It's been a relatively quiet decade-plus since OutKast hit it big with "Hey Ya!" and Andre Benjamin, AKA Andre 3000, recently opened up about why.
In a recent in-depth interview with GQ, Benjamin was very candid about his insecurities as a musician, claiming that he has loads of new material that was never released.
"When I pass away, people will find hours and hours of files… hard drives and sh*t," he told the magazine. "It’s hard drives of me just in the house alone playing horrible guitar. Me playing piano. Me playing a little sax. I was trying to find out: What can I be excited about? Because I never was, to me, a great producer or a great writer or a great rapper."
Benjamin was caught in a bit of a rut on multiple levels recently, telling GQ:
"I was in a creative hole, a personal hole, and I was still not dealing with my mom’s and my father’s deaths. And really, I don’t know if I have still. You know: Just push that away. The problem with being successful is you can do whatever you do times ten. And no one to stop you. You can easily go down the wrong path and you get into that place. And the thing that brings you out is other people."
Besides a brief OutKast reunion tour in 2014, and a few notable guest appearances on albums by the likes of Solange Knowles, Frank Ocean, and A Tribe Called Quest, Benjamin's voice has been noticeably absent from the music world.
And it might just stay that way.
For Benjamin, knowing when to throw in the towel is just as important for an artist as it is for an athlete.
"I’m slowing down, and I see these young kids coming up and I was them. And at a certain point, no matter how Mayweather you are, I think it’s classy to be like, you know what? [brushes off hands]," he said. "I think I have, like, maybe two more Mayweather fights… Or maybe one."
When it comes to his OutKast partner Big Boi, however, Benjamin only has high praise.
"When you watch early OutKast videos, Big Boi’s the leader. He always had the confidence, where I was kind of like the shy one," he remarked. "Big Boi can rap better than me—I always said that. If somebody said, 'Pick who you want from OutKast to go to battle with you,' it wouldn’t be me. ’Cause like, what I’ma do? Say some mind sh*t? You can’t have thoughts in a battle—nobody gives a sh*t about that."
Twitter was quick to praise Benjamin, however:
In the meantime, we continue to wait:
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