![]() ![]() And it felt great for me to do that, because it’s like, Phew, I don’t like that life, I don’t like that confrontation.įor your famous “Hey Ya!” performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, were you having those feelings? Yeah, I mean, a curse can also be a gift. Spending more time with myself and stopped touring. I never told my crew for a long time, so I just started getting to myself. You don’t want to explain it, because you don’t want to be a weak link around your friends. Because the more you run from it, the worse it gets. And I started to notice it getting worse and worse. It started a little bit before then, and I just chucked it off as Aw, yeah, man, I just need to take a break. Before that album, I moved to California. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was 2003, so. Even when people heard that we was having a kid, they was like, Oh, this kid is gonna be. He was born into it, ’cause his parents are Erykah and me. They say that if you’re an entertainer, whatever time you took off, you stay that age. It’s strange when, your whole life, everyone has treated you different from everybody else. And once you don’t have that around, you can easily go astray, because, I mean, since age 17 people have catered to me and Big Boi. What were you doing for him? Screen printing with the squeegees, and silk printing. He gave me my first job, actually, screen-printing shirts in his shop in Atlanta. He’s the kinda person that I can talk to. Right now, the only people that keep me in line is my homies, like Swiff, the DJ. Sneakers, $120, Tretorn by André 3000 Benjamin / Socks by Paul Stuartĭo you find that people enable you more than they would if you were just a dude with a job? Yeah. And the thing that brings you out is other people. You can easily go down the wrong path and you get into that place. The problem with being successful is you can do whatever you do times ten. And really, I don’t know if I have still. I was in a creative hole, a personal hole, and I was still not dealing with my mom’s and my father’s deaths. When you say you were in a hole, was it a creative hole or a personal hole or a mix? All of it. I was like, You know what? I need to be around people. I was in a hole, and then I got the offer. That’s the same thing that the Hendrix movie did for me. And then you have all these ideas and then forget ’em. So you try to find other ways to match it, and you really can’t. Especially when you stop being at your height, and you can’t match that energy. What does that include? Just the things that all musicians get into at some point. Then, after the shoot, he would actually pitch the T-shirt line to Anita Baker herself to see if she’d let his designs become her official merchandise. With that in mind, André presented an idea he’d been toying with: What if he designed his own line of Anita Baker T-shirts? He would wear the shirts along with his new line of signature Tretorns (and the new set of gold teeth he recently had made at an Atlanta flea market). He recently started wearing a daily uniform: a long-sleeve bootleg Anita Baker or Phyllis Hyman T-shirt, a beaded necklace, black Rick Owens pants or paint-splattered vintage jeans, mismatched Tretorns (one black, one denim) or Adidas Sambas, and an orange knit cap rolled over his ears and cocked a bit on his dome, like Marvin Gaye’s. Gone are the days of him wearing chaps and football shoulder pads-he just wants to be himself. At age 42, André doesn’t feel like playing dress-up. The plan that day was to talk about his wardrobe for our photo shoot. Which means that André 3000 is on everyone’s top-five list-except his own. If you try to point out that André 3000 has already mastered a very specific musical discipline (namely: rapping), he will deflect and say he’s never felt like a strong rapper at all. ![]() He’s made it a life goal to master one of them, although he won’t say which. He doesn’t store much in it, though: There’s a huge orange John Coltrane poster on the back wall and various instruments lying around. We just finished a long interview session in a nearby park, and I asked if I could see this space: André pays a little extra rent for access to one of the long, narrow storage rooms down here. So if things get hectic between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, or if Indian Point starts to melt down…party at 3000’s place. His girlfriend has looked into it, and this basement is registered nuke-safe or something-it’s a legit shelter. André tells me that to survive a nuclear event, you have to be three stories underground and you have to stay put for two weeks while the winds clear the toxic air. “We’re gonna need a whole lotta water to make it for two weeks.” We’re in the third-floor sub-basement of André Benjamin’s apartment building in downtown New York. “If they drop the bomb, you got 20 minutes to get here,” says André 3000. ![]()
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