Flute Out

The poetics of André 3000's New Blue Sun

Disclaimer. Nigga plays the flute with the audacity of the born free. He breathes music with the subtle mastery blind men exert over wind. He’s coming to blows with ghosts of himself innit. Extractive, regenerative, souls given to reverence for the never ending exhale that created and keeps recreating the earth and the human disinheriting the earth and returning to source. Think of Stevie Wonder on the harmonica playing “Fingertips,”  a jubilant standard about the healing hand of the creator possessing a child on his way. In kinship with this, Rahsaan Roland Kirk walking through the zoo like a pied piper calling flocks toward him in the documentary Sound, could seem extravagantly placed except it plays out like a ritual enacted by a man who knows his music is not to be restricted to venues and inside and covered in the blood and laughter of spectators in velvet and practiced outfits. There be lions Rahsaan would proclaim, attracting swans, elephants, pelicans, children, in the wild, where the tone belongs to them and he plays it back like a mirror or blacked out window. With the fascination of a child he feels the air swell around him, enclose him in their mirth and the  idea of communal swoon as it’s broken and liberated from words and sight.

An hallucinatory, incantatory, unabashed erotics of: can I relax? Can we relax here together in the wanderer’s parallax? We don’t mean to retire, but we’re changing. Can we play these changes together, teaching them to recognize and love themselves? The jazz takes on its operatic ambiance. The rap cannibalizes the so-called jazz and makes transience its home, invents language’s back door where meaning and sound reenter syntax as one siamese second coming from around-the-way, eager to tell the story that words alone would obscure. The beat ignites the words inscribing them with muscle and new will. The 808 is dirty and builds a trance we won’t escape and turns our living toward its brittle infinity of loops and snares. The music becomes its own location and since it’s dangerous to long for a homeland in this age, this music is the safest place, the healthiest object of desire. What is rap music as its health deteriorates into batches and mimesis, ready-mades, predictable stars, too much ass, too much glitter, too much spectacle, nothing new to tell us except everyone is still using sex and drugs to disassociate and love is never scarce but it’s scary to discuss over 808s so we lean into heartbreak, too leniently, and lust. Eric Dolphy gasps and hisses at us. Wouldn’t you be disgusted if you got all the way back to earth and all you heard were egos screaming their imbalance over your bliss of riffs and love calls? I only listen to Mobb Deep and MF DOOM on purpose anymore. That’s almost true, a couple of other rappers, crooners, Brooklyn corner store at noon in summer sounds, but after a few bars the others saturate my cells with their mode and I turn away and want to reject it. The  cacophony of DOOM and Mobb Deep doesn’t bore me or feel formulaic, it’s radiant and brazen as it was when it first arrived. You were supposed to tell me a story. With these whispers— tell me a story. Ecstatic melancholy story. Backstage story about the groupie wars. Subtle lore, like the soundtrack from a film adaptation of Henry Dumas’s unbroken circle before 808s, before the heart could think straight and square. 

André 3000’s New Blue Sun is ancient singing, a collaboration between the needs of the creative and free spirit but also one with the fatalism of some men in middle age, who develop a slightly dejected shell of light about them, having made it, but not quite transcended their personal denouement. Does your language change as the body changes? Does “the slang word pussy roll off the tongue” at 50 as the title of the second song on New Blue Sun insinuates. He still plays, you still play too much. We love that about him still. But now it feels to him, he suggests in interviews, either transgressive or false or unhip to play with words as a rapper. He’s grown reserved but not resigned. This makes me wonder if rap, also 50 and so flagrantly announcing it this year, is embarrassed by its future. Misty-eyed wistful men and women learning to breathe without rhymes, learning the blank verse of survival, learning their rise and fall, their plateau and tether to a spotlight that means them disaster but will not let go, their worth more dead than alive era. What if this album, an ambient album produced by Carlos Nino that is really more about the lilt and giggle of psychic growth revealed as collective reveling than one man who turns into air when he sings; what if it is also a demonstration of the mood the language of rap needs to occupy to feel fresh and real and meaningful again? We’ve heard enough of the same story,  enough aromantic brooding or pseudo revolutionary posturing or middlebrow lusting after the same three empty things. What if it’s time to rap about rap dying, about the earth tilting on its axis to watch blackness unblue the sun? What if the tempos need to be slower, weirder, delirious, winded, blurred, decoupled from the beat, never rhyming, unpopular, addictive, frightening in their will to change on time? I think if Coltrane and Miles and Mingus were still alive they’d be rapping into their instruments, writing sonnets and playing them wordless. I think if rap is still alive it will have to be about ego death, and the ego doesn’t have to die in silence or reeds, it can narrate its living. If the spirit is the breath, and the ego is a holding cell where spiritual growth gets trapped and mangled, where you are losing your breath trying to keep up with where it lands, rap’s ego death can portend the spirit’s return. We all dream of flying, we all know we’re falling, effective music is a negotiation between delusion and what’s happening. It loves you more than what’s happening. It isn’t even always great, its greatness is the humility to try again. Let the men be vulnerable at the end of their conditioning, let the rap lyrics fly by on flutes like rooftops lifted in a tornado, which we deny noticing even as we ask the storm fasten to us and move us too. We who know how to turn the ruins into an inheritance.