Tag: Andre 3000

André 3000’s debut solo album has no raps or lyrics — just digital flutes, instrumental jazz and vibes

This is the first time he has released an album in 17 years.

OutKast star André 3000 announced that he will release his debut solo album, New Blue Sun, on November 17.

The musician composed one-half of perhaps the most successful rap duo of all time with OutKast and, here at For The Win, he was recently named one of the best rappers to ever live.

But once the duo decided to split in 2007, he didn’t go on to have a prolific solo career like Big Boi, his longtime OutKast partner. Instead, he offered occasional guest features, even winning a Grammy award for his appearance on “Come Home” with Anderson. Paak in 2020.

Now 17 years after releasing his final album with OutKast, André 3000 announced that he will finally release his first solo LP. It is not, however, what many fans were potentially expecting (via NPR):

“One thing it is not, however, is a rap record: No bars, no beats, no sub-bass. André doesn’t sing on this joint, either. What he does do is play flute, and plenty of it — contrabass flute, Mayan flutes, bamboo flutes — along with other digital wind instruments.”

It’s not particularly shocking to learn that André 3000 is ditching the microphone for the woodwind instrument considering how often fans have spotted him playing the flute in public.

He even contributed four songs on the flute to the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once.

His upcoming album, however, is far more ambitious. New Blue Sun is an 87-minute-long, experimental project co-produced by percussionist Carlos Niño.

Song titles on the eight-track record include “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time” and “Dreams Once Buried Beneath The Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens” so that may give you a sense of the vibe.

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A highly debatable ranking of the 14 greatest rappers of all time

This was the closest we could get our staff to at least sort of agreeing.

Now that we’ve reached the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we wanted to celebrate the greatest rappers of all time.

Ranking musicians is an impossible task, of course, because everyone brings their own criteria and preferences. For example, we recently tried to rank the greatest American rock bands, and we realized there was no perfect science.

Music isn’t like sports. There aren’t definitive stats we can mention in order to demonstrate why someone is better than someone else. Rap is so much more about the way something makes you feel, which makes it very hard to judge and quantify.

But we still did our best to try and answer some important questions.

How exactly does one define greatness? Is it your personal favorite rapper, or is it more based on accomplishments and influence? How much do we factor technical ability relative to storytelling? What weight is given to flow compared to popularity? We all had our own definitions so we had to really just trust our gut here.

What about collectives? Rap groups (e.g. Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, The Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Run D.M.C., Salt-N-Pepa, etc.) were excluded from this list. We will revisit this at a later date.

Here was our methodology: Our staff was allowed to cast ten votes for any rapper, dead or alive. We were asked to rank each rapper from No. 1 overall to No. 10 overall. Rappers that got first-place votes from a staffer received ten points, rappers that got second-place votes received nine points (and so on … until rappers that got tenth-place votes earned one).

We calculated the results and brought them to you, the reader. This article is, by nature, imperfect. This list missed a lot of the best rappers to ever touch a microphone.

Art is subjective, as we know. But this was the closest we could get our staff to at least sort of agreeing.

RELATED: Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary is the perfect time to celebrate how intertwined it is with sports

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When will Outkast apologize a trillion times to Ms. Jackson? One Redditor attempts the math

How long will it take? Forever, forever, ever, forever, ever?

Math is a beautiful, infuriating thing—especially for a sports and pop culture blog—but there are just some times when we have to give in, break out the TI-89 calculator we’ve kept since high school and crunch some numbers.

One post on Reddit’s r/Music board late Thursday night immediately sent us scrambling to do just that. You see, while the rest of the world was busy watching Duke keep Coach K’s last dance alive a bit longer, Redditor u/randomvegasposts was pondering one of life’s great mysteries:

How long will it take OutKast to actually apologize to Ms. Jackson a trillion times?

Got the song stuck in your head yet? Good. Now let’s dig into the question.

Released in October 2000, André 3000’s partial ode to Erykah Badu (and her mother) apologizes to Ms. Jackson 20 times in the lyrics. As u/randomvegasposts noted, the song would have to be played 50 billion times in order to reach one trillion apologies.

According to the post, u/randomvegasposts counts 621 million plays on Spotify, which accounts for 31 percent of all streams on the current market. That leads to an estimated 1.863 billion plays. Adding in YouTube streams and record sales from “Stankonia”, u/randomvegasposts brings the estimated total up to 45.9 billion apologies.

But it gets more complicated because the internet in the early aughts was anything but simple.

With file sharing apps like Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa, Morpheus and tons of others at their peak, it’s impossible to tell how many times Ms. Jackson was pirated and played. Having grown up during that era, I can confidently say we can only underestimate this number.

So let’s consider this a different way. If we know it takes 50 billion plays to reach a trillion apologies, and the song itself—at normal speed—is four minutes and 30 seconds long, we would need to play Ms. Jackson on a continuous loop for 427,798.323 YEARS in order to fulfill André 3000’s promise.

Of course, Redditors have a few other ways of complicating this question. Let’s say you’re singing along with the song, do those apologies count as well? Or is it only André 3000’s vocalized apologies that matter here?

If André 3000 is singing in past tense, does that mean he has already hit a trillion apologies?

Does recording an apology and playing it back over and over count as multiple apologies? Or is André 3000 still stuck at the original 20 apologies in the lyrics when he recorded his part? And if OutKast had to record multiple takes in the studio, do those apologies count or are they unofficial?

The mind boggles. More specifically, the minds of all the sportswriters in our Slack Teams channel boggles. We were not built to deal with numbers these large.

The only obvious answer here is that it’ll take forever. Forever, ever.

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