Beyond Category: How Andre 3000 Foreshadowed His Foray Into Jazz
A-Side: Andre 3000 dropped a surprise piano EP titled 7 Piano Sketches following his attendance at the Met Gala blue carpet, where he arrived with a baby grand piano strapped to his back.
The release of 7 Piano Sketches follows his 2023 flute-based instrumental album New Blue Sun. Although the artist’s foray into jazz still confounds many fans, he foreshadowed this expansion of his artistry months before the album’s debut.
Seeing Andre 3000’s appearance at the Met Gala and learning of OutKast’s induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class of 2025 naturally made me think of my dissertation, which heavily references both the artist and the duo, starting with its title, “The South Got Something to Share.” Jazz as a musical genre is also heavily referenced throughout, in part because I am greatly inspired by it, and in part because, as historian Adam Green explains in his book, Selling The Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955, “Histories of migration and expatriation, analyses of jazz and improvisational arts generally, and discussions of cultural fluorescence hinge on the turns of black people toward one or another city, signaling their own historic exchange of life conditions of agrarian confinement for something else – not necessarily better, but certainly different” (4).
In this week’s B-Side, I share the epilogue from my doctoral dissertation, where I piece together his breadcrumbs to show the whole loaf of how and why Andre 3000 got into all that jazz.
Welcome to the B-side.
Epilogue
The Future is Now
“Duke Ellington in this bitch, rebelling is like an itch, oh I’ma I’ma live forever” – Andre 3000 in “Scientists and Engineers” by Killer Mike also featuring Future
“I rarely ever speak without something to say. But if you can't remember the who, what, when, or the how, remember one thing I said: the future is now” - Big Rube in “The Future Is Now” (2012) by Future (ft. Big Rube)
Personal politics aside, I must admit that I enjoyed Killer Mike’s 2023 album Michael. Although the Grammy Awards voting committee and I may never agree on whose album deserves “Album of the Year,” we did agree that Michael was certainly worthy of a nod for “Best Rap Album”*. Killer Mike (nee Michael Render) swept the 66th GRAMMY Awards when he won “Best Rap Album” for Michael in addition to “Best Rap Song” and “Best Rap Performance” for the song “Scientists & Engineers.” “I want to thank everyone who dares to believe that art can change the world,” said the Atlanta rapper in his acceptance speech for “Best Rap Performance.” In the speech for his third and final win of the night for “Best Rap Album,” he exclaimed, “It’s a sweep! Atlanta, it’s a sweep!” While I did enjoy the 14-track album, I do wonder whether the voting committee was swayed in part by the features from Andre 3000 and Future on the song “Scientists & Engineers,” which also features vocals from the singer Eryn Allen Kane. The song embodies a sound and production that sits in the pocket of the liminal space between past and future, gospel and trap, in a way that feels evocative of Atlanta itself. Andre Gee of The Rolling Stone described the album overall (the rapper’s first album in eleven years) as “a lush, bluesy mesh of Southern church vibes with 808s.”
Killer Mike, Andre3000, and Future collectively offer listeners a Dungeon Family reunion of sorts on “Scientists & Engineers.” Andre 3000’s status as an original member of the Dungeon Family needs no further explanation and Killer Mike has long been described by outlets such as OkayPlayer as one of the heirs to the Dungeon Family throne (Gonik 2018), but to Big Gipp’s (2023) point, Future’s connection to the collective is often overlooked, so his appearance on the song was arguably overshadowed by the rarefied air of a 3 Stacks feature. However, Fader editor Jordan Darville astutely observes in his review of the song that “Future contributes some addled bars that recall his mixtape days more than his current status as a global rap superstar.” As an ethnographer, Future’s debut studio album, Pluto (2012), is worth studying. The first track on the Pluto album is a song called “The Future is Now.” The song was produced by Future and Organized Noize and features spoken word poetry performed by Atlanta legend Big Rube. Big Rube’s words speak well to this study’s interest in “inhabiting multiple dimensions of perspective” and exploring the work/lives of people like him who move in their own eccentric orbit as rebels amongst conformists. However, he is very clear on the main point he wants listeners to take away from his verse and proclaims, “I rarely ever speak without something to say. But if you can't remember the who, what, when, or the how, remember one thing I said: the future is now.”
Throughout the album, Future, who is the younger cousin of Organized Noize producer Rico Wade, assumes the role of astronaut as he explores the possibilities of outer space and the realities of his physical surroundings. Framing the ATLien astronaut space explorer as both ethnographer and the subject of analysis, Future (nee Nayvadius Wilburn), who is also referred to publicly as “Pluto,” lyrically and sonically probes into the known and unknown as well as the tangible (finding his “astronaut chick” in the club) and intangible (feeling love towards her). His use of autotune at this point in his career was, by my approximation, a creative choice made to convey the idea that his lyrical content was not enough to express the full contents of his heart. As perceived sinners often say to perceived saints when they know their actions may contradict their character: “God knows my heart.” In a full circle moment, or perhaps simply a reminder that old habits die hard, Future expresses through the support of autotune in the outro of “Scientists & Engineers,” “Go make love to an angel/While the devil in my head.” Future is a folklorist after all, so we must remember what Zora Neale Hurtson said about Negro folklore as a mode of creative expression for the Black artist: “nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use. God and the Devil are paired, and are treated no more reverently than Rockefeller and Ford” (Hurston 2023, 53).
Anyone who actually listened, not just heard, but truly listened to Andre 3000’s “all-too-rare verse” (Darville 2023) on the song “Scientists & Engineers” should not have been surprised that the rapper would go on to release a non-lyrical album, New Blue Sun, just five months later. Perhaps I’m also primed to focus on what he said, not merely the fact that he said it on wax, which is again an “all-too-rare” occurrence. Understanding this, I want to draw attention to the following line from Andre3000’s verse on the song: “Duke Ellington in this bitch, rebelling is like an itch, oh I’ma I’ma live forever.” I was more surprised that he released an album at all and less surprised that the album he released was a non-lyrical offering of his spiritual gifts. You see, the lyric was both foreshadowing what was to come while also articulating what already was, which is that the rapper has embraced an understanding of jazz improvisation as a language in itself, similar to the musicians that Paul F. Berliner studied for Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (1994). In a 2023 interview with Rodney Carmichael for NPR, Andre 3000 describes New Blue Sun as a “new world” and a “new direction” for himself. He also talks about how he came to appreciate jazz music. “And once I started really getting into it, I'm like, hold up: Jazz was the rap of that time. These dudes, they were smoking. They were doing heroin. They were in clubs. We trade verses; they [were] trading solos. [When] you really get into it and you really understand what they were doing — and how rebellious what they were doing [was] — you're like, man, this is the ultimate,” he said.
Andre3000 made a prophetic statement in 1995: “The South Got Something to Say.” Now, nearly thirty years later, he offers us a new mantra: The South Got Something to Share. Words cannot always fully express what we feel because words are just one mode of expression. One of Duke Ellington’s favorite compliments was that something or someone he admired was “beyond category” (Schuller 1992). As Andre 3000 remarked about jazz in his interview with NPR: “Once I discovered and got deep into it — loving Eric Dolphy and Coltrane and Yusef Lateef, you know, Pharoah Sanders — like, these are some of my favorites. And as a child, I'm like, "Whoa, they can actually say something, or make me feel something, without saying something.” Not everything we feel can be expressed verbally. Some feelings may require autotune while others may require a new tune altogether. Work that comes from the soul can be expressed in a multitude of ways because there are multiple ways we can share our spiritual gifts. We are multifaceted and multidimensional beings. We are “beyond category.” The habitual “be” ensures that our souls will live on forever, forever, ever, forever, ever.
*My personal opinion is subject to change because I haven’t listened to all of the albums that were nominated yet. Michael (2023) is moreso the best new rap album of the albums that I did listen to in 2023.