André 3000’s ‘New Blue Sun’ Is A Masterclass In Defying Expectations
André 3000 has been out of the game for a long time.
Sure, in the 17 years since OutKast’s unofficial hiatus began, he’s stacked up enough guest verses to fill several mixtapes — from UGK’s legendary ‘Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)’ to Kanye’s vulnerable ‘Life of the Party’. But while he’s been upstaging artists on their own records, and taking the odd acting role, André 3000, the solo artist, has lain dormant. While the expectations for his solo rap debut are seemingly infinite, his talents are ultimately mortal.
It makes perfectly counterintuitive sense, then, that his first solo album, New Blue Sun, contains “no bars”. Instead, it’s 87 minutes of ambient flute recordings — the culmination of years of André wandering the globe, playing his instrument. Almost by accident, New Blue Sun has arrived with more social media fanfare than any ambient album in recent memory — which feels both amusingly inappropriate, and suitably strange, for a work that’s designed to be anything but eventful.
André addresses those hoping for something else in the opening track’s delightfully absurd title, ‘I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Rap” Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time’. A circular pattern of synth chords introduces the album, evoking the ambiguity of Aphex Twin’s masterwork Selected Ambient Works Volume II, but played much faster. Above the clouds, André plays not an organic flute, but a digital woodwind instrument, coming in and out of the mix like a painter adding delicate brushstrokes. As a rapper, he’s always been known for his dexterity — and the parallels between the breath control of a vocalist and a flautist are obvious. But this is something else: a once-virtuoso choosing to play as few notes as possible.
The album was culled from hours of sessions with LA-based experimental musicians, recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio. While the album opens with two calming tracks, the third is where it reveals something more. ‘That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild’ is exactly what it sounds like. With its repeated tom-tom drums, and André playing in a deep, resonant bass clarinet range, it feels like they’re trying to summon something primal.
Other tracks approach a sense of rapture. ‘BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears A 3000® Button Down Embroidered’ is pure ’70s new age with a stunning climax, while the closer ‘Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout into Undying Gardens’ is the most spiritual jazz track, featuring frenetic, atonal woodwind lines. Each of these songs, played live and fully improvised, never quite settles in a single place — like they have no beginning or end.
Even when dozens, if not hundreds, of ambient albums are released to streaming services every week, New Blue Sun is a remarkable work. It’s as if a mythical, lost-for-decades album has suddenly sprung into reality — except it was only announced last week.
Hip-hop’s jazz lineage is well-understood, but New Blue Sun exists in a much vaguer liminal space between hip-hop, spiritual jazz, new age and ambient music. That venn diagram of genres, especially their history of Black and Afrofuturist practitioners, are less well-defined.
In 1992, the eccentric Divine Styler made the strange, spacey, confronting album Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light — on a major label, no less. By the late ‘00s, Lil B and producer Clams Casino were making cloud rap — tracks that de-emphasised the percussive nature of rapping and brought ambience to the forefront. The generational collaborations between Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx, Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders, and even Frank Ocean’s Endless all bridge elements of the earthy and the ethereal. New Blue Sun has many predecessors — and yet, it still feels radical. Where OutKast were once mavericks who redefined the possibilities of Southern hip-hop, André 3000 is embracing an all-encompassing musicality, expanding the definitions of what someone considered a rapper can do.
Now 48, André 3000 has changed, but so has the world around him. In a GQ cover story, he explains, “Sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. 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….”
As much as that’s true for him, or a figure like Jay-Z, it’s not true for all. On the same day, Danny Brown, 42, released his most contemplative album. And Open Mike Eagle, 43, understandably expressed disappointment.
to be clear, he has the right to make whatever music he wants. it’s disappointing that he or anyone thinks rap cant be a viable means of expression for mature experiences.
I hope this slows the weird responses.
— open michael eagle (@Mike_Eagle) November 17, 2023
But there are deeper questions here: why should there be a hierarchy between hip-hop and any other form of music? Why are words more valuable than the breath of a wind instrument? Why would a hypothetical André 3000 rap album be more powerful than what he’s given us here?
Where Stankonia and especially The Love Below displayed a showy, larger-than-life, Prince-like genius, New Blue Sun is the work of a human that’s unfinished — who couldn’t have done this without a community of more experienced musicians around him. His playing reaches for a state of Zen, but in its darker moments, evokes the feeling of being unable to find it.
And in his interviews, André’s candour about the spiritual challenges of being an artist and a human — even one with as many resources as he has — is nothing but admirable. He says to GQ, “As you get older, honesty and beauty became way more important than anything else. You realise that you won’t be here at some point, so the choices you make are like: when I’m gone, what am I leaving behind?”
When ambient music is truly great, it can be a canvas for anything — from André 3000’s deep personal journey, to a soundtrack for a walk in the park. It would be easy to read New Blue Sun as a statement for patient listening and against algorithmic consumption — but there’s nothing calculated about it. In the end, it comes down to nothing more than the question— why make an 87-minute flute album?
Well, why not?
André 3000’s new album New Blue Sun is out now.
Kristen S. Hé is an artist and award-winning journalist. She tweets at @kristenisshe.