It's half past midnight on a friday night in Manhattan, and twenty-eight-year-old Andre Benjamin is in his room at the W Hotel wearing a pink ascot and billowing, high-waisted plaid golf pants that he designed. He has the regal carriage of a prince with a pimp's bop in his walk, but he's so graceful he doesn't walk so much as glide. The Love Below, his half of OutKast's new double album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, is on the stereo, and the room is, predictably, filled with clothes -- pink pants and blue seersucker jackets and black ascots stacked here or tossed there. The clothes are as beautiful and audacious as you'd expect from a man who cites as his style icons three completely dissimilar people: Ralph Lauren, Sly Stone and Jacqueline Kennedy.

A man who can wear a hot-pink silk shirt in a roomful of thugs and remain a man must surely have a formidable sense of comfort within his own skin. But it's not so. "I really don't have the personality to be a star," Andre says. "If I wasn't Dre from OutKast, I couldn't dress like this. But now I have a card to say, 'Who gives a shit what he does?' " Those clothes provide a symbol of the duality of this true Gemini: The painfully shy Andre Benjamin likes to get fly and become Andre 3000, but he could do without the inevitable staring. Andre is adrift, unsure of the future of OutKast, unsure of his future as a performer, unsure who to date or whether to ever marry.

"I almost don't wanna be an entertainer anymore," he says. "You get to a point where you don't wanna do 'Miss Jackson' ever again. You start to look for new things to be passionate about. So I moved to California, spend most of my time in L.A., Studio City. I been taking acting classes and auditioning and learning that craft."

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was an immediate success, selling more than 750,000 copies in its first two weeks. After the Grammy-winning classic Stankonia, OutKast are among the top groups in hip-hop both commercially and critically, but it seems that a rift has developed between Andre and his partner, Big Boi. "He don't smoke no more, and I still smoke, so we might not ride on the same tour bus like we used to," Big Boi says. "He's a vegan, and I'm on chicken and seafood the last ten years. He wants to do some acting as well as music, and my love is still in music, like it's always been. We don't hang like we used to, but I slept on his bedroom floor my last two years in high school. The bond we got is like brothers."

The rift is much more intellectual than personal, a difference in what each wanted to do musically this time around. But they admit that despite a love for each other, they have grown apart. "We're most definitely not splitting up," Andre says. "We're most definitely growing up, though. We each want to do certain things, and we're supporting each other's thing, and I know things I wanna get into may not fall into what the OutKast fan would expect."

The double album began in 2002 as a solo album from Andre, a little side project. Andre completed five songs, then presented the idea of doing a solo album to Big Boi and their manager. Neither of them liked the idea. "They didn't want me to drop a solo album before the next OutKast album," Andre says. "I was kind of upset. At first I was gonna release 'em on the Internet and just give it away for free."

Big Boi had already begun working on some songs, and the idea of separate albums packaged together was hatched. Big Boi's process goes relatively quickly, so by February he was done with his side of the record. But Andre missed his deadlines in February and all through the summer. "I could tell [Big Boi] was getting impatient," AndrÈ says. "The tourin' wasn't goin' on, and I was fuckin' up his money."

"I was tired of sittin' at home," Big Boi recalls. "We used to tour 200 days out of the year. It was a shock to be at home for a month at a time. I was like, 'What the fuck is goin' on?' I was ready to hit the stage."

"Big Boi knows me," Andre says. "Every album, I do this. It's just never been this bad." The final week in August, Andre was in L.A., working in four studios at once. "I stayed up for four days straight to get it done," he says.

Whereas Big Boi has made an album that resembles Stankonia and is eager to tour, Andre's diverges sharply from the OutKast sound, and he has said repeatedly that he will not do any more touring as OutKast, period. "For some reason, I don't wanna rock the house," Andre says. "Sounds crazy, but I don't." He's studying the saxophone and says the next time he's performing might be with a sort of jazz band. "I wanna start a band, a quartet or sextet," he says. "It won't be jazz, but it may be in the jazz tradition."

But Andre's entire life is in tumult. After two years together, he broke up with Erykah Badu in 1998, and he's nervous about getting into a new relationship, because he hurt Badu in their breakup. "When you've given love to someone and then take it away, that's terrible," he says. "I don't wanna do nobody else like that." He yearns for love, but he doesn't know if he can trust women and is uncertain if being in a relationship will be good for his music. "When I was with Erykah, I wrote some terrible raps," he says.

He lights up when talking about his six-year-old son, Seven, who lives in Dallas with his mother, Badu, but laments that his schedule keeps him from seeing his son as much as he'd like. Common, Badu's current love, spends more time with Seven than he does. "Seven would come to stay at my house and I'd be like, 'Hey, man, let's go see Shrek. And he'd be like, 'Already seen it. Me and Rashied [Common's given name] went to go see it.' I'm like, 'Damn,' " he says, deflated. "But when I told Erykah about that, she said, 'Seven is lying to you. He's just doing that to see what you're gonna say.' He was four years old then! That's when I knew I had to let Seven know that I felt funny about things, but the real man thing to do is to acknowledge Rashied all the time, so I do that. It lets him know that I'm comfortable. So he don't play those games anymore."

For all their protestations that OutKast have not broken up, Andre and Big Boi are hardly ever together these days. They live different lives, in different cities. I speak with the twenty-eight-year-old Big Boi (government name Antwan Patton) at Stankonia Studios in Atlanta. He wears a white T-shirt and has diamonds in both his ears and gold fronts on his teeth. He's filling a Phillies blunt with sticky, smelly weed. It's after 3 a.m., the beginning of Friday. He and his homeboys were in the studio only because their favorite strip club was about to close.

He laughs off Andre's talk of uncertainty about OutKast's future -- he says the future of OutKast is already mapped out. "We have the next three albums conceptualized," he says. "We sat down and brainstormed on the themes."

If Big Boi is the stabilizing force in OutKast, perhaps that's because his home life is rich. His three-year-old son, Bamboo, has a memorable role on Speakerboxxx, and there's a picture of his eight-year-old daughter, Jordan, on his key chain. He's also got a two-year-old boy named Cross, and his eyes twinkle when he talks about them. "Fatherhood is the best shit ever to me," he says. "I created 'em, they parts of me, and I wanna be there to see them be productive people." He says he's going to stop smoking weed because of them. "I will be quitting smoking within six months," he says. "I'm tryin' to watch my babies grow up, and lung cancer is not in the program." But the sacrifice isn't absolute: "I'll move just to eatin' brownies."

Big Boi sits back in his Aeron chair and pulls from his blunt. He says he's prepared to tour without Andre. "Performing to me is part of makin' the record. It ain't gonna be the same as the Kast together, but, shit, somethin' is better than nothin'." Then again, he takes Andre's promise not to tour with a grain of salt. "Once he sees them people dig it, he'll change," Big Boi says. "He always say that [he doesn't want to tour]. He always say, 'I don't know if I'm-a do another record.' Always. For the past three, four records. 'I don't know if I wanna do it.' Then he always come back around." OutKast have always challenged their audience with sonic and sartorial styles divergent from the rest of the world. But their audience will have to be even more flexible than ever in the future, because despite what the duo says, no one is sure what will come next from OutKast.

[Excerpt From Issue 935 — November 13, 2003]