As he sits, cradling a large bottle of mineral water in the restaurant of a
London hotel, Andre Benjamin is difficult to miss. In fact, he’s visible
from the lobby. This is largely due to his hair, a sort of deconstructed
afro that bears a passing resemblance to the coiffure of the Simpsons
character Sideshow Bob. It adds a good 30cm not just to his height, but
also to his width. Waiters are forced to manoeuvre around it.
Benjamin cuts a rather curious figure in the restaurant, but then again,
you suspect that he cuts a rather curious figure wherever he goes. While
his partner in Atlanta-based duo OutKast, Antwan ”Big Boi” Patton, is the
epitome of the southern-American rap star – a portly, blunt-smoking playa
famed for having a lapdancer’s pole in his home and an aquarium full of
sharks in his garage – Andre 3000 may be the most anomalous star in
hip-hop’s long history.
Softly spoken and courteous to a fault, he is delightful company. His
answers are usually preceded by lengthy pauses, during which he sighs,
strokes his goatee beard and composes his thoughts. This is not normal
behaviour for a rap superstar. In a world of weed-addled, champagne-sipping
fast-food lovers, Benjamin is a vegetarian yoga enthusiast who paints in
his spare time and has foresworn all intoxicants because ”I was abusing it
too much, I didn’t think I could last long doing that, so I had to chill
out”.
His musical predilections are equally outre by hip-hop standards. He is
unimpressed by his fellow rappers: ”Hip-hop don’t have no fresh energy,
none at all. It’s money driven, everybody tryin’ to make that cheque,
nobody putting art in their albums any more.” Instead, his tastes
currently run to the noisy ”drill’n’bass” techno of Squarepusher and the
Aphex Twin, the Ramones and the Buzzcocks’ stripped-down punk, plus the
Strokes and the Hives. ”I took my DJ to the Strokes concert last
Wednesday,” Benjamin says, smiling. ”My DJ, y’know, he’d never been to a
rock concert before. I don’t know if he understood it really.” There’s a
pause. ”Actually, he fell asleep.”
Then there is the small matter of his dress sense. He long ago eschewed the
standard hip-hop uniform of sportswear and designer labels in favour of a
unique look he dubs the ”gentleman rebel”. Today he is wearing an outfit
that teams a multi-coloured tie-dyed t-shirt with a pea coat monogrammed
with his initials. By Benjamin’s standards, this constitutes dressing down.
He chose to promote their last album, 2001’s Stankonia, by donning a long
platinum wig and a flowery dress – a staggering move given hip hop’s
famously unenlightened attitude to homosexuality. He has also been seen in
a pair of billowing plaid golf pants with bow tie and elaborate pink hat.
He is presumably the only rapper on earth who collects antique silk
scarves.
”I think it’s real important to show style now,” he says. ”The
majority of style right now is to act like you don’t have style at all, so
most companies are getting rich off clothes that look torn, clothes that
look worn. I think it’s important to dress again. I think that’s very
important. It’s just great showmanship and style. I think it goes back to
African tribes. They’re always elaborate, they got face paint and beads and
dirt in their hair and shit, making them look like something else. You look
in the mirror everyday and you see the same thing. As an entertainer, you
wanna see something new, know what I mean?”
And, quite aside from the clothes and the abstemious behaviour, there is
the music that Benjamin makes. OutKast have spent a decade releasing a
series of increasingly psychedelic hip-hop albums – Stankonia won a Grammy
and spawned their biggest British hit, the superlative Miss Jackson – but
those provide scant preparation for their latest release. Speakerboxx and
The Love Below are two solo albums packaged as a set. The first, the work
of Big Boi, is clearly the follow-up to Stankonia: taut, funky psychedelic
hip-hop with witty lyrics and guest appearances from Jay-Z and Ludacris.
However, The Love Below, Benjamin’s effort, bears almost no resemblance
to hip-hop. He describes its sound as ”real cool – like, if it hadda be a
colour, it would be a violet type of blue”. In fact, it careers between
genres with breathtaking dexterity and self-assurance. Among its vast array
of sounds, it includes a version of Rogers and Hammerstein’s My Favourite
Things set to clattering electronic beats, libidinous Prince-influenced
funk, a frantic and supremely catchy piece of folky psychedelia (current
single Hey Ya), a bleakly touching number featuring Benjamin’s mother
reflecting on his absent father, bursts of lounge-crooner jazz and a
lengthy skit in which Benjamin adopts an English accent that he rightly
describes as ”just terrible”. There may yet be a better album released
this year, but it seems unlikely.
The Love Below began life as a soundtrack to an as-yet-unmade film about
a young man’s romantic adventures in Paris. Much of the album concerns
itself with the quest for domestic contentment. It’s a topic that seems to
have preoccupied Benjamin since the end of his relationship with soul
singer Erykah Badu; Miss Jackson dealt with the effect of their break-up on
the couple’s son, the colourfully named Seven Sirius.
Benjamin becomes rather wistful when the subject is brought up, a change
of mood indicated by a particularly vigorous outbreak of sighing and
beard-stroking. ”I think about that a lot, but I don’t know if I’m chasing
the right thing, y’know?” he says. ”I don’t know if God intended you to
be with one person and just cut yourself off for the rest of your life. In
hip-hop, people don’t talk about their vulnerable or sensitive side a lot
because they’re trying to keep it real or be tough – they think it makes
them look weak. That’s what the Love Below means, that bubbling-under
feeling that people don’t like to talk about, that dudes try to cover up
with machismo.”
However, the album’s quality and subject matter has been overshadowed by
questions about OutKast’s future. Despite the success of the
Speakerboxx/The Love Below set – in the US, it sold 750,000 copies in its
first two weeks of release – its split nature has led to speculation that
the duo’s days are numbered, fuelled by Benjamin’s dramatic pronouncements
that he was on the verge of quitting the music industry altogether to
pursue a career in acting. (He is slated to star as Jimi Hendrix in a film
of the guitarist’s life directed by the Hughes Brothers, who made From
Hell, Dead Presidents and Menace II Society.)
Today, he is more guarded: ”I don’t think music is something you just can
quit,” he frowns, ”but sometimes you have to take a break from what
you’re doing to find love in it again”. However, anyone looking for clues
to OutKast’s future might note that he talks about the duo in the past
tense. ”The way it was between me and Big Boi, it made the sound – we did
great works, man – but I just know my own personality and I got to find new
things to do. OutKast now, it’s like a double album. What’s the most
natural thing to do from there? I don’t know. There’s always a possibility
that we’ll get together again. Contractually, we have three more albums to
do for Arista Records, so we’ll definitely try to complete those.”
If they do split, it will mark the end of a relationship that began at high
school in East Point, Georgia and has endured for 13 years, despite brushes
with the law – the duo had a brief phase of car-stealing during their teens
– and Benjamin’s eccentric approach to fashion. He admits that the latter
put a particular strain on their friendship. ”When we first came out we
looked totally normal, but after our second album (1996’s ATLiens), I just
got bored. I bought this turban and started to wear it. Thought it looked
cool. I started buying one-of-a-kind things from thrift stores . . . I had
girls who were making things for me, these outfits I drew.
‘I don’t think the hip-hop community had ever seen anything like it
before. They didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. The record
company would say to Big Boi, ‘Hey, talk to him.’ He’d tell me the shit
they were saying, but at the same time, it was new to him. He’d come along
to photoshoots and I’d show up with all this – this shit and he’d be stood
there like, ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do?’
”I remember the first full-on photoshoot where there was a total change.
We had disagreements. I gave all the concepts and ideas to the
photographer, like, ‘Yeah, we gonna be in the sunflower field, there’s
gonna be these girls and they gonna have their faces painted and they’re
gonna have this silver shit on, like women from space.’ So Big Boi comes
along and he’s like, ‘What the fuck? What am I gonna do? I’m gonna look
like a fucking fool here!”’ He smiles. ”A lot of pictures didn’t get
taken.”
Whatever OutKast’s future, Benjamin has no shortage of projects on the go.
There’s the films and two new clothing lines, one for children and one
offering both ”outlandish signature pieces and clothes the common man can
wear”. He talks idly of forming a jazz-influenced band, releasing an
instrumental album and ”getting into things that an OutKast fan would not
expect”. Given that the average OutKast fan has come to expect wildly
esoteric musical statements from a man given to dressing like Chris Eubank
after a disastrous experiment with psychedelics, that’s an intriguing
concept. Benjamin chuckles. ”Right. It’s like, what the hell would an
OutKast fan not expect? But right now, I feel like I have a mission.”
And what precisely would that mission be? ”I have no idea,” he sighs,
stroking his beard again. ”I have no idea. I have no idea. But I know I’m
not finished just yet.” — COPYRIGHT: GUARDIAN NEWSPAPERS LIMITED 2003