Would you prefer an album of flute melodies or rhymes about the Outkast member’s colonoscopy?
I’m sorry, Ms. Jackson, but André 3000 still really doesn’t feel like rapping. After announcing an album of instrumental flute music — which is notably not the rap album people might have expected from him — the musician opened up about his decision to switch up his style. In a new interview with GQ, he explained that getting older has not been conducive to great rhymes — at least for him.
“Sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way,” he said. “I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does. And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad.’ You can find cool ways to say it, but….” Then he apologized a trillion times.
Actually, he did not apologize at all. And just to prove his “it is what it is” attitude, he titled a song on his upcoming album “I swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.”
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“I’ve worked with some of the newest, freshest, youngest, and old-school producers,” he told GQ. “I get beats all the time. I try to write all the time.” He’s just not that into it. “Even now people think, ‘Oh, man, he’s just sitting on raps, or he’s just holding these raps hostage,’” he said. “I ain’t got no raps like that.”
This feeling, of course, is nothing new for Mr. 3000. Almost a decade ago, he told Rolling Stone practically the same thing, almost word for word. “I’ve always known that there comes a time when you’re just not as hip,” he said at the time. “It happens to everybody, and it has nothing to do with talent. It has to do with intensity and time and the world growing around you.” And that was when he was 39.