Culture

André 3000 is an enigma. The reclusive former OutKast MC has kept a low profile for much of the past 20 years, popping up for an occasional guest verse or movie role when he’s not wandering the Earth playing one of his arsenal of flutes.

But on The Late Show on Thursday night (Feb. 8), the rapper-turned-jazzer hung around to take the “Colbert Questionert,” the random series of queries from host Stephen Colbert meant to delve into the unexplored recesses of the enigmatic flautist’s soul.

As always, Colbert opened with the easiest question: what is the best sandwich? In the perfect response, 3000 offered up “a friend bologna sandwich,” adding some crucial cooking tips, including cutting slits into the lunch meat so it doesn’t bubble up in the pan.

As for his first concert, of course André — currently on tour promoting his first new solo album in more than two decades, the rap-less, all-instrumental flute jazz collection New Blue Sun — had the coolest answer: a Fresh Fest hip-hip jam in his hometown of Atlanta featuring Public Enemy, LL Cool J and Whodini. “My mama took me,” Dre bragged, as Colbert tried to earn cool points by revealing that his mother had also taken him to his first show, the slightly less hip Captain & Tennille.

Colbert quickly corrected himself, though, a remembered that it was actually 1970s/1980s fluglehorn/trumpet giant Chuck Mangione. That selection that clearly appealed to the host’s woodwind-loving guest, who then scatted along with Colbert on a duet of Mangione’s signature 1978 jazz-pop classic “Feels So Good.”

3000 ran through a series of other provocative answers to questions such as “What is the scariest animal?”(humans), the requisite “Apples or Oranges?” (oranges) and “What do you think happens when we die,” which was more complicated. “We just kind of transfer to another body… the energy doesn’t go anywhere,” André said. “These are just kind of space suits, or Earth suits we walk around in… I think that energy goes into something else or to another we can’t even imagine.”

As for why he has never appeared in any of the Fast & Furious movies, veteran actor 3000 joked he would have “but I think Ludacris took the role!” Turns out he wasn’t joking. He said he did audition for a spot in the long-running, rubber-burning franchise, but was aced out by his fellow A-town MC Luda. He’d still come back for a later chapter, perhaps for the as-yet-unwritten one Colbert suggested: Too Fast, Too Flute.

The sire of Stankonia then proclaimed that his favorite smell is a baby’s breath, “when they’re new and it don’t stink yet,” while dubbing cigarette smoke his least favorite odor. Also, for the record, André is not a cat or dog person, but that’s just because he’s hardly ever home. Plus, if you heard how badly he screwed up the ant farm he got when he was a kid you’d understand why that is.

And finally, asked to name the one song he’d want to listen to on an endless loop, Three Stacks thought long and hard and said “something by [John] Coltrane.” He kind of punted on summing up the rest of his life in five words, though, grinning as he rambled, “somewhere doing something with my hands, building something, drawing something, sculpting something, chiseling something… in a workshop somewhere… making physical things that will last 1,000 years.”

Watch André answer the Questionert below.