The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 2 (Andre 3000 Aging in Onyx)

Last week, Andre 3000 released New Blue Sun. His first new album in a full seventeen years.

The title of the first track on the album says it all.

I Swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time

If you’d never heard of him, you’d think you were listening to an Alice Coltrane acolyte rather than one of the top five MCs of his generation. And then on top of that/alongside of that, if you’d never literally heard him before this album, you probably wouldn’t know that he was part of the duo that redefined what it meant to be black and southern.

When asked about his artistic decision to go full woodwind rather than release what many of his fans have been calling for, this is what he said:

I want to sit with this for a moment.

Over the past year or so since I’ve been “away” from The Counterpublic Papers, four things have happened.

I started taking a pill everyday (for cholesterol).

I’ve started actively using reading glasses

I’ve become a card-carrying member of AARP

On February 20, 2023, at approximately 3:26 PM, I had to end my undergrad course on the politics of black cultural production prematurely, because I received a phone call from my youngest child…that had me scrambling to bring him back to Baltimore from Dallas.

Now I take those first four things—even that last thing—as ones that comes with the territory associated with entering a certain stage of life. A stage of life none of us were really prepared for. Being born in 1969 I could see myself being 31 given how important the year 2000 was in the zeitgeist of the latter decades of the 20th century…but I couldn’t see much more beyond that. I definitely couldn’t see aging.    

When Andre 3000 writes of needing a colonoscopy (something, as I think of it, I still haven’t gotten, and I need to) and of his eyesight going bad, I get it. When he says, jokingly, that colonoscopies aren’t cool, I get that too.

Further, I also get the need to express that in some way other than words. In another interview he notes that for him, the album is about wind and breathing.

I don’t know if I could capture the picture above (which I took in August of this year) in words. I became a photographer in large part because I wanted to capture things I didn’t have the skill to capture in words.

But here’s the thing.

The rap form is at its simplest comprised of two elements--a story, told in poetry, and beats.

Given this, the form should allow you to tell a story about anything. When Andre 3000 says “sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way” and then adds “I’m 48 years old” and then suggests that that last statement is kind of causal (I am 48, therefore I shouldn’t rap)…he’s making a statement about the genre itself. About the inability of the genre to extend and mature with the maturation of its producers and consumers. I don’t read him as saying “I don’t have the capacity to express what I’m experiencing in bars,” he’s saying “Rap doesn’t have the capacity to allow me to express what I’m experiencing in bars.”

I recall hearing about an interview with Mick Jagger in his twenties in which a journalist asked Jagger what he planned to be doing when he turned 30 and Jagger responded by saying something to the effect of “whatever it is, I hope it isn’t rock and roll.”

Now I’m almost positive this interview never happened, I just think that it did. But it does capture a fifties/sixties era truth that rock and roll was produced by and for teenagers and young adults. The fact that Jagger is still going at eighty is both a testimony to Jagger and to the genre of rock and roll itself. Rock matured as its population matured while still retaining just enough of its youthful spirit that teenagers and young adults still see and hear themselves within it.

But one of the reasons rap and hip-hop developed in the first place was because some of us  couldn’t fully hear ourselves in rock (or, for that matter in jazz, pop, blues, and r&b). We could hear ourselves partially—just as most of Nirvana’s Nevermind was inspired by The Gap Band, Method Man was inspired by Hall and Oates, but there were elements of our experience that weren’t quite captured there. I recently heard theorist Michael Shapiro deliver a paper entitled “The Civic Lives of Grief”. I asked for the paper after hearing Shapiro quote Ray Charles who believes singers only reach their full potential after they turn fifty (this connected to Shapiro’s interest in the productive capacities of grief). Thinking about the mundane and in instances tragic aspects of 21st century aging in onyx, as well as the prolonged grief associated with it, I can only hope that if Andre 3000 doesn’t return to bars to express this, someone does.