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The solo album from Outkast member Andre 3000 has been anticipated for so long that it’s entered the fabled history of hip-hop folklore. While 3 Stacks somehow finds his way on to at least three rap records a year (this year he’s already featured on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo; just a few months earlier he re-balanced the world’s chakras with a spiritualised verse on Erykah Badu’s “Hello”), his debut album seems to have been misplaced, presumably locked deep in the grand masoleum of lost rap albums alongside Jay Electronica’s Act II, the debut album from Child Rebel Soldier (which is the joint project of Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, and Pharrell), the second act to Yeezus, and all the other albums that have become thirsted after for so long that the mere mention of them is essentially a prerequisite to the dampening of any rap blogger’s hungry palette.
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Thing is: while talk of the albums mentioned above have mostly dried out to nothing more than a cursory comment underneath a Reddit post, with none of the artists mentioning working on those records again, the upcoming Andre 3000 solo album seems to get mentioned several times each year. In an interview with Billboard back in January, the ATLien spoke about returning to the mic to record some solo material. This time round, he’s been pictured in the studio, as immortalized in the below picture from Chris Rock.
So: is this real? If it’s a joke, then it’s the worst slice of humor to ever expel itself from Chris Rock’s famously funny mouth. You know what, though, there’s also a good chance this is real. “I’m always recording,” is what Andre told Billboard back in January. Then there’s this picture which has also surfaced of Andre, Chris Rock, and Q Tip in the studio. So c’mon 3 Stacks, please, come and save rap. Let us pray to your feet like the deity you are. Let us bathe in the proverbial bubble bath of your dulcet flow, washing ourselves clean from the gutter-end of Soundcloud wave rap with your consummate verse structures. Come, once again, and reset our spiritual equilibrium and get our lotus flowers spinning again. God knows we need you. God knows we’ve waited long enough.
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