Andre 3000 is at Peace (For Now)

realize at the same time how you’ve been defined almost entirely by this tapestry you’ve been woven into for twenty years, and how grateful you should be for that tapestry. It’s a sentimental thing to say that I wouldn’t exist without the band, but sometimes sentimental things are true. I spent years looking for this commune or that one, the jam se

An album like Donuts—thirty-one short snippets, manipulated samples, overlaid dialogue, no real songs except that everything there is so endlessly tuneful and rhythmic—made people rethink some of their basic assumptions about music, and not just hip-hop, but all recorded music—made them go back to the beginning, to the drum, to a unit of measuremen

In my head, I imagine that when I’m dead, when I can no longer defend my records or explain them, the periodicals will stay forever, like they did in the reading room at the Philadelphia Main Library, and those reviews will become the final word on the things that I’ve created.

I loaded up on music. I can’t remember all the records I got, but one of them was The Blueprint by Jay-Z, which became the soundtrack of that event, of that period, for me. To say that I had mixed feelings about Jay-Z at that point in my career was an understatement. To me he represented much of what was wrong with hip-hop, although I couldn’t have

The deeper you get into the process, the more you realize this idea of man and machine — of disappearing into the computer — becomes a form of automatic writing. Sleight of hand. You almost don’t feel conscious when you’re working. For me, that’s the tipping zone into the man-machine idea. When I got into electronic music, I recognized early on tha