In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud grapples with the persistence of suffering despite the great technical and cultural advancements of modern society. Why, he asks, are people with access to all manner of technical achievements and amusing diversions still so frustrated in their pursuit of pleasure? He enumerates several means by which we cope with this societal failure, including intoxication, asceticism, and religion. Art, he suggests, is of little help in this struggle against unhappiness.
“The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling,” Freud writes, “but its intensity is weak as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses.”
Andre 3000 disagrees.
The rapper, singer, and auteur has spent the last three decades pushing the boundaries of music and art in constant pursuit of the outrageous and inspiring. The most recent turn in his wide-ranging career has taken him to explore the sounds and textures of ambient jazz. In a wide-ranging improvised performance at The Kennedy Center on Nov. 9, he proved that even in the darkest of times, music retains its own peculiar power.
As a member of the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast, Andre 3000 redefined hip hop in the late 1990s and early 2000s with his verbal acrobatics and genre-defying sensibilities, before dissolving the group in 2006 and retreating into relative seclusion. After many years of only sporadic collaborations and singles, in 2024 he finally emerged to release his debut solo album New Blue Sun which, in classic Andre 3000 fashion, sounded like nothing he had done before. In this newest project, he has ditched lightning-fast raps and funky bass lines for free-flowing flute solos.
The album’s first song is a 12-minute track titled “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Where The Wind Blew Me This Time.” Over nearly an hour and a half, the record languidly experiments with the possibilities of humming wind instruments and tinkling keys. It’s a startling about-face for one of the greatest rappers of all time, but the album retains Andre’s signature touch in the songs’ expansive structures and nimble melodies. The record was recently nominated for Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammys.
Stream “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Where The Wind Blew Me This Time” by Andre 3000 on YouTube:
The New Blue Sun Tour took these ideas on the road, proving that the strength and breadth of the record’s concept is far more than just a flute phase, at The Kennedy Center. For nearly two hours Andre, backed by keyboardist Surya Botofasino and percussionists Carlos Niño and Deantoni Parks, improvised compositions which swell and pulse like electromagnetic fields. Across five movements at The Kennedy Center performance, his band took the audience on a meandering journey that ranged from the hush of whispering fans to the heart pounding intensity of synth bass lines. Indeed, the live band reached crescendos of crashing magnitude which are never quite matched on the record.
“Y’all are like ‘what the fuck?’” Andre joked by way of closing the first song after one such passage. “I swear we’re not high right now.”
At the center of the storm was Andre 3000 himself. While his band controlled the pacing and textures of the songs, Andre picked out melodies on flute, xylophone, and steel drum. This performance was a reminder that a musical instrument is at base, as its name suggests, simply a tool, and Andre brought a whole toolkit with him that night. In addition to a wide variety of bells, chimes, and gongs, I counted no fewer than six different wind instruments which he switched between throughout the night, ranging from the large sonorous flute featured on the album cover to a spooky sci-fi EWI (electronic wind instrument) and a reedy piccolo.
It was a pleasure to see Andre experimenting with the possibilities of sound in real time, as he coaxed all manner of coos, squawks, and hums from these instruments. He was able to make genuinely surprising music, sounds that I hadn’t heard before or even thought possible. I particularly liked the metal xylophone he played in the second movement, which he transformed into a kind of beat making pad with a rapid series of taps. Even though the context was so radically different, it was still possible to hear Andre’s origins in hip hop in the way he tapped out impromptu boom-bap beats on the gong or lapsed into staccato flows on the flute.
At times, it was almost possible to forget that we were watching an Atlanta rapper perform on one of the most elite stages in the country (tickets started at around $100). The fact that Andre was able to hold the rapt attention of The Kennedy Center concert hall for nearly two hours with his jazzy musings was testament to the singularity of his artistic vision. It was refreshing, in an era where pop icons like Beyonce and Taylor Swift exercise total control over their live performances down to the smallest note and rhinestone, to see a star of equal stature relax himself into the free-flowing vagaries of improvised music. It demonstrated a different kind of artistry, one dedicated to eliciting emotion rather than commanding awe.
“We are on the ride with y’all tonight,” Andre joked during one lull between songs. “The music you are hearing tonight is probably the most honest shit you will hear this year. Us and Future.”
In its patience and attention to sonic detail, New Blue Sun suggests that the answers to our civilization’s many discontents may lie beyond the limits of our present discourses. The album finds one of our country’s greatest poets abandoning his words and searching for other ways of reaching us with his breath. At the end of the final song at The Kennedy Center performance, as the band’s angular electronic sounds gradually faded around him, Andre sat breathing gently into the microphone. His sighs of relief continued to echo as the audience exited into the strangely warm November evening.