Hip Hop

Andre 3000 Recalls Having His Life Saved By A Stranger

Andre 3000 reveals he had a near death experience during his childhood.

Andre 3000 was almost never Three Stacks, and Outkast might not have ever existed. The iconic rapper and one-half of one of the most influential groups of all time recently sat down with journalist Mike Ayers to interview for his upcoming book One Last Song: Conversations on Life, Death, and Music. Delving into his childhood and the experiences that made a mark on him, Andre recalled a serious car accident that almost took his life.

“When I was younger, me and my friend were in car accident,” he explained. “We were riding with my friend’s mom, but we were so young, we didn’t know what happened until we woke up in the hospital.”

According to Andre’s story, it seems that fate stepped in that day to make sure we all had the gift of Andre 3000 in the world.

“We were on this street in Atlanta and it was a non-busy street, and fortunately, this guy who had money passed by, and he had one of the first working cell phones,” he recalled. “It was like a suitcase and he was able to call an ambulance. If we didn’t have that cell phone, we would have been out there for a minute and might have died.”

In One Last Song, Mike Ayers sets out to ask artists what song they would most like to hear right before they die.

Three Stacks got to thinking about death, mortality, and the sometimes-grim realities of adulthood during the interview, eventually sharing his story of a chance encounter that saved his life. As for his “last song,” Andre chose Prince’s “Sometimes it Snows in April.” “The mood of the song always clicked in that sort of way,” he explained. “I never knew what Prince was talking about, but it sounded like he was talking about life.”