André 3000 has a stoic view on aging. “With the word ‘hip-hop’, first you have to be hip. The older you get, you get further away from that hipness,” he told Hard Knock TV in 2014 on a press tour for his leading role as Jimi Hendrix in the biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side. And while he’s not necessarily wrong — it can be hard to keep up with what’s cool, the older you get — his self-preservation against aging by staying out of the limelight has almost served to do the opposite. André 3000 is cool immortalized in many ways.
Part of how he’s managed that is through evolving his creativity, especially in learning new instruments — which he considers a form of meditation. He’s gone viral over the years for randomly playing the flute in public spaces like LAX, Starbucks, and parks, and now he’ll be taking that vaudevillian inclination professional. He’s featured as a flutist under his real name, André Benjamin, on the soundtrack for A24’s highly anticipated new film Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film is directed by the duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known collectively as Daniels.
