André 3000 has revealed that he and Big Boi used to pray for assistance behind the mic back — but once their prayers were answered, it brought a set of challenges they weren’t prepared for.
In a new interview with GQ ahead of the release of his new album New Blue Sun, which is out now, the OutKast rapper confessed that the duo used to ask God for help before the group exploded into the mainstream.
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Three Stacks waxed poetic about how life changed for him and Big Boi once ATLiens and Aquemini hit the streets, musing that things reached a point where they couldn’t “take their kids to the park to play” because the paparazzi would swarm them everywhere.
“That’s life — you want what you want, ’til you don’t want it,” he said. “Me and Big Boi used to literally pray every night. ‘Lord, really, really, we just wanna be good rappers.’ That was our prayer. It was called, like, a rapper’s prayer. And we did that. And now we’re seeing that it’s happened. I love that it’s happened. I don’t regret any of that. But it’s kind of like now that I’m at a certain level, I miss certain things about normalcy.”
Check out the interview below:
Elsewhere in the interview, André 3000 spoke in depth about his love for playing the flute and revealed he’s secretly lent his wind instrument skills to releases from “known artists.”
The ATL legend said he was credited for his contributions, but the reason they were able to fly under the radar is that he used different names — much like when he adopted the moniker Earthtone III when producing OutKast records alongside Big Boi and Mr. DJ.
“I’ve actually played some wind things that I’ve put out in the world that I called myself another name under different artists that are out there that, you know, I was just kinda testing it out in a way,” he said. “From known artists, and they’ve been cool about keeping it secret.”
He added: “I wasn’t sure how to present the wind thing because I would just be on the street and playing [it]. I play in nature a lot. I play [while] hiking, walking, in the city, wherever. And what started to happen was people started filming me on their cellphones and posting it and making beats out of it which is cool to me.
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“But I was trying to find a way, how can I share my love for discovering this wind instrument with more people where it’s not this kind of Where’s Waldo?, there’s this dude playing kinda thing.”
