The Endless End of Outkast

It’s not hard to picture Prince rolling his eyes. This was Friday, the first weekend of Coachella, in April 2014; Muse and Arcade Fire were headlining the next two days, but it would be safe to assume that tens of thousands of people in Indio had come solely to see the first Outkast performance since the first W. Bush term. The duo’s last proper album, already more than a decade old at that point, had been a barely veiled divorce filing, André’s half an 80-minute slog of barely veiled Prince karaoke. It won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and was certified Diamond by the RIAA, but left people wondering what “the André solo album” would sound like, conveniently ignoring the fact that they’d just been given the André solo album.