“If they drop the bomb, you got 20 minutes to get here,” says André 3000. “We’re gonna need a whole lotta water to make it for two weeks.” We’re in the third-floor sub-basement of André Benjamin’s apartment building in downtown New York. André tells me that to survive a nuclear event, you have to be three stories underground and you have to stay put for two weeks while the winds clear the toxic air. His girlfriend has looked into it, and this basement is registered nuke-safe or something—it’s a legit shelter. So if things get hectic between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, or if Indian Point starts to melt down…party at 3000’s place.

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We just finished a long interview session in a nearby park, and I asked if I could see this space: André pays a little extra rent for access to one of the long, narrow storage rooms down here. He doesn’t store much in it, though: There’s a huge orange John Coltrane poster on the back wall and various instruments lying around. He’s made it a life goal to master one of them, although he won’t say which. If you try to point out that André 3000 has already mastered a very specific musical discipline (namely: rapping), he will deflect and say he’s never felt like a strong rapper at all. Which means that André 3000 is on everyone’s top-five list—except his own.

André and I have met up a handful of times in recent weeks to work out the details of this GQ Style project, and it’s always an experience. He showed up for one conversation in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel moving slowly and holding a plastic CVS bag. I thought he’d hurt his knee, but it turned out he was moving cautiously because he was experiencing severe nausea. He had the bag on him in case he had to barf.

The plan that day was to talk about his wardrobe for our photo shoot. At age 42, André doesn’t feel like playing dress-up. Gone are the days of him wearing chaps and football shoulder pads—he just wants to be himself. He recently started wearing a daily uniform: a long-sleeve bootleg Anita Baker or Phyllis Hyman T-shirt, a beaded necklace, black Rick Owens pants or paint-splattered vintage jeans, mismatched Tretorns (one black, one denim) or Adidas Sambas, and an orange knit cap rolled over his ears and cocked a bit on his dome, like Marvin Gaye’s. With that in mind, André presented an idea he’d been toying with: What if he designed his own line of Anita Baker T-shirts? He would wear the shirts along with his new line of signature Tretorns (and the new set of gold teeth he recently had made at an Atlanta flea market). Then, after the shoot, he would actually pitch the T-shirt line to Anita Baker herself to see if she’d let his designs become her official merchandise. So I said: Let’s do it.

Ever since OutKast released ATLiens in 1996, thinking of André Benjamin as an extraterrestrial has been pretty standard, but being around him is more like hanging out with a precocious and imaginative kid. He cautiously lets you in on his oddball ideas, of which there is a steady flow. He’s relentlessly introspective and occasionally naive. I genuinely believe that he cannot tell a lie. “I would say I’m a gullible person,” 3000 tells me at one point. “You know, my head can be in the clouds.”

When the location I pick for a second day of interviews turns out to be a bust, André and I end up wandering the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Eventually we have to take cover from a nasty rainstorm in the lobby of a new apartment high-rise, and the doorman agrees to let us sit on the lobby lounge couches to talk while residents check their mailboxes or come down to meet the delivery guys. The only dude who clocks us has a girlfriend upstairs who apparently wants to get married to André’s brilliant verse on “International Players Anthem,” so the guy goes up and grabs her, and she comes down to get a photo with 3000. They never ask what he’s doing in their lounge.

And that’s the way it is with André 3000: It’s as likely that he’ll disappear again for a decade as it is that you’ll find him sitting in the lobby of your apartment building. He might never release another song, or he might drop a solo album next week. Who’s to say?

GQ Style: What led you to move to New York City?

André 3000: I guess why most people move to New York City: a change, a new start. My kid went off to college, and my parents died—both of ’em within the last six years. I was like, I’ve kinda outlived Atlanta. It’s not like I go to the studio—I’m just sitting around wasting time and doing stuff I’m not supposed to be doing.

What does that include?

Just the things that all musicians get into at some point. You can’t run from it. Especially when you stop being at your height, and you can’t match that energy. So you try to find other ways to match it, and you really can’t. And then you have all these ideas and then forget ’em. So: I need to get out of here. That’s the same thing that the Hendrix movie [2013’s Jimi: All Is by My Side] did for me. I was in a hole, and then I got the offer. I was like, You know what? I need to be around people.

When you say you were in a hole, was it a creative hole or a personal hole or a mix?

All of it. I was in all three holes. I was in a creative hole, a personal hole, and I was still not dealing with my mom’s and my father’s deaths. And really, I don’t know if I have still. You know: Just push that away. The problem with being successful is you can do whatever you do times ten. And no one to stop you. You can easily go down the wrong path and you get into that place. And the thing that brings you out is other people.

Do you find that people enable you more than they would if you were just a dude with a job?

Yeah. Right now, the only people that keep me in line is my homies, like Swiff, the DJ. He’s like a super-, hyper-realist. He’s the kinda person that I can talk to. My stepfather is next in line. He’s kinda like that anchoring person. He’s been there since I was 5. He gave me my first job, actually, screen-printing shirts in his shop in Atlanta.

What were you doing for him?

Screen printing with the squeegees, and silk printing. He’s that next person in line. And once you don’t have that around, you can easily go astray, because, I mean, since age 17 people have catered to me and Big Boi. It’s strange when, your whole life, everyone has treated you different from everybody else. They say that if you’re an entertainer, whatever time you took off, you stay that age. I was 17. I wonder how my son feels. He was born into it, ’cause his parents are Erykah [Badu] and me. Even when people heard that we was having a kid, they was like, Oh, this kid is gonna be—

—a genie!

Before he even got here. I really hate it for him. You gotta understand, I’ve only written one check in my life. When I was 17, they still had checkbooks, and my mom taught me how to write a check and do my balance. So I had one check on my balance, and then OutKast took off. I have not paid a bill since. People ask, What does it feel like? As humans, we want attention. We want to be validated. At the same time, it’s strange attention, and a lot of it. If you have an excess of anything, it becomes strange.

Did you come to N.Y.C. to face that feeling down? In Atlanta, you’re in the bubble of your car.

Yeah, that was part of my reason for coming here. I was diagnosed with this social thing. I didn’t notice it until I became an entertainer. I don’t know if it’s the shock of all kind of people coming up to you, or the expectations, but I got to this place where it was hard for me to be in public without feeling watched or really nervous.

Trapped.

Yeah, and it started to bleed over into my normal life. I’d just meet new people and I would freak out or have to leave.

When did that start?

Maybe 15 years ago.

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was 2003, so...

Yeah, around there. Before that album, I moved to California. It started a little bit before then, and I just chucked it off as Aw, yeah, man, I just need to take a break. And I started to notice it getting worse and worse. Because the more you run from it, the worse it gets. You don’t want to explain it, because you don’t want to be a weak link around your friends. I never told my crew for a long time, so I just started getting to myself. Spending more time with myself and stopped touring. And it felt great for me to do that, because it’s like, Phew, I don’t like that life, I don’t like that confrontation.

For your famous “Hey Ya!” performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, were you having those feelings?

Yeah, I mean, a curse can also be a gift. So if you’re watching the “Hey Ya!” video or that performance, I was really nervous. So it made me just move really fast. In the “Hey Ya” video, I didn’t make that shit up like a routine or anything. They were just like, Go! And I’m like, All right. Fuck. [moves fast] And of course that’s what people responded to. And I hated it. So after those times, it was like, All right, I’m done.

So you stepped out of the spotlight, and here we are 14 years later and you’ve got a head full of ideas and projects. For starters, what’s the story with the Anita Baker tees?

Well, my mom used to work in a beauty salon. She did nails and had a little booth, and at a beauty salon, there’s always somebody coming in and selling something, be it cologne, or stolen clothes, or phones that last like a month. And a guy came in, back in the day, with a box of cassettes—my mom purchased these Anita Baker bootlegs. She played them all the time at home, and I started to realize, like, Whoa, I enjoy this.

And how did that lead you to the bootleg tees?

As you get older, the people you love pop back up. I was going through an Anita Baker phase, and I started trying to buy a T-shirt. So I go on the Internet and I find this site that had shirts with photos of Anita on them. So I bought two or three of them. Then when I got ’em in the mail, they were like—the part of the shirt where the picture was printed on there was so hard.

Yeah, shitty heat-transfer shirts.

Right, it feels like this big piece of wood on your chest. So it’s like, “Man, this clearly has to be bootleg.” I felt bad about it, because it’s like, I know Anita ain’t got shit to do with these shirts.

Anita was definitely not seeing a piece of the action.

I’m an artist, and I’m buying bootleg shirts of another artist, so I felt bad. So I was like, Maybe, so my conscience feels good, let me try to find an address for Anita and send her a little check. And it’ll be a joke, like, “Anita, I just bought these shirts, I feel bad about it, here’s $50.” Then I started thinking, Wouldn’t it be great to design a line of Anita Baker tees and present the line to Anita? Maybe she needs some merch.

Other than satisfying your guilt, what appeals to you about designing Anita Baker merch?

I just want it to come from an angle of, like, “Anita, we love you” instead of “Anita, we’re trying to put out a line.” And to be honest, if I was her manager, or her nephew, I’d be like, “Auntie, you gotta do this.”

What if Anita says no?

Hey, it’s fine. It was just an idea. There’s no way to lose here.

You also have this new Tretorn collection. Where did that begin?

My agent, William Morris. They try to pair who you are to the right brands. So my agent Todd was like, “What brands are you into?” And I was like, “Well, honestly, all my life I’ve wanted to do a fabric-softener or dryer-sheets commercial.” [laughs] Really. I don’t know if it’s because my mom used that stuff, but my clothes have to smell like that.

Your agent was like, “Umm, okay, dryer sheets…”

Yeah, “That’s gonna be hard.” Then we talked about shoe brands, and in Atlanta, Tretorns were a special shoe for the hood-prep kids.

“I was in London during the Benjamin Bixby era and just on sheer ‘Fuck it,’ I said, ‘Someone reach out to Tom Ford and see if he’ll meet me.’”

Can you break down the hood-prep thing?

Yeah, it was kids that loved rap, they spiced it up and funked it out. I had a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook back then, and the shoes in there were penny loafers, Docksiders, and Tretorns. So, okay, we gotta get these Tretorns.

Once it was on with Tretorn, what did you want to do?

I wanted to work with the Nylites, because those were the ones that I wore. And then, as we went through their old pictures and archives, we found a couple other styles that stood out, too. So we’re just trying to find new ways to do it. I would create sketches, and use paint pens, and come up with stuff that I’d never seen. We were trying to see how we could push it.

I see a connection between the Tretorns and Benjamin Bixby, the clothing line you did [in 2008]. They’re both a flip of prep.

Yeah, well, Tretorns started on the tennis court and then became a street thing. Bixby was my first foray into design. To be honest, man, those were the best times of my life. I was traveling to the fabric shows in Paris, I’m flying to Hong Kong, flying to Italy. At one point, I was in Hong Kong, and there was a N.E.R.D. concert, which is Pharrell. And Kanye was playing it, too. So I went to the show, and they were like, “Man, what are you doing out here?” I was like, “Yeah, man, I’m trying to make this shit happen, trying to make clothes.” And it’s awesome to see them blow up with it now. I was trying and it just didn’t click. I learned a lot, though. I learned that you should just do what you do the best first. Do that one thing. All the other stuff doesn’t matter—you’re just spending a lot of money.

What else did you learn?

I was in London [during the Bixby era] and just on sheer “Fuck it,” I said, “Someone reach out to Tom Ford and see if he’ll meet me.” So we got a hold of him and he said, “Alright, meet me at this restaurant.” So I go meet Tom Ford, just me and him. I’m like, “So yeah, I’m trying to get into this fashion thing.” And he’s like, “Well, if anybody should be the one to make it, it’s you.” And I was like, “So what do you think about Bixby?” He’s like, “I hate that fucking name.”

[Laughs.]

He was honest: “I hate that fucking name, but if you love it…” I was nervous as hell, but I said, “I know you’re not with Gucci anymore, but if you could do it all over again, what would it be?” I think at that point he’d only done [Tom Ford] eyewear, and he was about to do other things. He’s like, “To be honest, fashion shows—I probably wouldn’t do them. There’s so much more I can do with a million dollars.” I thought that was really smart.

Financially, are you in a place where money doesn’t affect your decisions about releasing music?

Well, I can’t say that I don’t buy a lot of things. And I do a lot for family and friends. But it’s not like I’ve got five cars and three big houses, I’m supporting all these women, or I gotta support my coke habit. So right now, I don’t have to worry about those things. But who knows what it’ll be in five, ten years.

Part of me just wants to say, Come on, man! Put out more music! Let us decide if it’s worth it.

I’m with that, because I want to hear both sides of it. But if I were to drop dead right now, honestly, we’ve done it. And that’s the truth. You know what I mean? Here’s the only thing that I would regret: Man, you know, there is still that album that you wanted to do.

What do you mean?

Like, I wanted to put out my own project. Things I’ve been working on. But that’s for my personal [satisfaction], you know? And when my dad passed away, there was mourning for him dying, but there was a whole ’nother wave of mourning because I realized, Whoa, he died in his house alone. And I wondered: Had he done everything he wanted to do?

Do you think he died in peace?

I don’t know. I don’t think so. He had all these troubles the last few years. He had to get his heart valve replaced and prostate cancer and colon cancer, and it’s kinda back-to-back-to-back at a certain point. But I think we made amends, and that was a cool thing. I do miss not being able to talk to him about him living alone and not ever being married. I think I would have gotten a lot of great insight. I think he would have told me something.

It’s tough, too, to deal with being sick without a partner.

Growing up, I would always see these great women, like, Oh, man, she’s cool. Or, She’s really cool—she has her stuff together, and they have a great chemistry. But for some reason, he kept not making it happen, and that’s always happened with me. I know my son looks at me like, Yeah, man, she was cool. Or, Oh, man, she’s, like, great, beautiful. And it’s always me not going to the next step. So I know my kid sees it the same way.

What was your relationship with your mom like through the years?

My mom was everything. I grew up a mama’s boy completely. When I was small, she was like a dictator. I understand it now, but she still went hard. And I think when a male is not there, the woman goes harder.

Trying to be both parents.

Yeah. I would wrestle with my mom. Me and her, going at it. And then you go through this “Ah, man, I hate my mom” phase. And then one day—I think it was Mother’s Day or Valentine’s. I was 23 or 24. I took her out to the movies, and I’d left something in the car, and when I walked back to meet her, I looked at her and caught her face in such a way that I thought, “Oh, wow, that’s Mom.” It’s like that moment where she’s not just this person that took care of you. It’s like, Whoa, she’s a woman and she’s my mom.

You saw the person, not Mom.

Yes. When you’re growing up, your parents are trying to set this great example for you, so they won’t tell you all their shit. I think more parents should tell kids their shit. It takes a lot of pressure off the kids to realize, Phew, I’m not the only person in the world that can’t get this shit completely right.

Did you realize that early enough to apply it to your parenting?

No, I didn’t.

This is a more recent thought?

Yeah, when I was around 35, my mom pulled me to the side in the kitchen. Out of nowhere, she was like, “You know, when you were 5, I used to go and do crack.” She was like, “It was new during that time. I was dating this drug-dealer guy, and he sold cocaine, and we would do cocaine, and that was like a normal thing.” And she said, “Me and that guy broke up, and I had to find something to get high, and there was this new thing called crack.” So she tried it, and there it was. And the person that she ended up marrying was the guy that used to keep me when she would go do crack.

Did she blurt it out because it had been gnawing at her?

Yeah, but I think it was more that I triggered it, because at that time, I was doing drugs. I wasn’t doing hard drugs—she saw me smoking [weed] all the time, and I think she saw me going down a path. I think she was trying to tell me the story to help me. She said, “You know, I left this dude, and I had to get my own apartment at that point, and I was still smoking crack, and when I moved into this apartment, I guess the people that lived there before left a tennis racket in the corner.” So at the time, she was like, “I’m gonna take tennis lessons.” Two years later she looked up and she hadn’t taken one, ’cause she was doing drugs. The tennis racket was the thing that made her know “I missed all that time.”

I saw a tennis racket in the corner of your practice space.

I was mimicking her.

It’s beautiful that you’ve carried that forward.

After she told me that, I looked at her like a god. “So you’re Ms. Benjamin, the preacher’s wife?” She’s married to a preacher, and she’s always in the church, and she’s this helpful person in the community, but you gotta think: At one point she was doing crack. So she was strong enough to break that and change over. So I looked at her like, Wow.

Even more superheroic than if she had just been perfect.

Exactly.

You know people still think of you as sober and vegan, right?

Yeah, my life has changed a lot. I was a vegan/vegetarian for like 14, 15 years. After our first album, we were going hard, out on the road, doing drugs, partaking in every woman, and I started to see myself deteriorate. I would look in the mirror and be like, “You look like shit.” So I got to a point where I said, I gotta stop. So I went that way and tried it. What’s funny is this idea that people have of me as being straight-edge. My homie Cee-Lo, from Goodie Mob, he has this joke. He’s like, “Man, I don’t know why these women think we’re sitting cross-legged with incense like some Buddhists, praying with our hands. I mean, we out here fucking these bitches.” [laughs]

The truth is, you have some pretty raw sex raps. But people’s image of you is unshakable.

We’re human. I try to find the goodness in the world and like, you know, I mean, even Jesus—Jesus had to get a little bit, you know what I mean?

Wow. [laughs]

I mean, I hate to say it like this, but Martin Luther King, he was out there, you know what I mean? Just because you have a natural urge and you follow it, it doesn’t mean that you can’t want the best for people and the best for yourself. And now, to be honest, when I write about sex, it’s more like: I’m on a time clock. I’m getting older, so you want to get it all in.

So of all the music projects you started since The Love Below, what remains?

When I pass away, people will find hours and hours of files.

Hard drives?

Yeah, hard drives and shit. It’s hard drives of me just in the house alone playing horrible guitar. Me playing piano. Me playing a little sax. I was trying to find out: What can I be excited about? Because I never was, to me, a great producer or a great writer or a great rapper. I always felt that I was less than everybody else, so I fought harder. My only gauge to know when something was good was how I felt it. Like, Oh, man, this is dope. Or, This is new. So I got to a place where nothing excited me. I kept trying and pushing and pushing. I got to a place where I was just kinda in a loop. My son would see me go through all these phases. He would be like, I’ve seen my dad have all these great ideas. He had this band idea. And this other idea. And I never followed through with any of it. So when my parents passed away and he went off to college, it was like, Man, what am I gonna do? So I felt like it was time to come and study or replenish myself. In New York, they have the fashion thing and they have the stage thing—I’ve never done stage before. And they have music. So I saw myself coming to study an instrument, coming to learn Spanish and probably try stage. I’ve only done one.

“For me, hip-hop is about freshness. You can always hop, but you won’t always be hip.”

Which one?

An instrument. Like, I never totally dedicated myself to anything. I’ve always been a jack-of-no-trades, but just making it happen: You know, play guitar just enough to play on The Love Below. Play piano just enough to do “Ms. Jackson.” My first chords were “Hey Ya!”

Wait, your first chords on the guitar became “Hey Ya!”?

Yeah.

Wow. Did you know, coming here, that you were going to have to face people on the street?

Yeah, but I didn’t know how much. I love the New York streets. I love walking, I love not having a car. It’s so dope. Part of my therapy—they call it cognitive therapy. It’s basically just another word for face that shit. [laughs]

Do you think you’ve spent these years out of the limelight re-adjusting?

Yes, it’s always hard. There’s so many social norms I just don’t know. We wanted to sign a record deal at 17, but my parents wouldn’t do it, so we had to wait until we were 18. So I’m like, Oh shit, we were the same age as Soulja Boy when he started?

You were kids.

Yeah, running around the world. I can say, man, my partner, Big Boi, has always been on it. He’s sharp. He always knew the right decisions. He got into a real relationship really early. Right before our second album, he had a kid, and he and the girl stayed together, and they’re married now. I did the opposite. I’m all over the place. I never went on real dates. I don’t want to meet anybody’s parents. Like, I’m a fucking rapper.

The secret reality of OutKast is that while Big Boi was “street,” and you guys were marketed as “the player and the poet,” he’s always been super on it.

Big Boi is smart as fuck. We went to the same high school. I dropped out in 11th grade. Big Boi graduated with honors. When you watch early OutKast videos, Big Boi’s the leader. He always had the confidence, where I was kind of like the shy one. Big Boi can rap better than me—I always said that. If somebody said, “Pick who you want from OutKast to go to battle with you,” it wouldn’t be me. ’Cause like, what I’ma do? Say some mind shit? You can’t have thoughts in a battle—nobody gives a shit about that.

So are you going to the studio? Are you making music?

Actually, I hate going to the studio. So what’s got me going once again is me being excited about other artists. I’ve been working on producing a few artists. A couple projects. But here’s the crazy thing: I don’t have the pulse anymore. Rhythms change every generation. The intensity and the drums change. And I’m not on the pulse. I can’t pretend. It’s kinda like watching your uncle dance. So the only thing I can do is this kind of novelty, off thing for them.

In hip-hop, either you have the wave or you don’t.

That’s what hip-hop is all about. It’s a new-kids’ art.

But if you think about jazz, over time it became a big tent, with room for lots of different movements. So with hip-hop, even if you’re not the new wave, you can do something that has its own merit. Isn’t it okay to be off the pulse of the kids at this point?

For me, hip-hop is about freshness. You can always hop, but you won’t always be hip. At a certain point, you just won’t. And this is how I know: All the people I grew up with, none of them, not a one, is thriving. Not a one. So that tells me something. I gotta watch that, as someone that’s come in the game and has loved these guys. I mean, loved them. Loved them. But the potency just moves on.

I’m torn right now. You’ve said before that you’re like a boxer who’s starting to slow down. But you’ve always struck a balance between what’s going on with the culture and that left-field 3000 thing. You’ve always been a hybrid of inside and out, and I don’t think you’ll lose that.

It’s Mayweather. He knows. He’s like, Yeah, I can fight maybe three more of ’em. But I’m slowing down, and I see these young kids coming up and I was them. And at a certain point, no matter how Mayweather you are, I think it’s classy to be like, You know what? [brushes off hands]

But you’re not quite there yet.

No, I think I have, like, maybe two more Mayweather fights.

Okay, good.

Or maybe one.

Will Welch is GQ Style's editor-in-chief.

This story appears in the holiday 2017 issue of GQ Style with the title “Earth to André 3000.”