Starting in the early 1990s as half of the Atlanta group Outkast, he specialized in wise and funny verses connecting street life with the stars. The flute is difficult to master but, fundamentally, intuitive to operate-intuitive like tapping out a rhythm, or like speaking.Īndré 3000’s intuition long ago earned him a claim to being one of the greatest rappers alive.
And at its best, rap can seem like an act of inner channeling, of making the body and mind one. This observation suggested that the flute, all along, was a bit hip-hop.
The “key thing in the history of the flute, going back thousands of years,” Powell said, is that “it’s the closest instrument to the human voice.” No reed or mouthpiece separates the player’s breath from the sound it makes. Neanderthals and 15th-century Swiss mercenaries and 1970s heavy-metal bands found use for it. It is possibly the oldest musical device in the world. Ardal Powell, the author of The Flute, told me that nothing surprised him when it came to this instrument. In 2017, I spoke with a music historian to understand the trend of flute rap: a boom in rappers rhyming about codeine, cars, and trauma over the soft sound of breath moving through a tube.
