Brother Ali can easily pinpoint the turning points in his life. When he was 13, he met hip-hop legend KRS-One, igniting his passion for conscientious hip-hop. When he was 15, he became a Muslim, dismaying his mom but finding new guidance.

   In each case he said, "I was searching for a place to fit ... somewhere I wasn't judged by appearance."

   Now, at 29, the hefty, hollering, heart-on-his-sleeve rapper is staring change in the face again. His album that landed Tuesday, "The Undisputed Truth," could well make him the biggest rapper ever to call Minneapolis, Minn., home.

   Whatever it does, "The Undisputed Truth" is a personal triumph; strong reviews or swift album sales would be icing. While Ali named his last CD "The Champion EP," this one truly sounds like the work of a conqueror.

   Over the course of 15 tracks, Ali smacks down the problems that have plagued his tumultuous life: the gawking over his albino condition (by everyone from childhood bullies to insensitive music journalists); the doubts that every artist faces (though not self-doubt, in his case); the mistrust of his Muslim beliefs; the injustice that he claims tainted his north Minneapolis youth and a particularly rancorous divorce and child-custody battle that kept him from releasing this album quicker.

   "If I made this album any sooner than I made it, while I was still in the middle of all that, it would be one (messed)-up album," Ali said, shaking his head. "But I'm on the other side now."

   Fresh from a hip-hop festival in Southern California, where he returns at the end of this month to play the uber-trendy Coachella Music Festival, Ali sat for a late-night interview last week at the south Minneapolis home of his DJ and close friend, BK-One. He usually doesn't make it over to BK's basement studio until 10 p.m. after his son Faheem, age six, goes to bed.

   Things are great back home Ali said. There's a smile-inducing line near the end of his new album where Ali boasts of buying a couch from Ikea instead of Goodwill for the two-bedroom apartment that he now shares with his son and his new wife Tiffany. And they live just around the corner from the Fifth Element record store, where a giant storefront window display for his new album has Ali staring down traffic on Hennepin Avenue.

   "People are gonna have to get used to seeing my face now," he joked.

   BK-One (Brendan Kelly) has been face-to-face with Ali for almost 10 years, since before the rapper joined the roster at Rhymesayers Entertainment, the omnipresent Minneapolis hip-hop label that's also home to Atmosphere, P.O.S. and I Self Devine. Even BK was pleasantly astonished when he first heard the songs that would become "The Undisputed Truth."

   "I watched everything that's happened to him closely from the sidelines," the DJ said. "You can hear it all on this album. He sounds stronger than he ever has before. And his art's stronger. For the first time, it really sounds like he has found this place to occupy that's all his."

   His 2003 album, "Shadows on the Sun," quickly became one of Rhymesayers' biggest sellers and earned national press. But almost immediately, writers started asking Ali about being albino, and because it's a genetic condition that removes skin coloration, what his racial background is. The albino questions he was used to, going back to his childhood. He remembers being six or seven and "basically hating the world," he said, because of the flak he got for his pale skin.

   "Kids say out loud the brutal version of what adults think," he said. "They'd say stuff like, `You know your mom doesn't want you.'"

   He coyly addressed his albinism in the "Shadows on the Sun" track titled "Forest Whitiker" (sic), an ode to his and his favorite actor's less-than-pinup looks:

   "I'm not the classic profile of what the ladies want / You might think I'm as depressed as can be / But when I look in the mirror I see sexy ass me."

   However, Ali now admits he "wasn't ready for" the other questions about whether he was black or white, which were semi-relevant considering that racial issues were sprinkled throughout "Shadows." To him, though, the queries brought back the scenario he had always worked to avoid: being viewed through a skin-color lens.

   "Flip a coin and put it in your story," he flippantly told this writer when asked about his race.

   He's much more concise about it now, though. "I don't want it to look like I'm lying or trying to fool anyone," he said. "But it still don't feel right to have to answer it."

   Yes, Ali is fully white. He was born Jason Newman in Madison, Wis., and moved around as a kid to several small cities in Michigan before landing in north Minneapolis at 15, after his parents split.

   Even before his arrival here, he started identifying more with blacks than whites, through friends, through hip-hop and then finally when he got turned on to the Nation of Islam. He read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" around age 13, he said, "and it spoke to the side of me that used to think white people are cruel."

   As an albino, Ali knew what it was like to be singled out because of skin color. He might have been even more deeply affected in a way, because he didn't even fit in with his own family. "The reality is my experience is different from black people and white people," he said. "Even my younger brother has had a different experience than me."

   Ali addresses all this on "The Undisputed Truth" in the hard-hitting track called "Daylight:"

   "They ask me if I'm black or white, I'm neither / Race is a made-up thing, I don't believe in it. My genes tie me to those that despise me (and) made a living killing the ones that inspired me / I ain't just talking about singing and dancing / I was taught life and manhood by black men."

   The black men Ali refers to include all his hip-hop heroes (other favorites include Melle Mel, Chuck D and Rakim, the latter of whom he toured with last year). On a more personal level, he also has his Muslim mentors to thank, he said, "for teaching me to be a balanced human being."

   Ali has long been a worshiper at the Masjid An-Nur mosque in north Minneapolis. It's also the mosque attended by Rep. Keith Ellison, Congress' first Muslim.

   "I'm extremely proud of him," said Ali, who doesn't really know Ellison but credits him for vicariously helping kick-start his career. (Ellison reportedly represented a friend in a police beating case, and the friend gave Ali some of the settlement money to record his first release, the 2000 cassette "Rites of Passage.")