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.

Coat, $2,019, by Visvim / Custom T-shirt by André 3000 Benjamin / Cords, $795, by Brunello Cucinelli / Necklace, his own

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.