As the audience at the 1995 Source Awards lustily booed the hip-hop duo OutKast when Antwan “Big Boi” Patton and André “André 3000” Benjamin received the award for that year’s best new artist, André dropped one of his most memorable lines. “The South,” he told the crowd of East Coast and West Coast hip-hop heads, “got something to say.”
Not only did André 3000 have something to say, he had the most creative, rhythmically clever, Southern-inflected, word-splitting way of saying it.
Not only did André 3000 have something to say, he had the most creative, rhythmically clever, Southern-inflected, word-splitting way of saying it. Though he hasn’t recorded with OutKast in 17 years, his legendary guest verses on other artists’ songs have often been the best parts (sometimes the only good parts) of those songs.
I can’t be the only one who, for example, listens to André 3000’s verse and skips Ye’s on the 2021 single “Life of The Party.” There he questions the concept of heaven even as he tries to send a message to his mother and father there. He’s wondering if his father’s smile masked unhappiness and considers it unsurprising that both died of heart conditions.
He’s always, it’s seemed, had something to say.
But now he says he doesn’t. At least not through rap. Explaining his decision to release an album, out Friday, called “New Blue Sun” that features him playing wooden flutes, André 3000 told GQ in a video interview that he finds himself out of things to say.
“People think, ‘Oh, man, he’s just sitting on raps’ or like, ‘He’s just holding these raps hostage.’ I ain’t got no raps like that,” he said. “Sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. Like, I’m 48 years old and, not to say that age is the thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does. Like I gotta go get a colonoscopy? Like what do you rap about? My eyesight is going…
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