One of the greatest rappers of our time in conversation with one of the most lauded culture writers alive. This is André 3000 and Hanif Abdurraqib on freedom, fame, flutes, and the burning question: ‘You gonna put some beats on that shit?’
Words by Hanif Abdurraqib | Photos by Erik Carter
May 14, 2024
It is difficult to discern whether the sidewalk was once occupied by a person adorned in a costume of holiness, or evil. On the morning after Halloween, electric light trembles down a sidewalk in Venice, California, where the air lets out a collective groan, the kind that signals a population who, perhaps, dragged themselves out of bed this morning and called off work, midweek responsibilities be damned. Waiting for André 3000 on the sidewalk in front of The Butcher’s Daughter (restaurant, not actual offspring of a butcher), I assess the discarded black cloak. Could be a nun, or a priest. Could simply be some tossed-off goth accessory, unrelated to the holiday. While I weigh my options, in the distance the shade inches south and the sun spills over something that shines and reflects. It’s teeth – a set of sharp, glistening teeth, vampiric in nature. So, not entirely evil, but not entirely holy, either.
André 3000 enters the restaurant and weaves through the narrowed, crowded center of it with no fanfare. No second glances from any of the people immersed in their conversations, no whispers or pointing. He’s wearing pinstripe overalls over a gray long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of unlaced Black Cement Jordan 3s. He’s beaming, as if there’s a song in his head that isn’t the mid-aughts pop trickling out of the restaurant’s speakers. He’s carrying a flute in his left hand.
“I can walk from here to Santa Monica normally, like a regular person,” he tells me after sitting down and joyfully exhaling. And then his brow furrows a bit. “So I had to ask myself, Man, do you want to be noticed again? You know, if you haven’t done anything in a while, people kind of … it fizzles out. And I had to decide that I wanted to talk about the music more than I wanted to not be noticed, I guess.”
There’s a way, as he talks about New Blue Sun – which, at the moment of our speaking, has been completed but has yet to be announced – that André seems sort of unprepared, or sort of downplaying the realities of public excitement to protect his commitment to his quieter life. There’s no verses on it, no rapping, it’s not a “rah-rah” album, he says. People will be excited, but it won’t make him “famous” again. (It could be argued that he never exactly stopped being famous, though it can be argued at an equal or greater pitch that fame is relative.)
Whatever one thinks of the music on New Blue Sun, the 87-minute ambient flute journey to a kind of self-rediscovery, it does sit within a firm lineage of Black artistry that acts as a series of refusals. Or, to put it a different way, moves toward growth that requires turning away from a path that might be more satisfying to an audience. Particularly an audience that has come to mythologize one version of yourself at the expense of every other version that could exist, every other version that hasn’t been invented yet. Pharoah Sanders never stayed in the same place too long. Neither did Nina Simone. Zev Love X walked out of KMD, found a mask, and MF DOOM was born. The distance between these sonic and aesthetic leaps, throughout Black music making, sometimes comes at a cost, but is the cost so much that an artist might sacrifice their own evolution, that is the question worth asking. As Don Cherry told us, “When people believe in boundaries, they become them.”
So then, sacrifice becomes about risk assessment. Not just for the Black musician or celebrity, but, to a different degree, the Black retail worker, who knows the way they are treated by coworkers or customers isn’t right, but also knows they’ve got rent due. There’s a cost to be paid, not only to an audience, but at times, to self. And it has to be measured. Is the truth that may be revealed actually worth what might be lost in the process?
“Listen, I’m not a person who says fuck the audience, fuck the crowd,” André says. “Even just as a challenge, man, at 48 years old, I wish I could make a rap album right now, just to do it. I hear everything people say. As a fan, I would want the same thing.”
He pauses for a moment and lifts his hands for a short second or two, palms upward, as if he’s showing an invisible audience that he has nothing in them.
“The thing is, I can only give what I’m feeling. I’m interested in discovery. If there’s not any discovery, it doesn’t feel real to me. I’ve never considered myself the best producer or the best singer or the best rapper or any of those separate categories. But one thing I do have confidence in is my feeling.”
There’s a difference, André insists, between pumping rap into the culture as a means of exercise, and putting rap into the world as something meaningful, useful, something that expands on the form and advances his own legacy. (He does insist that he’s been writing verses, but hasn’t been moved to record.) This is a level of separating self-awareness that many artists in his position, with the level of freedom to create and an eager and willing audience, might turn away from in favor of a more easily satisfying path, but it begs the question – satisfying to whom?
In an interview six years ago, André reiterated something he’d insisted upon when he was 25: that he didn’t want to still be rapping at 50 years old. More than a Townshend-esque “I hope I die before I get old” musing, or even placing a timeline on what is or isn’t a worthy creative pursuit, it was foreshadowing an attempt to have an honest relationship with linear time. A life, teeming with creation, not wanting to be confined to Just The One Thing, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how easily it comes to you or how much people want you to keep doing it.
But the expectations of the eager masses (which haven’t shrunk as much as André seems to think) can be a challenging balance, even and especially for Black artists, who are often seen as vessels for consumption, primarily, even if and when the work they’re creating is deeply human, free, and feeling. And so it could be said that New Blue Sun is a type of liberatory work. A reclamation of curiosity and play, detached from demand. Principled on a type of ascension, with care for the self beyond and before the audience, some of whom might fight the approach and the work on par with a cleansing, a type of holiness. For others, perhaps, the evils of withdrawal.
The least interesting question, but still the one that intrigues me most mightily, is, why the flute? André isn’t a classically trained flautist; it wasn’t placed in his hands as a child. It was an instrument he decided on, at a later stage in life (which, too, is a kind of freeing or freedom exercise). To compare this to, say, taking interest in a new sport and picking your new favorite team is a bit flimsy and flippant, because André didn’t just decide on an instrument to joke around on for a little while. He chose an instrument with which he would articulate a new phase of his life.
But in lieu of a more expansive inquiry about aging and what sounds we pursue as we achieve a surplus of years above ground, I simply ask, “Why the flute?”
André laughs a bit.
“It’s the most human-sounding of instruments,” he says, reaching for the wooden flute he carried into the restaurant. He looks down at it as he speaks, running his thumbs along the carved designs on its sides. He doesn’t look up as he continues. “What I mean by that is, most instruments – outside of someone singing – there’s a few processes or steps that goes into it before we actually hear a sound. So if you’re playing guitar, you’re picking the string, vibration resonates in the chamber, then we hear it. Piano, you hit a key, key hits the hammer, hammer hits the note, note hits the string, then we hear it. With flute it’s very direct. It’s straight wind, straight. ... You’re human, so what you’re hearing is a human’s wind go through an instrument.”
So, I say, in a mechanical sense, it’s about the labor output vs. the emotional payoff for a player. It’s about the shortest distance from a nonhuman sound to a humanlike sound, which isn’t exactly fooling anyone, but could fool someone who had their eyes closed while the sound of a flute interrupts an otherwise impeccable groove. So, say, listening to “Black and Blues” by Bobbi Humphrey, when the flute interrupts the percussion and the bass and drifts along in fits and starts, it sounds enough like the singing of language, it can act as a stand-in.
Sure, yes, of course, but there’s a simpler response, too: transportability. Vital for someone, like André, taking up a new instrument and finding themselves eager to get good at it. You’ve heard the stories, or seen the photos over the years. There’s André on a New York sidewalk, strolling and playing the flute. Heard he was in the corner alone at some party playing the flute. Pal of mine saw him in the produce aisle playing the flute. It could be easy to dismiss this as performance art or attention-seeking instead of seeing it for what it is: curiosity and eagerness to improve upon one’s abilities, or getting comfortable with a newfound love and learning the shape of it, not wanting to stray from its side.
“I loved that I could practice anywhere,” André tells me, now looking up from the instrument in his lap but still clutching it affectionately. “So if I’m here and I’m waiting on my coffee, and I know it’s going to take two, three minutes for them to make it, I can stand outside and just play and practice. And it’s not so overwhelming where people next to me are like, ‘This motherfucker playing this trumpet.’ You know what I mean? It shields everything out, but it’s still a welcoming kind of sound.”
André mentions Guillermo Martinez, his flutemaster, the maker of the flute he’s holding, which he hands over to me for a moment. Striking circular patterns are carved into the side. It’s lighter than it looks, I mention. André nods and says that it’s based on a Mayan flute that was originally made of clay. Martinez, who found a way to make these flutes out of wood without sacrificing sonic quality, is teaching André how to make flutes on his own.
André’s path to the flute actually does have some rhyme and reason that isn’t strictly sort of sonically spiritual. “I actually started with saxophone first,” André tells me. He was drawn to the sax years ago due to his affection for John Coltrane. He was naturally gifted at the instrument, and then, when researching Coltrane’s early life, he saw that Coltrane first played the clarinet. And so André got a clarinet but didn’t take to it as well. Then, after finding a bass clarinet at a pawn shop on an OutKast tour, the deeper tones appealed to him. “It’s something about the deeper tones, the wood. I love saxophone, too, but there’s something about the wood and wind. There’s a certain resonance. Especially even when you’re playing, you actually feel it. You feel the vibration of what you’re doing.”
Now, he takes a sort of holistic approach to the instrument. Beyond simply playing it, the act of learning to make these flutes, how to craft his own instrument with his own hands, has brought him closer to some higher sonic and spiritual power. He’s holding the flute again, pointing out things on it. “I understand why this is shorter than that,” he says, rapidly gesturing to two different parts of the flute. “I understand why these holes are all a certain distance apart,” he says, running a hand along the top of it. Looking down at the flute, lovingly, he runs through a series of questions that feel a bit like a tender inner monologue. “What can I do to help get it in tune? What can I do to get the air out of here? What is the wind doing when it’s going through it?”
And then he pauses and looks up at me, speaking with a tone of whimsy, the way someone might describe their first kiss. “Man, I remember the first time I heard this flute. This sound. It was a gift. I want to give this gift to other people. It’s a relationship, man. You’re finding out new things about it every day. And look,” he says, now holding the flute slightly aloft. “This is a piece of wood from a tree that was living. You have this connection with this natural thing that has a life of its own. That has some say in what you’re doing.”
At the time of this writing, New Blue Sun has entered the world, and it’s a musical and cultural landscape that is far different from the one André last released music into. (The final OutKast album, to date, was 2005’s Idlewild.) Music is shoveled into the streaming heap at an alarming volume on a weekly basis, and attention spans ping-pong from one cultural moment to the next (to the point that, by the time you, reader, have your eyes on this piece, the album might have already fallen out of the immediate cultural jukebox, through no fault of the album itself).
Upon its announcement and the immediate release that followed two days later, there was the expected series of clashing responses: excitement, dismay, confusion, debate over what a 48-year-old “could” or “couldn’t” rap about. Debates about jazz and hip-hop and age that were seemingly a touch overblown by the nature of the internet, which allows for responding to one thing as if it is the consensus. There were memes and jokes, not at the expense of the unheard album, but mostly jokes that centered on an audience’s eagerness to wrap their lives around the tones of the flute. Above all, there was rapturous excitement, the kind that doesn’t often arrive for new music, at least not as frequently as it did even five years ago.
For all this, when the record did come out, it was a bit hard to parse the critical response to the album, of which I think there are two distinctly different but perhaps intersecting tendrils: There is the project of New Blue Sun. Its ambitions, its craft, its making, and what it all “means.” And then there’s the music itself. The latter is, of course, defined by the former, but the achievements of both deserve separate podiums, and are on separate levels.
It’s an album of immense ambition and immense vision, and the artist with his name on the jacket is operating from a place that is not one of expertise, but it’s also not amateurish. It exists in this middle space, one defined by eagerness and seeking. Even purely sonically, the way André utilizes the flute on the album sounds as if the instrument is crawling toward a connection with its surrounding sounds, looking for pockets within the percussion to fall into, or dancing along a bass line in a loose harmony. There’s a way the album feels, in part, like an ode to this communal dance, breaking forth from any perceived isolation and running toward an other, or several arms of several others.
It’s incorrect to call New Blue Sun a solo record, though it also feels incorrect to treat it like a single bandleader leading a jazz band. It feels, both in sound and in André’s articulation of the work, like friends who got into a room to see what would happen, and kept coming back to the room. When I ask him if he feels like a bandleader, citing his hero Coltrane, André gently recoils a bit.
“No, no, not at all. If anything, Carlos is the bandleader.”
He’s referring to Carlos Niño, the brilliant, prolific percussionist. The two met at an Erewhon market shortly after André moved to California in the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution. There, Niño invited André to an Alice Coltrane tribute he was putting on that night. The two bonded, and Niño brought some players into the room: Nate Mercereau on guitar and synth, Surya Botofasina on keys. These were the core four who made up the sessions, which had a sense of magic to them.
“I told Carlos, most importantly, I want to transport people from wherever they are to a different place, and I don’t know what that is yet,” André says. “As a player and somebody in it, you’re actually on this ride with homies. You’re on this ride, and we’re figuring out what we can do. And Carlos may jump and do something, or Nate may jump and do something, I may respond. Surya may do something. So it’s like a ride, a free ride that we get to sit back and look at like, ‘Whoa, what happened?’”
Searching through feeling and arriving at something sonically pleasing was key to the making of the album, largely, as André reiterates to me several times, because he doesn’t know chords, doesn’t know notes. It’s all feeling. OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” he tells me, was written just by spreading his fingers out and playing around on the guitar. And so this approach was no different, except that in terms of execution, it was vital to surround himself with people who, yes, would join him in this pursuit of feeling, but who could also shape the songs to be good, to be useful, to be their own distinct sonic worlds.
I consider this, too, to be a part of aging, or considering time, or considering what time one does or doesn’t have left. There is a way that, for some of us, feeling begins to rule our goals, our ambitions, our impulses. The reflective and reflexive nature of creation can, if we are lucky, get caught up in the central pursuit of extracting a feeling, in hopes of prolonging it, allowing it to live somewhere beyond us.
The music of New Blue Sun, acting as a manifestation of these ambitions, offers a different type of achievement. It is an album that has a lot to say, despite not relying on language to say it. What comes, instead, is an emotional, rich series of recordings that have both the spirit of improvisation and the tightness of a focused collective on a mission. Yes, the titles are long and somewhat overwrought (though some of us grew up in the early-to-mid-aughts pop-punk heyday, so we’ll be alright). And the album’s eight tracks do stretch to nearly an hour and a half. But when it works, like on the first track, with its apologetic and on-the-nose title, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time,” what a listener gets is instrumentation that is not fighting for space but reaching for the next sound, and the next, across some distance that you, listener, are also lost in, reaching. On the first track, flute isn’t heard until we’re nearly three minutes in and the band has found itself. What emerges in the third minute and beyond is the album’s central architect (if André doesn’t prefer “bandleader,” I will settle for “architect”), interspersing between experimentation and play. There are flute bursts that exist as sort of fractures on a song like “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy,” a turning away from the monosyllabic note, an approach that André tells me exists as a kind of aversion to making a jazz record. Which is puzzling to me, as we’ve sat and waxed poetic about our affection for John and Alice and Miles, André’s affection for Kamasi Washington, and so on.
“The thing is, it’s all envy, it’s all me wanting to figure out what I envy,” he tells me, referencing a story about Shabaka Hutchings coming to the studio while he was making the album and announcing that he never wanted to play saxophone again. “And I thought, sometimes you just don’t want it to sound like a saxophone, you know what I mean?”
When I scrunch my face up in confusion, trying to follow him but not quite getting there, he smiles and becomes lightly animated, using his fingers to trace lines on the table between us like he’s drawing up a play.
“OK. Like Sam Gendel, he is crazy. But even him, he’s expanded. He’s a saxophone player or horn player, he just doesn’t want to go into a jazz band. And I think once you put a saxophone on it or a bass or a clarinet, it would’ve gone into the jazz space. So I wanted it to be more experimental. And I’m a jazz lover, so all the years of listening to jazz, there may be things I do that are just inherent because I’ve listened to jazz. Even now in preparing to do the live shows, all that stuff is made up.
“So now I’m sitting down with one of my homies that’s a horn player, and I’m asking him, ‘Help me understand what I did.’ And that’s the fun part, I’m still learning while doing it.”
It’s tricky to toe this line between a sort of youthful, eyes-wide-open eagerness and exuberance and toying with words like “amateur.” André has the excitement of someone who is traversing new ground, but he’s also serious about the work. He’s been at it for years. What was a fun spectacle for the public, seeing him out and about with his instrument, was him practicing his craft while going about his everyday activities. It hardly matters at all whether New Blue Sun is seen as a career-defining achievement; it is more important, I think, that it be viewed as the defining of a turning point. A bridge from one version of the self to another.
The versions are intertwined, of course. André, conversationally, is the same as he’s always appeared to be, both in song and otherwise. He flows off into tangents, he’s whimsical, he smiles wide while looking skyward and trying to recover a thought that might get him back on track to his original point. If you have frozen him in time as the person in the “Hey Ya!” music video, then yes, at least energetically, there’s still enough of what one might perceive as that version of him that exists. But he’s excited about the future. We talk about Sun Ra, and his eyes grow wide. Sun Ra, who wanted more than anything to ascend elsewhere. To space, or beyond, sure. But any elsewhere would do. Anywhere not here. In order to have that mindset, you have to make your peace with what inevitably gets left behind, be it material loss – family, friends, wealth – or emotional, spiritual loss, giving up what is known in favor of the unknown. There’s a part of your past that might not make it. André is uninterested in ego, he tells me, but not entirely uninterested in legacy.
“A lineage lets me know I’m human,” he says, softly, after I ask him if he hears any of his influence in the world. “My life meant something. My trying times, my fucked-up times in this world has meant something. I wasn’t just here.”
As our time together winds down, André wants to talk to me about spit. And I do admit, I find myself as fascinated as one can be in a conversation that takes such a turn. He’s breaking down the nuances of the flute’s machinery. “Your saliva goes into the flute, and it builds these coatings,” he says, pushing the end of the flute toward me, already off and running in the excitement of information delivery. “So my first flute that I ever got, I played it for years and years without cleaning the spit out of it. And so I took it to my flute maker and he was like, hey, you ready for a touchup? And I was like, yeah, yeah, why not? So I let him do the regular things he would do with any kind of touchup. And I realize now, don’t let them clean out the inside, because when I got my flute back, I actually shed tears in my studio because it was different. And I did not recognize it.” Taken aback slightly by this information, I ask, “So you don’t ever clean out the flute?”
André smiles and leans back in his chair. “Look, it’s your own bodily fluid that’s going into it. It seeps into the wood. That’s what gives it … it gives it its soul.”
I’ve been cautious to bring up rap, to bring up OutKast. But André flows into it naturally when talking about how he’s spent his time, what he tunes his ear toward. He pours high praise upon JID (“that dude be rappin’, man”) as well as Earl Sweatshirt and Teezo Touchdown. He tells me he’s just happy to be alive to see the evolution of the genre, as a 48-year-old who started at 17 rapping in hallways and basements. This, it seems, makes him momentarily reflective.
“You know, people always ask about me and Big Boi,” he says, detouring all on his own. “We cool, man. That’s my homie forever. We were friends before doing music.” He pauses for a moment, figuring out how to answer the follow-up question that he’s seemingly backed himself into.
“People ask, so will there be another OutKast album? I really can’t say, man. I do realize that our chemistries have changed. We’re different people. We’re totally different people. Not to say that we won’t be able to make any kind of music, but I think, yeah, people have to realize, like even in relationships, man, husband and wife, chemistry should change after a while. And I think people think there’s this one thing that has to stay a way, but we are ever-changing, man.”
He mentions that he’s played New Blue Sun for Big Boi, in a series of people he’s played it for, with mixed results. Two people cried. One director friend thought it transcendent. He took it to his old hood, and one of his old friends fell asleep while listening. This same friend, he tells me – hardly able to finish the story because he’s laughing so hard – woke up and shouted, You gonna put some beats on that shit?
“Look, I know these ain’t bangers,” he says, sighing while smiling. “I know this ain’t number one album in the country and all that shit. It’s not even about that. Yeah. But I just want people to hear and to see and feel the movement, to see and feel the change, the journey of it. You know what I mean? To me, that’s the biggest story. If I’m on the outside looking in, how do you come from this to this? You know what I mean? I want people to see that part.”
And so, it seems, André 3000 is at peace, for now. In an anxious era, beset on all sides by unpredictable demands and unpredictable cruelties, he has made something he can hold in his hand, ask you to come close, and perhaps stay for a while, to feel whatever peace he has discovered.
When we walk outside and part ways, I look back for a moment. A person sitting at a table outside glances up at him as he walks by, and does a double take. They seem to take a split second to consider the distance between what their eyes are telling them and what their brain is considering. And then they get up, walk to catch up and say hello to the artist, who is not as invisible as he imagines himself to be. ◊
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited-edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry). His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas Press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Erik Carter, originally from Rowlett Texas, began his career in New York City and now resides in Los Angeles. He aims to highlight the stories surrounding Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, celebrating the nuances of their many voices. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, GQ, and Rolling Stone, among others. He was overjoyed to have worked on this story.
