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What’s Cooler Than Being Cool?
Lessons from André 3000 on identity and the pursuit of weirdness
“Ain’t nobody dope as me, I’m just so fresh so clean.”
So starts the chorus of “So Fresh and So Clean,” the fourth track off OutKast’s fourth album, Stankonia, released 19 years ago last month. To the uninitiated, the line may sound like typical hip-hop braggadocio. But to those of us who worship at the altar of OutKast, it’s more of a mission statement, the crux of a broader proclamation issued incrementally over Stankonia’s hour-and-a-half-long running time: We’re different, yeah, but we’re cool, and we’re cool precisely because we’re different—in fact, ain’t nobody cool like us.
Delivered in ebullient style and executed in unapologetically Southern diction, this proclamation amounts to nothing less than originality as rebellion, honesty as truth — and it changed hip-hop forever. It also changed the life of a certain anxious suburban boy who was searching for, as André 3000 would later put it, “anything that seemed real in the world.”
I was a freshman in high school when I sat alone in the dark of my room on a cold December night and pressed play on Stankonia for the first time. I’d had a screwed-up year, spending most of it in my psychiatrist’s office, sunk low in an oversized armchair, studying my hands while Dr. Omar detailed why he was yet again upping my dosage of Zoloft. (“Let’s just see what 10 more milligrams does for you.”)
To a boy who lived in a bubble of self-consciousness, and to whom cultural norms were cosmic codas, discovering André was a revelation.
My primary problem was social anxiety, and like many teenagers, I exacerbated my symptoms by ruthlessly comparing myself to the “cool” kids. I desperately wanted to be like them, and I tortured myself in misguided efforts to conform. Self-conscious to the cuticle, I spent a shameful amount of time planted before my bathroom mirror, contorting my face into what I thought was a cool, bad-boy glare. I pretended to enjoy the same music as everyone else, watched the same TV shows, and even wore the same clothes — which unfortunately meant lots of baggy, wannabe-gangster apparel from Foot…
