André 3000 has said that he feels bad for the current spate of celebrities enjoying the heights of fame.
In a new interview with GQ to promote the release of his new album New Blue Sun, which is out now, the OutKast rapper said that celebrities who are under the eye of the watchful public lead a “wack life.”
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“I love that it’s happened,” he said, referring to his fame. ” I don’t regret any of that. But now that I’m at a certain level, I miss certain things about normalcy. I’m an only child, so I’ve always kind of been to myself anyway.”
He continued: “A lot of my contemporaries, I actually feel bad for them. Because we got children, and sometimes some of these people can’t even go out without having paparazzi follow them. It’s like, that’s a wack-ass life, man. […] [That part of] being famous really sucks, man. It’s so unhuman.”
Check out the interview below, beginning about three and a half minutes in.
Elsewhere in the interview, he revealed that he and Big Boi used to pray for assistance behind the mic — but once their prayers were answered, it brought a set of challenges they weren’t prepared for.
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.”
André 3000 also 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 was part of the collective that adopted the moniker Earthtone III when producing OutKast records alongside Big Boi and Mr. DJ.
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“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.”
