André 3000 has broken a new record by now scoring the longest-ever song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
Following the release of his new flute music album ‘New Blue Sun’, the record’s opening track ‘I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a “Rap” Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time’ entered the Billboard Hot 100 at 90. The track clocks in at 12 minutes and 20 seconds, making it the longest-ever song to enter the charts.
The title was previously held by Tool, who released the 10 minute and 21 seconds cut ‘Fear Inoculum’ in August 2019 – that track debuted on the Hot 100 charts at number 93. ‘Fear Inoculum’ dethroned the previous longest track, which was David Bowie‘s nearly 10 minute song ‘Blackstar’.
However, the title for the longest song to top the Billboard Hot 100 belongs to Taylor Swift, who in 2021 released ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)’.
‘I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a “Rap” Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time’ also marks André 3000’s first song to reach the Billboard Hot 100 since his 2012 collaboration with B.O.B, ‘Play the Guitar’.
‘New Blue Sun’ comes 17 years after OutKast’s sixth and final studio effort, 2006’s ‘Idlewild’. Since then, André 3000 had distanced himself from making music. He most recently explained why he’s stepped away from rapping.
“Sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way,” he said. “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.”
He continued: “And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy’. What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad’. You can find cool ways to say it, but….”
“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.”