The Last Supper?

The nightclub is called Hollywood, even though it’s in Milan, Italy, because movies are as much a universal fantasy as sex and money. Tonight, the biggest star in Hollywood is André 3000.

It’s fashion week, an annual January event when Milan fills with well-dressed, self-important shovers and anorexics, and Outkast have come as the personal guests of Giorgio Armani, who rules this hurried, mercenary city like the Pope (if the Pope wore tight black T-shirts and had a winter tan). A few flights down, the club’s VIP lounge is full of hipsters and hip-hopsters pressing to get closer to André. “In da Club” pushes the sound system, a comp bottle of champagne passes among André’s posse, and a six-foot-tall blonde dances with one hand on a pole, wearing a high-cut Armani T-shirt and low-cut Armani jeans with — in case anyone misses the point — white Armani underwear poking out.

From the moment Dré arrives in the smoke-filled club, everyone wants to shake his hand or congratulate him, acting as though Outkast’s hit “Hey Ya!” is the greatest song ever — which it may well be. All week long, he’ll get free clothes, free dinners, free praise, a free hotel room, until it seems anything in the city is his for the asking. After less than 15 minutes, though, Dré starts to pack up. A local rapper asks knowingly whether he has “some bitches back at the hotel.” No, Dré answers, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “I don’t like cigarette smoke.”

André Benjamin: rock star with allergies.


The Emporio Armani fashion show the next night starts two hours late, a delay that only increases the degree of drinking and shoving inside Alcatraz, an industrialized disco. Finally, at 9:30, long-haired male models traipse a mirrored catwalk, seemingly impervious to the terrible techno music blasting, draped in fashions as expensive as they are unusual (apparently, Mr. Armani thinks men are ready to wear shoulder wraps over their suits). After 15 minutes, it’s suddenly over, and after a riot of photo flashes and more shoving, Outkast move from the front row to the street.

André’s bandmate, Big Boi, who will spend three days in Milan without sleeping, is out in the cold, content except for one longing: weed. “I wish I had some bud,” he sighs. He even checks with Blender to see if we’re holding. Cars stop, creating traffic madness along the road, and as passengers congratulate Big, he takes decisive action. “Who’s smokin’ that shit?” he demands loudly of anyone who passes. “I’m-a ask you like a nigga from Atlanta — who’s smokin’ that shit?”


Before they were André 3000 and Big Boi, André Benjamin and Antwan Patton met in Atlanta as 15-year-old outcasts who lived in black neighborhoods but dressed like white preps. They listened to conscious rap by De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest when classmates preferred gangsta N.W.A and Ice Cube. André was the wild one, always high. (“He taught me to roll a blunt,” Big Boi marvels.) Then André stopped smoking, quit drinking, went vegan — hell, he even refuses a piece of gum from Blender because it creates digestive acids that hurt your stomach — and sprouted eccentricities including a peacock wardrobe so outrageous, his cousin told him the ’hood thought he was gay.

Where André, a slim Southern gentleman, is quiet, contained, elusive, anxious and feline, the compact Big Boi is emphatic, driven, intense and lion-like. Both are 28 now, and adult changes have left them with differing views of their bond. “I would die for him,” Big Boi says. “It’s just that serious.” Dré, more a loner, says, “If we weren’t doing music, I don’t know if we would still be friends.”

Starting with Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik in 1994, every Outkast record has sold better than the one before, a remarkable streak, and last year’s split CD, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, boosted them to superstardom, with sales of 8 million and seven weeks at number 1. For consistency, daring, durability and crazy inspiration, Outkast are the greatest living hip-hop group. “Hey Ya!”, which André wrote and produced, has even transcended the pop charts to become a cultural meme, a universal force, a new addition to the table of the elements: It has inspired parody videos on the Web featuring Saddam Hussein and Charlie Brown, and a flurry of live covers by rock bands. Right this second, “Hey Ya!” is playing at a wedding or a bar mitzvah. Presidential candidate Wesley Clark dropped the duo’s name in a TV ad last fall, declaring “I don’t think Outkast are really breaking up” in a bid to impress young voters. Outkast are the rap stars even whitey can love; it’s impossible to imagine any politician favorably mentioning 50 Cent or Eminem.

Bad timing, then, because André, restless and wary of feeling trapped, has lost interest in rap — he won’t tour, because he doesn’t want to do the old songs. Instead, he wants to play jazz and make movies. “I’m starting a new group,” he tells Blender. Where Big Boi insists that Outkast are not breaking up, André is noncommittal. Unless Big Boi can change André’s mind, Wesley Clark’s prediction may prove incorrect.

André: “In a perfect world, this would be the last Outkast record.”

Big Boi: “‘The last Outkast record’? He don’t say that shit to me!”


André Benjamin has a sheepish confession: He was a skateboarder. After graduating from high school, he admits, he wrote “Skate or die” when signing classmates’ yearbooks. Even then, André was trying to change identities.

“Like most of the rap stories you hear, we lived in the projects,” he says. We’re sitting in the extravagant Art Nouveau lobby of his Milan hotel as a cocktail-hour pianist plays show tunes. A small child stops by the table, transfixed by André’s brushy hair. “Kids look at me crazy,” he says, smiling broadly.

André was raised by a single mother, described by his friends as “no-nonsense,” and for a while the pair lived in a Motel 6. But Sharon Benjamin-Hodo had a steady job working the assembly line at General Motors, and bought a house in an Atlanta subdivision. André was the first kid in his ’hood with a computer. He was bused to a white school, which created both opportunity and embarrassment: “I didn’t want anybody to know where I lived, ’cause they were all rich. So I would get dropped off two miles away and walk home.”

A self-described “mama’s boy,” he came to resent his mother’s rules, so at 15, he was sent to live with his father to instill some discipline. “That was the biggest mistake ever,” he says, chuckling. His bachelor father, who worked in collections, enforced no rules. “That’s when I got into all kinds of trouble — stealing cars, robbing the pizza man. We’d find an empty apartment, order three pizzas, then meet the delivery guy and tell him, ‘Drop it like it’s hot.’ That was fun.”

One of his fellow car thieves knew Antwan Patton, who began rapping in the tenth grade (his first rhyme: an antidrug rap), and he too lived in a Motel 6, for a whole year, with his two younger siblings and single mother. “We used to live off bologna sandwiches from a cooler,” Big Boi says. “I’ve been to the lowest low. Drugs and alcohol, domestic abuse — crazy shit.”

Who in his family had a substance problem? “Shit, who didn’t?” he laughs. “Pops, Grandma, uncles, aunts.

I smoke a little bud, but I know my limitations.” His dad was abusive to Big Boi’s mom “while he had the chance to be. Then my mom was like, ‘Fuck this shit.’” But, Big adds, his mom was bedside last year when his father died after a failed kidney transplant. “Smashed me, man. Smashed me,” he says softly. At the start of the group, André dominated. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be saying this,” says Cee-Lo, the Georgia rapper who has known André since the third grade, “but in the beginning, Dré was writing all the material for himself and for Big.”

“They were always a bit standoffish and very shy,” adds LA Reid, the former president and CEO of Arista Records, who signed the duo to their record deal.

Outkast’s ’hood-simple first single, “Player’s Ball,” topped rap charts and described “black-man heaven” as a land of big cars, pistols, gin and juice, ho’s, bitches and so on. Their first tour was with 95 South and Quad City DJs, short-lived booty bandits, and there was no reason to think Outkast would be an exceptional group.

“I’d wake up smoking, go to sleep smoking, smoke all during the day,” André says, recalling that tour. “I had some of the best times when I was high.

I never worried about anything; now, I worry about every little thing.” He was once so footloose that a friend dubbed him “Freddie Floater” — now, he says, his anxieties give him insomnia.

Their third album, 1998’s Aquemini, was a revelation. The lyrics turned more personal and distinct, and the beats slowed into humid Southern funk. The unprecedented title song, a word created by combining André and Big’s astrological signs, pledged lifelong love and togetherness between the two rappers “until they close the curtain.”

“We didn’t have blinders on — we listened to every type of music,” Big says. André dramatized the band’s emergence by turning into music’s wildest dandy, trading between fluorescent futurism and retro glamour, unisex robes and country-club cardigans, looking one day like Superfly on Mars, the next like Mr. Rogers’s accountant. These changes upset some Arista executives, who beseeched Big to stop André. “It wasn’t what normal rappers do,” André shrugs. “They say I’m this crazy dude, always in Buddha position. I’m a regular dude. I like to fuck girls, I like to curse — but I also like to dress cool.”

Next, 2000’s generous and comprehensive Stankonia “blew away every barrier,” Big Boi adds accurately. “Bombs Over Baghdad” drops raging guitars while dissing other rappers; “Gasoline Dreams” questions the American dream; and the alternately angry and apologetic “Ms. Jackson” rose to a number 1 pop single, prompting an envious Vines cover. “Black people don’t like loud guitars,” André muses. “That drives me crazy. I’ve been wanting to turn it up for years.”

“We came in the door as a hip-hop group, but it’s exceeded hip-hop: We are hip-hop, reggae, jazz, blues, soul, funk, everything,” Big says. The evolution only expanded their audience. “You might see a 50-year-old father with his 21-year-old son. It’s everybody: young, old, black, white, blind, crippled, crazy, whatever. Our tours are like some Woodstock shit.”

Then came the day when Outkast met with their manager and Arista Records to discuss the group’s next album, and André — who was spending lots of time in Hollywood — announced that he was working on a solo record, which he wanted to turn into a film. “It was a shock to me,” Big Boi says, shaking his head.


Big Boi is relaxing in his hotel suite, sipping a Hennessy-and-Coke, his iPod rotating among Kate Bush, Oran “Juice” Jones and (of course) Outkast. He rolls up the sleeve of his new Armani dress shirt, one of many he was given this afternoon at the company’s showroom, and displays a tattoo of the Outkast crown logo on his forearm. It signifies, he says, that Outkast is in his veins.

When André announced his plans, Big Boi explains, Arista was adamant: The label wanted an Outkast album, not a solo album. “I was a little bit pissed off,” André admits. “I’m looking for something new to do.” He considered giving away the songs on the Internet.

In the past, he says, some credits have read “Produced by Outkast,” even though “I actually produced those songs. Financially, I don’t know if that’s cool,” since a shared credit means a shared royalty.

Big Boi — who says he took over management of Outkast’s label and clothing company when André lost interest in both — felt abandoned by his partner. “What do you expect me to do, being that Outkast is my heart, what I put my whole life into? Am I supposed to sit on the sideline and cheer? That’s a lot of shit. But Dré’s selfish; he’s an only child.” Though Big’s tone is somewhere between peeved and annoyed, and he keeps returning to the question of why André would break up the band, he insists that “I wasn’t angry; I was just frustrated.”

So Big, who calls himself a “team player,” kept working on songs he thought could be Outkast tracks. Arista execs heard those songs and offered to release them. “And Dré was like, ‘How the fuck do they want to put this shit out, and they didn’t want to put mine out?’” Finally, it was agreed that André and Big Boi would each make a solo album, released as an Outkast double CD. But, adds Big Boi, “It took a long time, a lot of phone calls and a lot of crying.”

On The Love Below, André abandons rap almost completely as he croons the tale of a gigolo (nickname: Ice Cold) who falls in love after a one-night stand but doesn’t want to give up a player’s life. He tells this conflicted story with fantastic comic timing and a bag full of horny falsetto tricks nicked from vintage Prince albums. Where Big Boi included André in producing and cowriting much of Speakerboxxx, Big appears on only one song on The Love Below — “Roses,” the group’s next single and video. “Dré wouldn’t let me rap on nothing else,” Big says sadly.

André hasn’t had a serious girlfriend since breaking up with neosoul beauty Erykah Badu five years ago (they have a son named Seven, who’s 6 years old), and when he’s single, he says, he’s usually “dirtying up.” So is he, like Ice Cold, also a gigolo?

“I wouldn’t say that. When it comes to sex, I’m pretty conservative. There’s certain shit I hear my homeboys do, and I’ll be like, ‘Really?’” His eyes pop open. “I’ve never had a ménage à trois — and I’m an entertainer! Isn’t that, like, the first thing you’re supposed to do?” He then shares with Blender his best estimate of how many women he has had sex with in his 28 years. “Is that a good number? Is that normal?” he asks.

Blender suggests that it’s higher than average, and André is appalled. “Please don’t print that then, man. Girls judge you by that shit. They may decide they don’t want to sleep with you on that.” So the purpose of this interview is to help André get more women? “No, not necessarily to get me more. But don’t fuck it up for me,” he says, laughing.

Lately, André has been discovering vintage punk rock, including the Ramones (“I loved ’em off the bat”) and especially Buzzcocks. “I loved the fun and almost stupidness of it.” Under their influence, plus that of the Beatles, he wrote “Hey Ya!”, which, he says, is “about the state of relationships today, how people stay together because tradition says they should, even if they’re unhappy.

“I’ve always been a girlfriend type of guy, but a girlfriend just doesn’t sound pleasing to me right now. When artists get married, their music or films go to shit. Because they don’t have trouble, don’t have friction. I’d rather talk about being lonely and horny than being together and sad.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” he says resignedly. “Even married people tell you, ‘Don’t get married.’ I love being free.” On the Love Below song “She Lives in My Lap,” actress Rosario Dawson asks André, “What are you afraid of?”

What’s the answer to that question?

“Captivity, I guess. I get bored really fast.”

André’s fear of boredom and captivity are also evident in his urge to leave Outkast, since other than his mother, his longest relationship has been with Big Boi, who has three children and also supports his siblings and cousins. “They’re very separate personalities, very distinct,” LA Reid says. “If you talk to Big Boi, it’s numbers, and if you talk to André, it’s colors.”

“Big is a solid and Dré is a fluid,” Cee-Lo explains. “Dré’s just eccentric; he has a solitary disposition. They travel on separate buses; on the Smokin’ Grooves tour, Dré’s bus was him, his cook and his guitar tutor. Big’s a people person — he’s got that big heart, and he likes being surrounded by loved ones, so everybody else was on his bus, smoking and drinking.”

André seems to be a mystery even to his partner. “He said to me the other day, ‘We’ve been working 10 years strong. I’m tired of it.’” Big frowns. “That’s not a good enough reason. He said, ‘I don’t ever want to do those songs again.’ ‘Rosa Parks,’ ‘Ms. Jackson,’ ‘Player’s Ball.’” His voice is soft, like a prayer. “It’s time for us to do stadiums. You get to a certain level, you master your style and then you throw away your black belt?”

Even André’s mother called Big, he says, encouraging him to persuade Dré not to quit. “Everybody on down the line thinks this is a bad move.”

A costly one, too. Outkast were offered $1 million for a 60-minute set at a Nashville festival this spring, and André turned it down. “Didn’t even flinch,” Big Boi says. At a nightly average of $300,000 per show, he estimates Outkast lost $40 million in revenue in the past six months, including ads for beer, milk and soda (“Dré’s like, ‘I don’t drink Coke.’ But you used to drink Coke!”).

Yet Big Boi, for all his annoyance, plans to persist in pressuring André. “He’ll change his mind — he always does. He wanted to give up after the record company didn’t sign us. He was like, ‘Fuck this; I’m gonna go be an architect.’ I’m the Jesse Jackson of the group — ‘Keep hope alive.’”

“I don’t know what the future of Outkast is,” André muses. “This would be a great note to leave on.” He has already started another group, the Vultures, led by Johnny Vulture, the guitarist whom he plays in the “Hey Ya!” video.

This spring, though, Outkast will begin filming an original movie for HBO, which a source calls “an updated gangster film,” and it’ll be followed by a film soundtrack in the fall. After that, André 3000 and Big Boi have a full plan for another Outkast album, complete with title and concept.

As any student of rock history or Prince knows, two diversions have regularly spoiled the careers of rock stars: playing jazz, and Hollywood. “And both of those things are going on in Outkast right now,” André says with a rueful laugh. “So we fucked up, huh? Might as well start selling incense. I don’t know what to say, but I do love jazz. And I want to know more about it.”

Outkast will probably continue for a few more years, though not very many. “I don’t want to be rapping when I’m 40 years old,” André says. “Rap is about youth and energy. I don’t want to be 40 years old doing ‘Player’s Ball.’”

What does he think Big Boi will be doing at 40?

“‘Player’s Ball.’” André laughs, acknowledging the difference between the partners. “He’ll be like, ‘I want to do this shit. Let’s run it.’”