The New Yorker:

Strange, beautiful records by Lana Del Rey, Noname, Sufjan Stevens, and more.

By Amanda Petrusich

In mid-November, the musician André 3000—one-half of the beloved hip-hop duo OutKast, which released six idiosyncratic and irrepressible records between 1994 and 2006—announced that he was, at long last, putting out a full-length solo LP. “Hey Ya!,” OutKast’s biggest hit, from 2003, is the sort of song that belongs on one of those satellite time capsules nasa periodically launches into space, a rare and potent distillation of everything freaky and beautiful about life on Earth. His fans wanted a rap record, and why wouldn’t they? André 3000 is preternaturally good at rapping. Instead, he gave us “New Blue Sun,” an eighty-seven-minute, largely improvised, entirely instrumental flute record with song titles such as “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” Digital flutes, contrabass flutes, bamboo flutes, Mayan flutes. Lotta flutes.

I’ll admit that I have an unusual—my therapist might say pathological—affinity for meandering, ponderous, vibey records that are fundamentally at odds with the pop Zeitgeist. It might be my punk-rock heart, or a response to the tumult of modern life, but, when I first heard about “New Blue Sun,” my reaction was not gentle disappointment or abject confusion but a kind of giddy thrill: Cosmic flutes, presented in the upside-down barometrical spirit of Yusef Lateef or Pharoah Sanders or John and Alice Coltrane? Shoot it in my veins! If that makes me sound like a pretentious gasbag, well, whatever, never mind. I spent my teen-age years pretending to like difficult music because I aspired to be a cooler and more sophisticated person; this year, I found myself pretending to like massive pop releases because to dismiss them as trifling or mercenary seemed, I don’t know . . . ungenerous? Out of touch? Lame? Rockist? While the former practice sorta worked—when I was fifteen, locking myself in my bedroom with Sonic Youth’s “Washing Machine” opened my mind to the thrill and logic of utter cacophony—dutifully listening to Morgan Wallen, the most popular artist of 2023 by a number of metrics, mostly made me feel as though I was on eternal hold with my insurance company.

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