and some new children's clothes scattered around the bed. Noticing me look at them he tells me, "They're some new clothes for my son."
Brother J is a very dynamic individual. He has a different energy about him that a newer artist wouldn't possess. He represents a lot of history in hip-hop as well as in America and simultaneously represents a distinct tendency of hip-hop music. Alongside the history of Brother J is the black student/black consciousness movement of the late 80s/early 90s, Sonny Carson, Yusef Hawkins, etc.
I grew up on X-Clan's music. My Mother bought me their second album in 1992 titled Xodus and, needless to say, I loved it. I loved the cultural dress, the jackin'-for-beats sound, and the repetitious braggadocio that was their signature style. I loved Professor X's sign-off, "Vanglorious! This is protected by the red, the black, and the green, with a key, Sissyyyyyyyyy!"

I have an overwhelming feeling of confidence in proclaiming that no other American white kid took them as seriously as I did. I was sold on pork-chop nationalism. I rocked the kufis, dashikis, and even converted to Islam. Now, X-Clan, in and of themselves, certainly do not bear the responsibility for such a complete makeover, but that era, that movement, and its music—and X-Clan representing for me the mature outgrowth of my white, alienated, afrocentric radicalism—perpetuated my angst of the mundane existence that was white America.

Of course, at twelve years old, race was a binary, colonial structure and whites and blacks alike being homogenous, reciprocal units.
Whites representing, in chaste Fanonian ilk, the oppressive colonizer group and blacks, the enslaved, subjugated lost tribe of Shabazz.
I have obviously changed a lot in the last fourteen years, but being in the same room with Brother J gives me a comfortable sense of familiarity.
Wasting no time, I jump right in.

"How did the passing of Sugar Shaft affect the group as a whole?"

"It was hard because, you know, for a person, to work with other producers they're not going to have that kind of flow that someone that's been with you half your life has had, you know what I'm saying, so on that level it hurt me.
"I celebrate him every time I come on stage, man."

Shaft passed away the same year as Eazy-E, in 1995, for the same cause: complications from the AIDS virus. With both Shaft and now, since March of 2006, Professor X deceased, I inquired about his production on the new album slated for the 31st of October, and titled Return From Mecca.

"On that project," the Dark Sun Riders album, Seeds of Evolution, which was released the same year Shaft died, "I introduced some of the producers and now that production team is now, probably about ten times more than what I represented with M.A.T.E. and Ultraman."

DJ M.A.T.E. and Ultraman are both members of Dark Sun Riders and Ultraman is involved with the new X-Clan project.

"So, now we have Fat Jack in the house and we have DJ Orator and Pro Mic and Bean One; there's so many different cats, man, that are coming to contribute their energy that have wanted to contribute to conscious music and have never had the opportunity to do it on a real mantle."

J excused himself a couple of times to go next door to converse with his tour mates. My curiosity eventually overcame me and I asked him, "Who's over there?"

"My partners Fat Jack and Zulu."
"No shit?"
"Yeah, you wanna meet them?"
"Of course."
Next door Fat Jack and Zulu are posted up in house clothes watching the tube.
"Do you know we are?" asks Fat Jack in an inquisitive tone.
"Are you kidding me? I've been banging y'alls shit for like eight years or more."
I began rattling off various ATU albums; Mood Pieces, Underground Fossils, and Thynk Taynk, much to their impression. They were caught off guard by my knowledge of them and I was surprised by theirs. I guess they weren't used to folks being familiar with their work outside of LA.
Zulu approaches me and states, "I give this to all X-Clan family." He instructs me to cross his forearm with mine, symbolizing an 'X', while making a fist. He then tells me to open the palm, and then conclude the greeting by forming another fist.

Settling back in to J's room, we proceed with the interview.
"What precipitated your transition in the Dark Sun Riders project both spiritually and politically because there was an obvious shift. I'm really curious to know what things influenced that shift. Can you talk about that a little bit?"

"Yes, when I did the Dark Sun Riders I started to experiment with different levels of production. Usually when people listen to X-Clan they're used to having samples and the Dark Sun is probably the first time they've ever heard me outside of sampled breaks."

"Holy Rum Swig" and "A.D.A.M." spring to mind with their head-nodding, lockstep patterns and "Impeach The President" breaks. They were some of their more notable tracks. It was in the Dark Sun Riders album that I noticed a change in Brother J. There was much less emphasis on cultural nationalism albeit the stressing of spiritualism carried over. DJ M.A.T.E., one of the producers was also white. These seemed like unthinkable moves during X-Clan's prominence.

"We're too far in the game to think separatist on any level, you know, on a racism level or any level," Brother J states soberly.

J digs into one of his bags and pulls out a couple of his new mixtape CDs. The opening song contains a excerpt from a Malcolm X speech and, were normally it would be something from his Nation of Islam days, was instead a post-NOI utterance, "I will work with anyone, I don't care what color they are, as long as they want to change the miserable condition that exists on this Earth."

It has been a hobby of mine to write about the era from which Brother J departs. I have maintained for several years now and this has been supported from many sources including Dr. Lester K. Spence of blacksmythe.com, that the black consciousness music that characterized that epoch in America was the result of the movement of black students against Apartheid and other forms of racism at home and abroad.

Relentlessly looking for an answer to my theory, I asked J about his perception of why there is an absence of the categorically political hip-hop we think of when considering the late 80 and early 90s.

"Everybody thinks that, you know, that X-Clan broke up because of internal problems or whatever case may be and, you know, there's a thing about growth, the mold of X-Clan, I wanted to expand it further and now with the group that started with just myself and Shaft there were other elements included and you know, it's a thing of when the baton passes from eldership to the next generation there's a little struggle before the baton is released and this is real because I want people to understand X-Clan was a real family."

At first misunderstanding my question, I posed it again hoping to avoid his irritation and he eventually replied, "The era changed because the people shifted."
"Thank you for saying that," I state with conviction.

Since it is completely impossible to separate X-Clan from the epoch in American history from which they sprang, it makes it quite difficult in locating their relevancy in popular hip-hop today. Curious for his response I asked him how he would attempt to make it relevant again.

"We wanna make it as quality as cats when they go into the club and expect something quality from, you know, whatever thug cat is number one; if it be a 50 Cent, you know, if it be Slim Thug, whatever it is we wanna present that same quality. Those cats got some banging ass tracks."
"I'm glad to hear you say that."

"Yeah, man, its great production, man, I don't diss on the production at all. It's just, I just think the music is out of place, you know, where it's being programmed. I think the programmers are really creating the civil war between conscious music and, you know, what they call thug music."

While I disagree with this characterization of modern hip-hop, I was relieved that he was open to its possibilities. Pressing on, I asked him about Chamillionaire's newest single, "Ridin' Dirty".
"Everybody who feels threatened when their riding and gets harassed should support that song."