Creation as a cross to bear. Does it have to be that way? (Maybe... but maybe that's okay.)

André 3000 and The Dandy Warhols can teach us some very important lessons about how to carry that weight.

Andre 3000 simultaneously carrying and shrugging-off the weight of his legacy at the 2025 Met Gala.

André 3000 has just released a new collection of music titled 7 Piano Sketches. I hesitate to call this release an “album” because, for starters, it’s just too short. It’s also way too underdeveloped (and that’s putting it kindly). Some commentators, like one-time Rolling Stone editor

Hank Shteamer

, reviewing the release for Pitchfork, have properly identified 7 Piano Sketches as an EP. If I’m being blunt, though, 7 Piano Sketches is too half-assed to even warrant designation as an EP.

Bear in mind that I say this as someone who raved about André’s album of instrumental bass flute music, New Blue Sun, which I hailed as a spiritually-elevated masterpiece that showcased André aspiring to the luminous aural transcendence of “spiritual jazz” icons like Jon Hassell. I also say this as someone who rarely makes a sport of dismissing people’s creations so casually.

(As always, I urge you to see/hear for yourself:)

When New Blue Sun was released in late 2023, a wave of consternation and bafflement percolated throughout the hip hop sphere. André, née André Benjamin, is of course best known as the more outwardly flamboyant half of the Atlanta duo Outkast, one of the most successful—and innovative—hip hop acts of all time. The talk at the time basically boiled down to “What the fuck is this guy doing?” Underneath the outcry, it seemed to me that there was a current of betrayal, as if Benjamin’s fans, admirers, and peers took his radical departure personally.

I understood why fans would be dumbstruck, but I didn’t feel the sense of ownership I’d have felt had I been more personally invested in Benjamin’s body of work with Outkast. It’s not that I don’t admire the shit out of his off-kilter rhythmic phrasing, it’s just that I’ve never delved into the Outkast catalog as much as I’ve been meaning to since the first time I got my brain twisted like a pretzel by the delightfully outlandish video for “Elevators (Me and You)” when it came on MTV back in 1996. (I’d also recommend listening to the uncensored version.)

It also helped that I happened to love André’s new direction—and that I find hip hop’s dogmatic codes oppressive to the point where I can see artists starting to buck against them when they get to feel like a yoke around one’s neck. But that’s my hangup—not André’s. When speaking in interviews with the likes of GQ (and, four years prior, to Rick Rubin), Benjamin didn’t express resistance against hip hop. Instead, he expressed doubts about his own relevance as a rapper.

Even though I loved New Blue Sun, I recognized this as a signal of trouble—or, more precisely, a clear indicator of an artist starting to retreat from the very thing they do best. I didn’t feel like André owed hip hop anything, but I felt he owed it to his gifts as an MC not to just drop rapping outright. Not only that, he had just appeared with a guest feature on the Killer Mike track “Scientists and Engineers,” released just five months before New Blue Sun.

Alas, since lightning has decidedly not struck twice for me, I’m beginning to view André’s ambivalence towards rapping as an alarming creative implosion from an artist who’s managed to find himself both stuck but adrift. And, if his aimless farting around on 7 Piano Sketches doesn’t scream “lack of purpose,” I don’t know what does. To clarify, the new EP actually pre-dates New Blue Sun by a decade. Which means that Benjamin’s instrumental skills haven’t taken a step backward from New Blue Sun, as it might initially appear.

By his own admission, however, André originally named the recording The Best Worst Rap Album in History.¹ Granted, he never intended to release this stuff—the title was more of a working handle that functioned as a sort of inside joke with himself—but the fact that he chose those words shows that he’s been chafing against his own legacy for quite some time. This doesn’t come as a huge shock—Outkast, after all, hasn’t put out an album in almost 20 years—but it does raise questions.

So what’s going on here? I got into it at length with

James A. Brown

on his Media Studies podcast. I recommend first watching this Key & Peele skit spoofing Outkast first:

James and I opened our livestream with this skit, but it was cut due to copyright. When James exclaims “They nailed it!” at the very beginning, he’s reacting to the part where Keegan-Michael Key, as André, says “I got a new idea for an album, man! It’s gonna be just the sound of screeching metal, and only one spoken-word per track.”

Right off the bat, James discusses the profound impact that André 3000 has had a profound on his life. As a self-described “blerd—a black, nerdy kid from the projects,” it was very meaningful to discover in Outkast a hip hop group that represented “this other shade of blackness.” James makes a compelling case that André’s withdrawal from rap music impoverishes the hip hop landscape from having a key figure who “does not feel like he has to fake toughness.”

Suffice it to say that James has not been onboard with André’s forays into jazz. (James has other, less flattering terms for it.) But our conversation took an unexpected turn when I realized that none of us is as far from André 3000’s situation as we might think. Even, for example, at my nanoscopic level of putting work out in places where it’s publicly visible, I can already relate to Benjamin’s inner conflict. So rather than continue to take shots at someone whose shoes I can barely imagine walking in, I started to empathize with Benjamin’s predicament at a certain point in the livestream.

It occurred to me recently: no matter who we are or what it is that we create, the creation becomes something that both replenishes and depletes energy. It becomes both a vehicle and a heavy cross to be born… a font of riches and a giant bloodsucking tick. As human beings, we are nothing if not animated by the twin drives to create and accomplish. At the species level, our lives are so fully enveloped by creative instincts (whether we answer them or not) that we lose sight of how prevalent our urge to create actually is. Rather than identify creation as a part of the human condition, we assign it to… artists.

But at the end of the day, even someone as high-profile as André 3000 is in no different of a position than, say, the owner of a restaurant whose success consumes not only the owner but their entire family. Or, take the ultimate paragon of creation: the mother of an infant. Contact with the infant, of course, bathes the mom’s brain in a blissful wash of oxytocin, but the infant literally sucks the life out of her as it screams, ever ravenous for mother’s milk, touch, attention, and time.

Our challenge, then, is to always find a way to ensure that whatever it is we’ve created re-waters the soil it grows from. It’s easier said than done, but it can be done… I recently went to see the Portland rock band The Dandy Warhols, and I was struck (among other things) by how much joy, enthusiasm, intention, and aspiration they put into songs of theirs that date back thirty years. As I say in my new video post about the show, the total lack of ambivalence towards their own material and accomplishments—not to mention the sheer life force that surged from the stage like a tidal wave—was palpable. There was no weight hanging over the room.

It’s rare to see bands at any level appear to be so at-ease with their own back catalog, so decidedly unencumbered by what they’ve accomplished. As we can infer from the plight of countless famous people, being celebrated for what one has created obviously has a way of distorting one’s relationship with the creation and the muse that inspired that creation—to say nothing of the relationship with the audience and with the self. But, whether it’s the Italian baker who loses their taste for cookies and canoli or the musical artist that comes to resent their hit song, we all have a fine line to walk.

I, for example, sat for 8 hours straight in the same chair editing that video—never once getting up to move around, snack, or get fresh air. As strongly compelled as I’d been to make the video in the first place, lo-fi warts and all (if you watch the footage, you can hear chicks chirping in the background, you can see me ducking to avoid dive-bombing flies, the lighting is terrible, etc), I didn’t feel satisfaction when I was done. Instead, I felt jittery, dysregulated, and completely hollowed-out.

Here’s the thing: I’m quite certain that communicating via videos and essays is where I belong right now. Even still, I sometimes get plagued by doubts. Luckily, I was somewhat stabilized by the bike ride home, and by reading bedtime stories to my kid. Though still doubtful, I slept well. More importantly, I posted the fuckin’ thing anyway. But if that’s how I feel, just imagine how someone like André 3000 feels, with the full force of his past successes and the attention of the world bearing down on him at all times.

I wish André could have been at that Dandy Warhols show—or at least that he could himself at a show that would spark the same feeling in him as it did in me. A collaboration between him and The Dandys would be amazing, or even just a cool hang. But I’d just as soon be happy for him to stumble onto whatever might snap his inspiration back into place, so that he didn’t have to feel like he had to stand in its way. As I’m sure he can tell us, inspiration hurts when you fulfill it but, as most of us could tell him, it hurts a hell of a lot when you don’t fulfill it.

Somewhere in the messy middle, though, there’s a tolerable medium. Let’s hope he finds his way back there. In the meantime, kudos to acts like the Dandys, who appear to have found it.

1. From the official 7 Piano Sketches order page:

These piano sketches are improvisations. To conjure them up, I spread my fingers out on the keys and randomly but with purpose move them around until I find something that feels good or interesting. If it feels really good I will try to repeat it. I cannot name which notes, keys or chords that I’m playing. I simply like the sound and mechanics of piano playing. Some of my favorite piano music composers and players that inspire me are Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Philip Glass, Stephen Sondheim, Joni Mitchell and Vince Guaraldi.

These piano pieces weren’t recorded with the intention of presenting them in any formal way to the public. They were personal, at home recordings. I would sometimes text them to my family and friends.

Pardon the sound quality, they were all recorded with my iPhone sitting directly on the piano or my laptop microphone with the exception of ‘Blueberries’. (recorded in studio)

Most of these were recorded in Texas. The house my son and I were renting had no furniture at all. Only a piano, our beds and tv screens.

This collection of songs was recorded almost a decade before New Blue Sun. The original title for it was 'The Best Worst Rap Album In History' and here is an excerpt from the original liner notes.

“It’s jokingly the worst rap album in history because there are no lyrics on it at all. It’s the best because it’s the free-est emotionally and best I’ve felt personally. It’s the best because it’s like a palette cleanser for me.”