I like to know what I’m listening to. I need it spelled out for me through melody, harmony, and lyrics. I like basic songwriting structure with a verse, a chorus, a verse, a chorus, a bridge, and a chorus. I like when songs are 3 minutes and 27 seconds long. I like variations of the same chord progressions slightly rearranged to incite the same release of pent-up serotonin I’ve waited to feel since I put my headphones on the charger an hour ago. And so, the loose amorphous sound of ambient music is equally frustrating as it is meditative.
Music that doesn’t reveal itself immediately requires extra effort. My ego demands that I figure it out. The airy swell of strings on Jónsi and Alex Somer’s Riceboy Sleeps is a code to be cracked. The directionless rhythm of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is a bridge troll with three riddles to cross.
I suppose I have approached most facets of my life this way, as a puzzle with a finite number of pieces that must fit together in one specific way in order to have any kind of meaning. For as long as I can remember, my mission has been to eliminate any sense of mystery from my life and outrun the unknowns of the universe. I hate app dates because the look in someone’s eye when they are trying to figure out how they feel about me is my personal nightmare. I have been known to read the last line of books before making it to the end. I am an emotional wreck in the moments leading up to a classic horror movie jump-scare. Please don’t make me wait for any kind of clarity. Just give it to me now, for I am a frail Victorian child with tuberculosis and I must be taken to the sea.
I figured this was the way to live. Avoid risks, choose stability at every possible junction, don’t ask questions, and take care of yourself. But the day I was out of questions, the future went dark. André 3000’s new album New Blue Sun turns on the light.
In his first solo project and return to music since the days of Outkast, he greets an audience that believed he was gone forever. The album deviates from his established reputation as one of the best rappers of all time, instead adopting an ambient new wave jazz sound, heavy on the flute.
At the height of his career in the 2000s, his path was clearly mapped out in front of him. All he needed to do was follow it. It’s suffocating to feel like the trajectory of your life has been decided by what other people believe you are destined to do.
Does the greatest rapper of all time believe they are the greatest rapper of all time? Who do they think is the greatest rapper of all time?
“Even now people think, Oh, man, he’s just sitting on raps, or he’s just holding these raps hostage. I ain’t got no raps like that. It actually feels…sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does.” (GQ)
New Blue Sun is a rejection of his established narrative in favor of one that has always been there, lurking beneath the surface. It’s a declaration that we, in fact, don’t know André 3000 and perhaps never did. It’s an intimate look at what a great artist does when he isn’t catering to the people who call him great. And more importantly, it reveals what we make space for in our lives when we embrace the unknowns of the universe.
Ambient music as a genre is designed for this. It’s in a constant state of metamorphosis, a reflection of one’s environment. It feeds on the unknown and rejects the confines of a clear definition. Ambient music isn’t a message. It’s the distant sound of the underground train and the crunch of leaves underneath your feet mixed with the indistinct chatter of passersby. It mirrors your thoughts about the week ahead or the unresolved feelings you have about a person you can’t even call your ex. Some questions will never have answers. Ambient music relies on your energy to find its meaning. It fits into the curves and folds of your life. Not quite like a puzzle. More like a hug.
New Blue Sun is objectively a hard sell (and apparently was rejected several times by labels.) It’s one of the least commercially viable forms of music, one that doesn’t rely on beat or melody or lyrics to hook a listener. It’s not “catchy.” And while a rap album would have certainly been easier to market and tour as André 3000’s “epic comeback”, New Blue Sun sets the musician on a different path, one that’s less defined, faded in parts, covered in leaves, and split into forks. But a path nonetheless.
Ani xx