It’s like an SNES soundtrack, a friend texted me. And in my podcast feeds and my various content aggregators, think pieces bloomed: We talk about the genius of the new Andre 3000 album, they said.
I’m listening to the New Blue Sun as I write this, and I listened to it earlier today while working. After two listens, the first two songs stand out: they don’t fade into the background, there’s lots of interesting textures, they continue evolving over time.
But the next six? To call them genius is like calling Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music genius: yes, but only because it proves he’s an artist. Artists get tired. They make an art out of refusal. Other examples of the art of refusal include Joni Mitchell’s Mingus, Public Image Limited’s First Issue, Neil Young’s Trans, Nirvana’s In Utero, De La Soul’s De La Soul is Dead, and of course, Andre’s 2003 album The Love Below and Outkast’s 2006 album Idlewild.
Not all of the above albums are good, because that’s not the point. The point is that no one as big as Andre is refusing to make the music that has made them extremely popular in the 21st century, which means no one has Andre’s integrity as an artist. No wonder other rappers (see Staples above) have so much respect for him.
In these last 17 years, the rise of streaming, which should have made it easier for big artists to take big swings, has instead resulted in big artists taking no swings at all. The biggest news among big artists in the last three years was that one of them was going to re-record all of her music so she could keep more of the royalties.
Fine, I’ll revise that: there’s one person who took Andre-esque big swings in the last 17 years, though I’m sure he was not at the level of fame of Andre or Nirvana when he did it. More at the level of De La Soul. In fact, like De La, he also loves skits, though not as much as them, since that’s impossible. Frank Ocean’s Blonde was an authentically weird right turn after Channel Orange: an album that sounded like it was recorded in a bathroom, even though Frank had the time and resources to record it in Shangri-La. It was a refusal. It resulted in Frank becoming even more popular, to the point where, like Andre, he could be invited to Coachella and like Andre when Outkast toured again in 2014, actively sabotage his own performance.
By the time I fell in love with Outkast’s Aquameni, which remains the best album of 1998 (yes, it’s better than The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, though just barely, and both are a sign that rap had reached its fullest flowering of personal expression), it was six years later, I was in high school, and no one cared about Outkast. By 2004, the glow of the singles from Speakerboxx/The Love Below had faded, and other bigger rap albums where the rappers actually rap most of the time from 2003 were blasting from every car stereo: 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying, Tricky Daddy’s “Let’s Go,” and Lil Jon’s “Get Low.” Outkast was dead, crunk was in. Kanye had just arrived, but his dominance was still a few years off.
“Get Low” scared the hell out of me. I have a distinct memory of entering a high school dance where it was playing and immediately walking out. The idea of grinding in public to a song so explicitly about actual fucking made my palms sweat, to hopefully metonymize my discomfort in a way that’s comprehensible to you, dear reader.
Aquameni isn’t not about fucking; see “Da Art of Storytelling, Pt. 1,” “Mamacita,” or “Spottieottiedopaliscious.” But those songs are also about the consequences, not just the catharsis of Lil John and Ludacris. As Big Boi says after five minutes of rapping: “Go on and marinate on that for a minute.” It sounds great in the car, it sounds great when you’re stoned; it also sounds great when you’re listening to it with total focus. I was rarely stoned and rarely driving in high school (I lived within walking distance), so it was all about listening to the cd on my walkman, and then on my Ipod.
Aquameni is the sound of the South, of the West, of the North. It features Raekwon (one of the architects of the New York sound), George Clinton (one of the architects of the L.A. sound) and of course, story upon story about Atlanta, which will become the most important city in rap by approximately 2013 and remain so for longer than L.A. at least was able to hold the crown from New York. Without Outkast, it’s difficult to imagine Atlanta becoming so influential. Without Outkast, it’s difficult to imagine Kanye’s stadium rap or Drake’s omnivorousness.
Stankonia probably matters more for rap history, and “Hey Ya” has a billion streams, but 25 years ago, Andre collaborated with his best friend to make the best possible album they could make, and they did it. What else would he have to prove, ever again? It’s no wonder that his next album would only have four rap songs on it and his next one would have zero.
The best Andre 3000 rap album of the last 20 years is “Andre 3000 Guest Verses,” which Mr. Wilder still updates on occasion, as I can tell from the inclusion of this years’ “Scientists and Engineers.” There’s 5 songs on there that predate the dissolution of Outkast in 2003, so reduce the number to 20 and the runtime to about 90 minutes and you’ve got an amazing story of rap and R&B over the last 20 years: tracks from Jeezy, Jay-Z, UGK, Rich Boy, Drake, Lil Wayne, Kelis, Beyonce, Ludacris, Frank Ocean, Rick Ross, Future, A Tribe Called Quest, T.I., and Killer Mike. I’m not sure why Asa forgot “Solo (Reprise)” off of Blonde, but the playlist has “Pink Matter” which fufills a similar purpose.
I’d love it if Andre engaged more with the dominance of women in rap since the ascendence of Cardi in 2018, but there can’t be much to argue with in terms of Andre’s presence in music based on these songs. Few of them are hits, but they’re better than hits: they’re collaborations where Andre remains stubbornly himself and usually inspires whoever he’s working with to the heights of his or her artistic capabilities. Andre raps about relationships, classism, rap as labor, partying, generational divides, regret, and just this year, about racial double-consciousness on the aforementioned “Scientists and Engineers.” These songs are typically the best rap songs of their respective years.
So when Andre titles his first track on New Blue Sun “I Swear, I wanted to make a ‘Rap’ Album but this is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time,” he’s definitely protesting too much. About 10 years ago, Asa first showed me how he was making his “Andre 3000 Guest Verses” playlist and we talked about the brilliance of Good kid, m.A.A.d city. He told me to get on Spotify, this new streaming service so we could share more playlists with each other. The social aspect of Spotify hasn’t really panned out, and Kendrick’s last album was, um, bad, but we’re not going to all start listening to ambient music just because Andre tells us to. As I just mentioned: there’s a lot of great rap being made by women right now, even if it’s often not in album form but in singles by Sexyy Red, Megan Thee Stallion, Glorilla, Ice Spice, and Latto. Doja Cat is extremely popular and extremely good. There’s also a lot of great rap being made by people outside the mainstream like billy woods, Danny Brown, and JPEGMAFIA. And there’s a lot of great rapping going on in Spanish, even if Bad Bunny should take a year or two off.
I encourage Andre to continue to wear his seersucker shirt in his mansion and play his flute and continue to be the unique, wonderful artist he’s been since 1992. I’ll keep listening to him rap and probably not listen to him play the flute.