( Original and full article published on May 15, 2025 by Saby Reyes-Kulkarni on Substack at: feedbackdef.substack.com )

André 3000 and The Dandy Warhols can teach us some very important lessons about how to carry that weight.

André 3000 has just released a new collection of music titled 7 Piano Sketches. I hesitate to call this release an “album” because, for starters, it’s just too short. It’s also way too underdeveloped (and that’s putting it kindly). Some commentators, like one-time Rolling Stone editor Hank Shteamer, reviewing the release for Pitchfork, have properly identified 7 Piano Sketches as an EP. If I’m being blunt, though, 7 Piano Sketches is too half-assed to even warrant designation as an EP.

Bear in mind that I say this as someone who raved about André’s album of instrumental bass flute music, New Blue Sun, which I hailed as a spiritually-elevated masterpiece that showcased André aspiring to the luminous aural transcendence of “spiritual jazz” icons like Jon Hassell. I also say this as someone who rarely makes a sport of dismissing people’s creations so casually.

(As always, I urge you to see/hear for yourself:)

When New Blue Sun was released in late 2023, a wave of consternation and bafflement percolated throughout the hip hop sphere. André, née André Benjamin, is of course best known as the more outwardly flamboyant half of the Atlanta duo Outkast, one of the most successful—and innovative—hip hop acts of all time. The talk at the time basically boiled down to “What the fuck is this guy doing?” Underneath the outcry, it seemed to me that there was a current of betrayal, as if Benjamin’s fans, admirers, and peers took his radical departure personally.

I understood why fans would be dumbstruck, but I didn’t feel the sense of ownership I’d have felt had I been more personally invested in Benjamin’s body of work with Outkast. It’s not that I don’t admire the shit out of his off-kilter rhythmic phrasing, it’s just that I’ve never delved into the Outkast catalog as much as I’ve been meaning to since the first time I got my brain twisted like a pretzel by the delightfully outlandish video for “Elevators (Me and You)” when it came on MTV back in 1996. (I’d also recommend listening to the uncensored version.)

It also helped that I happened to love André’s new direction—and that I find hip hop’s dogmatic codes oppressive to the point where I can see artists starting to buck against them when they get to feel like a yoke around one’s neck. But that’s my hangup—not André’s. When speaking in interviews with the likes of GQ (and, four years prior, to Rick Rubin), Benjamin didn’t express resistance against hip hop. Instead, he expressed doubts about his own relevance as a rapper.

Even though I loved New Blue Sun, I recognized this as a signal of trouble—or, more precisely, a clear indicator of an artist starting to retreat from the very thing they do best. I didn’t feel like André owed hip hop anything, but I felt he owed it to his gifts as an MC not to just drop rapping outright. Not only that, he had just appeared with a guest feature on the Killer Mike track “Scientists and Engineers,” released just five months before New Blue Sun.

Alas, since lightning has decidedly not struck twice for me, I’m beginning to view André’s ambivalence towards rapping as an alarming creative implosion from an artist who’s managed to find himself both stuck but adrift. And, if his aimless farting around on 7 Piano Sketches doesn’t scream “lack of purpose,” I don’t know what does. To clarify, the new EP actually pre-dates New Blue Sun by a decade. Which means that Benjamin’s instrumental skills haven’t taken a step backward from New Blue Sun, as it might initially appear.

By his own admission, however, André originally named the recording The Best Worst Rap Album in History.1 Granted, he never intended to release this stuff—the title was more of a working handle that functioned as a sort of inside joke with himself—but the fact that he chose those words shows that he’s been chafing against his own legacy for quite some time. This doesn’t come as a huge shock—Outkast, after all, hasn’t put out an album in almost 20 years—but it does raise questions.

So what’s going on here? I got into it at length with James A. Brown on his Media Studies podcast: All My Favorite Rappers Are Crazy.

To read the rest of the article go to: https://substack.com/home/post/p-163673401