Breath Control

André 3000 fans have waited decades for a solo rap album. He offers flute instead.

- CRAIG JENKINS

SINCE THE 1993 RELEASE of OutKast's debut single, "Player's Ball," André 3000 has cultivated a powerful distaste for easy wins. Resistance was always core to his duo with Big Boi, and OutKast's wide web of interests yielded dense, unpredictable American pop music, cementing the group's reputation as one of the most gifted songwriting teams in any musical tradition. André in particular seemed to delight in scrambling normies' circuits. "It's the people who take whatever music they doing so far to the left of what was going on," he gushed while naming influences in a 2000 Rolling Stone profile. "Put on any album from goddamned 1966 and put on a Sly Stone album-it sounds very different. P-Funk from any time sounds different. Those are the people that inspired us to blow niggas' minds." Across later OutKast works, André seemed driven by an appetite for this interdisciplinary respect, as the gritty metacommentary on fame, rap clichés, and industry politics guiding "Ova da Wudz" and "Return of the 'G" took a back seat to the restless experimentation of 2003's The Love Below.