Last year, you released "Hot Funk in the Summertime" (2024) and "Funk is Alive" (2024), describing the tracks as a return to your roots. "Hot Funk in the Summertime" in particular you cited as an homage to Sly & the Family Stone. You even quoted them in "Our World is on Fire" (2020). How did they first make an impression on you?

 

That's a great question. First of all, I was blessed to come of age at a time when musicians and artists had the responsibility of waking the world up. Sly & The Family Stone did it in a major, major way. They made people stop, look, and listen to what Black people were trying to say. They did it with painting pictures with the lyrics and the music. It just made a statement and it spoke to me.

 

Sly, P-Funk, Ohio Players. There was a lot of really, really serious funk music happening at the time. It had an impression on me. I think one of the reasons why I returned to that is, no disrespect to hip hop, but funk is kind of the roots of hip hop. Without funk, I don't think there would be hip hop. I really got a little bit tired of the sort of misrepresentation, the disrespect, and marginalization of funk. I saw hip hop being glorified and rappers are like gods. I'm thinking, Funk musicians, creators — are we chopped liver? I don't think so.

 

One thing I kind of miss right now is the power that Sly had. Think about it — "You Can Make it If You Try," "Everyday People" — some of the songs that just dominated the airwaves that spoke to everybody. I always think about James Brown, "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" In my neighborhood, because I was in the projects, that was all you heard. That's when I realized how powerful music can be. 

 

The powerful thing about funk music is that it makes you move but the lyrics that you're singing along to can be empowering on a subconscious level. You may not even know how it's affecting you. As Sly's saying "I Want to Take You Higher," it elevates something .. 

 

... It's consciousness. People think oh, it's drugs. No, it's consciousness. Listen to the lyrics of those songs. They're going deep. The lyrics to these things are just so profound. It makes you think outside the box. A lot of people don't understand the well of artists that these things originally come from.

 

How did you discover your specific voice as a musician, songwriter, and vocalist? 

 

My specific voice, believe or not, I think I discovered that later in life. I think, in the beginning, I thought I had a very specific voice and I had a very individualized sort of style, but I was in a band — Grand Central. I was pretty much a major part of putting that band together. Most of the people that were in the band were people that I brought in the band, William the percussionist, my sister played keyboards, Morris played drums, Terry Jackson played percussion, and then me and Prince. 

 

When Prince's record came out first, it kind of kneecapped me a little bit because it was part of our whole band's thing and then when I did it, people thought, Oh you're trying to copy Prince. I thought that was the most absurd thing I'd ever heard. I really took offense at first because if they knew me, they'd realize that that is absolutely preposterous. I take individuality extremely personally. I did back then and I do now. 

 

I think because of that, when I came out, I thought, I'm just going to make a whole different statement and so I decided to do new wave. It was technologically inspired music. Nobody, especially Black at that time, was doing anything like that. I just wanted to make my own statement and try to separate myself from the things that I was a part of creating back when we first started, so I created that. It was different.

 

My record company was like, "Why can't you just do what everybody else is doing?" Why would I do that? That just doesn't make sense. I have friends who are doing that. If I want to do that, obviously, I can do that. We went round and round. It really got to the point where some of the people at the record labels were kind of disrespectful. I got into a big thing: you're not going to put a mustache on my Mona Lisa! I stormed out. I just stopped doing it for myself. I think I took like a 27-year hiatus and then produced other people and helped other artists realize their individual dreams and then I came back. My wife kind of encouraged me to get back into the game.

 

I think the times also helped me get back into the game because [the murder of] Trayvon Martin happened and I felt compelled to speak out on that because, at the time, nobody else was speaking out. In fact, I put a lot of artists and athletes on blast and said, "You guys have these platforms ..." If I had that platform, believe me, I'd be speaking out and I just didn't understand why they weren't. I think the response was "I don't have a dog in this race." Yes you do ... and here we are now. I think everybody has a dog in this race. People eventually started speaking out but that's what motivated me to get back in the game, and then I realized I kind of have a thing for this. I actually enjoy writing songs. I wrote a song for Freddie Gray. I started writing songs to try to get people out to vote, using music as a platform to bring awareness to what's going on in the world. I realize this is a gift that I have and I should try to get people motivated, so that became something important to me. 

 

And that goes back to your voice as an artist. 

 

For some reason, the powers that be have created this concept that, somehow or another, artists have a time stamp and their relevancy has a time stamp, and what they have to say, nobody wants to hear it. We only want to hear from these young folks who haven't experienced anything, as opposed to people who, not only have they experienced it, they understand it and they can speak on it and speak on it with power. 

 

I think it's important for people to speak out. It's important for people to help young artists be aware of what this business, this industry, if you want to even call it that, what it's truly about. It used to be about artistry. It used to be about really appreciating the gifts that people brought and shared with the world. If you think about all the different artists that would not exist right now that existed back then because of people who appreciated what they had to give, the gift ... Now, we're relegated to some sort of weird fuddy-duddy concept thing. 

 

I'm going to live life on my terms. To allow people to write your narrative, to rearrange your possibilities, to smother your opportunities ... I'm fighting to the end to make sure that that does not happen, not just for me but for anybody like me. I benefitted. I was able to live my dream. Prince, Morris Day, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, all these people who grew up in my neighborhood, we were able to live our dream because of the people who were before us. I think we owe it to this generation right now to fight for them to be able to not just have their music exploited on platforms where they get paid a penny for a billion different plays and somebody who didn't create a thing or write a song is somewhere with yachts and living this life of luxury and selling off their stock here and there and meanwhile the people who created it are somewhere just working a second and third job. I just think that that is so foul. And then they trick people into believing that music is free. People are subscribing to this! I mean, come on.

 

I'd be curious to know who influenced Grand Central, as well as the impact your band had on the Minneapolis sound.

 

Our influence, as far as music, was the music that was out at the time but I think our influence was also the climate in the country at the time, the movies that were out heavily influenced us, Superfly, Shaft, The Mack, you name it. Those things were such heavy influences on our perception of the world because that was our window to the world. 

 

Minneapolis was 99.9% white so we had a little fraction of Black, but the reality is — and a lot of people don't understand this — you wouldn't know that because when you live in a Black community, you're surrounded by Black folks, period, so the outside world is the outside world. We only had one radio station and that radio staton had to clock out at sunset or something crazy like that. I guess the unintended or intended consequences of that was you wound up listening to a lot of rock. You wound up listening to a lot of Top 40 and so you're constantly inundated with The Eagles and Rolling Stones. There was a radio station that played album oriented rock, so they played Doobie Brothers and other kinds of alternate musical expressions. That was our window to outside of the box. I think that helped create the sound.

 

Because our band was so small, we didn't have horns, so we had to have our sister experiment and sort of play horn patterns with her organ and so that turned into, eventually, synth patterns. That became a thing. I have heard everybody talk about what the Minneapolis sound is. Success has a million different fathers and all that, and that's wonderful — great, fantastic — but the reality is the way we created the Minneapolis sound that we were a part of, we created in my mother's house. That was really rooted in us working on a demo tape and basically not really getting the response we wanted, so we really needed to come up with something a little bit different than everything else. It was really just Prince and I at the time. We were very competitive. We went back and forth until we cobbled together something we thought was very unique and ultimately it wound up I think being very unique. He was able to be the beneficiary of what we created. I like to think I played a little bit of a role in that.    

 

What would you attribute to the musical, creative, and familial bond that you shared with Prince?

 

We had a lot of familial bonds. We grew up in the same neighborhood, lived in the same house for years. Our fathers played in a band together. We didn't know that when we met. We found that out later. We shared the same record collection so, in essence, we were drinking from the same tree of funk and music. We had a lot in common. We had the same passion, wanting to be successful. We definitely bonded on so many different levels. He was into basketball. I was really into hockey and football.

 

There's a connection between the heart and the spirit of a champion, like Muhammad Ali or Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan. I think there's something about that junkyard dog spirit that certain athletes have that, when you see them, it's inspiring. As a musician — I can only speak for myself — it fed my passion for music because without passion, you can't be successful. You're not going to make it. You got to be the Bundini Brown of anything that you do. Bundini Brown was the guy who was always like "Come on champ! You can do it, Ali! You can win this game!" That became my attitude in the music business when we were young ... and still.

 

It's easy to take new wave for granted now that it's an established style of music. How did new wave enter your life and what compelled you to explore it on your first album? 

 

Several reasons. For one thing, as I'm doing now, I'm always looking for something new. If you got to know me, you'd realize that's just in my DNA. Musically, I was always listening to cutting edge music. What's new? What's fresh? I was listening to some David Bowie stuff, "Ashes to Ashes." I love that record, but it probably got me in trouble, in terms of being a Black artist because that was one of the things that me and Prince used to go round and round about — what the industry would allow Black artists to be able to create. I just found that silly. I just thought no, that can't be.

 

I heard Devo. I don't know if you remember "Doctor Detroit" and "We're Through Being Cool" and all that stuff and then Kraftwerk, Art of Noise and some of those bands. Over in Europe, they were doing more cutting edge stuff than they were doing here at the time. We would go over to Europe to get a gage on what was coming next. They were more accepting of Black artists and Black artists' diversity as opposed to here. Here, they were still trying to keep a brother down and say "You fit into this box over here. Now shut up." Because I'm not a "go along to get along" kind of guy, that is probably the difference between me and a lot of other artists from Minneapolis.

 

I used to try to make my record company understand, "Look, let me just be an artist." They would cut out the Top 10 R&B hits and say, "Why don't you just give me something like that?" Because I don't want to. I thought I was an artist. I thought, as an artist, you get to create your own music. I said, "I may get around to doing all of that, but right now, I want to do this." I want to distinguish myself as an artist, separating from where I came, and then I will eventually go in a different direction. Obviously, having seven, eight ... I forget how many Top 10 or number one hits, I showed that I know how to do that.