André 3000 says he recently found himself deep down “the whole rabbit hole” of his and Big Boi’s time together as Outkast.
Capping off a landmark year as a solo artist with a Rolling Stone interview, 3 Stacks, whose instrumental album New Blue Sun is up for Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammys, relayed to Andre Gee how he landed in such a situation. First, he spoke a bit about how he didn’t start to fully take in the magnitude of the larger Outkast legacy until he and Big Boi had stopped making music together.
But a deeper realization of the scope of the duo’s work together came about, in part, thanks to a voice text André received from his four-year-old niece. Her own discovery of videos of André’s past work, he explained, inspired him to “go back and realize, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of stuff that we did.’”
This is a familiar sentiment among artists of 3 Stacks’ status, particularly those whose mainstream breakthrough, or at least the work that a sector of their fanbase forever holds them to, stems from art they made as a duo or group. What some fans often (perhaps willfully) misunderstand about such artists is that a successful fusion of dynamics within a duo or group is almost always a very temporary kind of magic, and why shouldn’t it be?
The idiom “lightning in a bottle” gets tossed around, maybe too much, but it certainly applies to Outkast. Furthermore, living and working in the bubble necessary for operating at that level often means you're not necessarily privy to how the results of your blood, sweat, and tears-fueled creative process are being discussed among the people.
André 3000 is acutely aware of this, and he reiterated his stance on it during his latest RS chat. But he also had more to say with regards to YouTube and that aforementioned rabbit hole, this time citing his appearance on LeBron James’ The Shop podcast as having led him down a path one can assume he very rarely takes, and understandably so as someone whose eyes seem ever pointed toward what’s ahead.
“They were talking about a rap that I did a long time ago. I had forgotten about the rap, so I wanted to go back and hear the rap, so I YouTubed it,” he said in the interview, which also sees him detailing the ants-related knowledge he’s accumulated on the platform. “Five hours later, I went down the whole rabbit hole of all of our stuff. It’s amazing to hear yourself, from 18 years old till now. I’m just now understanding the weight of what’s happened to me.”
André also gives an update on the possibility of returning to the Outkast world, as seen in the full feature here.
New Blue Sun is joined in the Album of the Year category at the 2025 Grammys by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, Charli XCX’s Brat, Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4, Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department.
Sadly missing from the 2025 nominees class entirely is an album, One More Time, by a group whose storied interpersonal history and friction-causing individual creative pursuits, in some ways, are not all that dissimilar from Outkast’s. Yes, I’m once again talking about blink-182.
For 3 Stacks, getting acknowledgement from the Recording Academy on what is technically his debut solo studio album “really, really surprised” him. Get a look at the full list of potential winners here. The ceremony itself is set for next February in Los Angeles.