If you were young and spellbound and sat and listened hard enough to Outkast at their creative peak, what you heard was not two, but a cacophony of voices. My earliest exposures to the group came via iPod Classic in a race car bed—a single dope boy in a plastic, stationary Cadillac—and convinced me that the duo comprised multitudes. Big Boi, while bullishly mesmerizing, was a figure whose always rough edges provided a digestible clarity. Even in the naive eyes of a child, though, André 3000 existed in a discernibly different space.
He buried entendres like land mines. He continually toyed with the pitch and meter of his voice. Appearances fluctuated. For every album, new models of the rapper appeared: bald-headed rhyming prodigy, surgical ATLien, soothsaying Gemini, Ice Cold pop maverick. Flesh out one version of André 3000, and three more popped up. It often seemed as if there was no style, form, or vessel capable of containing all these versions of one person. The only common tie was him, and then he got tired of ties at all and went adrift—appearing every so often, with great effect and little frequency.
Today, he plays the flute. Dré left a few breadcrumbs (and maybe a Future melody) leading to this revelation over the years, low-key appearances in airport lobbies, street corners, and parks, instrument in tow. Then, last week, he dropped a full-on album—all flute, no bars—called New Blue Sun, his first solo release since 2003. An hour-plus ensemble piece, the record is sculpted from a collection of jam sessions with everyman percussionist Carlos Niño and others, and if it’s one thing for certain, it’s eminently self-aware. The first track on the album is named, succinctly, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” The cover art is a pic of 3 Stacks crouched on the ground, holding a flute.
It’s extremely ambient. Free-form tribal jazz would be another descriptor. If Alice Coltrane were locked in a room with an intercontinental New Age band, and also restricted to growlingly low registered woodwinds, she might serve up something resembling this. Most often, New Blue Sun sounds very airy, very free, and very much like the man enjoyed making it. Impressions beyond these, this early, are well-dressed puff. (He’s playing fucking woodwinds, what else can you say.) That this album is what he cooked up after a decade-plus diet of strictly guest features is so on brand, it strains credulity. If you get André, you get that his art is as fluid as he is. Its existence alone says as much about what he wants as he ever will.
Before launching himself into orbit, André Lauren Benjamin emerged from Georgia soil, an only child in the shadow of Atlanta public housing, in a neighborhood called East Point. He took the bus to schools on the other side of town thanks to a program formed in the wake of Georgia desegregation. At home, Dré listened to Anita Baker, A Tribe Called Quest, Prince, and Snoop, most every kind of Black music from most every kind of place. At 9, he persuaded his mom to leave him unattended while she worked late shifts at a nearby GM factory, regularly cooking his own meals and putting himself to bed.
Dré met Big Boi in 1991 outside a Ralph Lauren store at a mall in nearby Buckhead. They realized they went to the same high school and bonded quickly over many things—girls, school, sports—but most of all, music. Within two years they’d formed (and twice renamed) a rap group before finally landing on “Outkast.” Nursed and tutored by Organized Noize’s sweeter-than-a-plate-of-yams-with-extra-syrup song making, the two virtuosos evolved with each release, from breakneck-paced pups to multi-hyphenate power-music revivalists.
From the start, Dré was always off-kilter. “My mom always used to say, ‘Why you wanna be a typical everyday n***a?’” he recalls. “‘Why don’t you do something different? Why you wanna be like everybody else?’” He wasn’t afraid of sticking out or reconstituting the boundaries of the genre. He rapped about “fragments of a million me’s,” galaxies at his fingertips.
He thought he wanted fame. Then he got it and realized the cost. (During one low he received a call from Prince, who was so dumbfounded by Dré’s discomfort that he told the MC, “You know what your problem is? You don’t realize how big y’all are.”) By the end of Outkast’s run—in spite, and because, of how he’d mastered the art form—André’s feelings about making music were so tenuous that they basically sank the group.
This is how what might have started off as a brief period of artistic inertia morphed into a decade of relative solitude. He still loved his day ones. (When I spoke to Big Boi in 2021, he told me, “We talk all the time. He’s my brother, and music is just something, a gift, that we shared and we shared it with the world, and now we’re just living.”) And he still recorded for himself and others. But then his mom died, and then his dad died, and then his stepdad died—all in the span of 10 years. “It was a lot,” he admitted in the lead-up to New Blue Sun. “It was really, really heavy for me.”
His kid grew up. He tried acting. He lost and gained folks. He got old. If you’re looking for one answer to where New Blue Sun is coming from, you’re probably not going to find it. Dré’s here because he loves what he made it with. (“I take my flute pretty much everywhere I go.”) He’s here because he believes he’s outgrown rap. (“I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. I’m 48 years old.”) He’s here out of pride in his new art. (“I really want people to hear it.”)
As expected, the man has spoken little and cryptically on the subject. The closest thing to an outright explanation he’s given is the admission that he wants “people to know that I did something or that I was valuable to somebody,” not just in the present, but for the generations of artists that follow. “You’re only as good,” he’s said, “as the people that were before you.”
What goes unsaid in this is it’s not just who (comes before) but what (they do). The craft. The art. The creations. The things that link all of 3 Stacks’s infinite selves. The oh-so-heavy loads he’s got to shake off. This is the brilliance, the tragedy, and now, as ever, the price of André Benjamin: He wants the music consumed, not him.
