André 3000 threw Hip-Hop fans a curveball when he released an instrumental flute album in November 2023. The Outkast rapper insisted he wasn’t holding his raps “hostage,” but fellow Dungeon Family member Big Gipp claimed 3 Stacks has a rap album in the vault during an interview with Atlanta’s B High.
“I’ma tell you something you don’t know — the bruh got a rap album,” Big Gipp said. “Bruh, if he wanted to rap, he got that. Organized Noize could go in they vault and pull out a 3000 album. It’s not about that. It’s about where we are in music right now. Him coming out rapping wasn’t gonna change nothing. It was just him joining what’s going on. Now, him coming out doing this and making this successful, he just broke the whole situation down to where now we can go in another direction.”
Big Gipp applauded André 3000 for releasing the flute album despite the demand for a rap project. The Goodie Mob stalwart believed 3 Stacks’ pivot provided a blueprint for other Hip-Hop artists.
“At the end of the day, for me, that’s great,” Big Gipp said. “Because guess what? He can go out here in theaters, people gonna charge $100, $500, $1000 to see him play his flute. Right? He’s showing you another way to take music and grow gracefully as a man and an MC. I ain’t got to depend on rap for the rest of my career.”
New Blue Sun marked André 3000’s first project since Outkast’s 2006 album, Idlewild. The project peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard 200 chart. The album’s opener “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time” broke the record for the longest song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
