Slave To The Ism

“…the rain exploding in the air is love / the grass excreting her, green wax is love / and stones remembering, past steps is love / but you. you are too young for love.” Sonia Sanchez, “Ballad”

I first fell in love with Andre 3000 in ’96 while living in Detroit, somewhere on the East Side. Back then I was running around my cousins in biker shorts, a training bra, and tank tops. My hair use to be in french braids with beads held on the ends by aluminum foil.

The thing about growing up in the D is, musically we lack coastal identity so we listen to everything. After that “Player’s Ball” joint, Outkast especially. 3000 stood out to me. Politely average, but cool. Familiar but detached. A little exhibitionist too. He rocked the satin grandma turban like it was really hot, till I thought it was really hot. “His lips are big,” I remember telling a girlfriend. His washboard belly used to fuck me up. Lyrically, he was supplicant, simple, provocative, freaking genius but we didn’t know it at the time, like we didn’t know ‘Pac was going to get shot and turn martyr.

From the beginning, 3000 was the only one in Outkast I actually listened to. No offense to Big Boi, but Big is safe. Familiar and attached like the bass player in a band. The Flea to 3000’s Frusciante. He provided the balanced normalcy to the group, the type of cat you could chill on the porch with drinking sweet tea in oval plastic bitching about how hot it was.

But somewhere, one day— God, seriously I can’t even remember when— I fell in love with 3000. Before he was 3000, when he was just Andre. Before Erykah Badu froze him with “baduizm” like Medusa. While he was still searching out his inner enigma, rawk-star, trip-hop, freak, no homo, cornrowed masculinity.

Scary niggas who didn’t have the balls or depth to understand him took comfort in clowning him. They dissed him like New York dissed Outkast when they were really outcasts. Sometime after Badu’s ass turned him out, maybe right before, he begin to explore his feminine, funky side, hats with feather boas, bone straight weaves, and pink trousers so tight you could almost trace the balls’ print.

My dudes called him a faggot. 3000 snapped: “Thanks ta’ them niggas that get the wrong impression of expression,” he rhymed on ‘98’s “Return of the ‘G’”, “then the question is, ‘Big Boi what’s up with Andre? Is he in a cult? Is he on drugs? Is he gay? When y’all gon’ break up? When y’all gon’ wake up?’ Nigga I’m feelin’ better than ever what’s wrong with you? You get down!”

That was funny to us. Ha ha alpha male haters! And before anyone could cue up their lil rap blog for a rebuttal, Big and Dre (including my homie Mr. DJ of Earthtone III… whattup David) dropped the double dope gem Speakerboxx/The Love Below. In the “A,” where I eventually migrated, it was like an epiphany. 3000 totally embracing the ball prints, and silky weaves, and poofy-collared shirts, and sobriety of his feeble yet hard masculinity. By the time “Hey Ya” dropped, he was a fucking rawk star in a green suit.

“I can’t afford to not record,” he admitted on the Love Below’s “Prototype.”  “I think I’m in loooooove…again.” I ignored Rosario Dawson’s giggle at the mouth of “She Lives In My Lap.” I went to sleep playing “Spread.”

I fell in love with 3000 again.

But soon he disappeared. Life was changing. I dropped out of college, wound up homeless, left Atlanta, and started working in New York. My old Outkast VIBE, the one with the naked thick-thigh’d guls flanked around the fellas with cherries covering their love below, was boxed up in storage somewhere. My girl who worked with Big Boi insinuated the boys had a couple differences, like Peter and John. My other homies claimed 3000 wasn’t even in the studio. Soon enough, we forgot about Outkast. The Grammy’s was over, the south was snapping, popping, leaning and rocking, and everyone fell back on Jay-Z’s almost-forty-something dick.

Eventually the same hyenas 3000 swatted and clapped like fruit flies only to realize they’ve hid behind a crevice, came back saying he no longer had it. But my people believed in him like young black folk believe in Barack. And before long, the domino-effect of 3000’s genius cameo appearances— more versatile than Weezy, less preachy than Nas— opened up like the Holy Spirit touching Hannah’s canal, announcing  lyrically that Benjamin Andre was no longer Andre Benjamin but dammit, “3 Stacks.”

Last year I got a phone call. It was Dre. He was cruising around Atlanta on a cloud. I was checking my email. “You sound really crunk right now,” I told him. He laughed. Our conversation was intended to be short. I had work to do, so did he, but we remained on the line for almost an hour, rambling on about life, art, love, and boredom, going back and forth like double-dutch in the summer.
I asked him where’d he’d been hiding. “In China,” he said, putting artistic swipes on Benjamin Bixby.

I revealed, sheepishly, that I thought he was on some ol’ skool Dada-shit, attempting to maintain a quaint air of mystery before the inevitable radio jam. He asked what folks have been saying about him. “They say you’re hot,” I replied, not missing a beat. They also say he’s a genius (see Jay-Z, Rolling Stone issue # 1040), they also say that his verses were as anthemic as an Ali bout, and that he’s come a long way from East Point, and that he’s tough lyrically without resorting to “bitch/ho/d-boy” fake hood posturing, and that maybe he’s not gay after all. The brotha was doing good for himself. 3000 seemed pleased, finally believing, just once, his own hype.

“Aight Linda,” he eventually said in his country twang as sweet as agave syrup, inarticulately happy over something still inarticulate. “Aight Andre,” I said, flirtatiously back. When we hung up, I stared at the phone. I felt numb like lips after this boy first touched them with his mouth. It’s been a long time. Maybe I was too jaded to still feel it. Maybe I was simply getting back in touch with my inner-stan. Maybe I was just young, i.e. naïve as hell. Or maybe, after all these years, I had fallen in love, again, with Andre 3000.