André 3000 sets new record for longest song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100
The 12-minute track features an equally lengthy title, I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.
Image: Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images
André 3000 has broken the record for the longest song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 with his new track I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.
Debuting at No. 90 on the Billboard Hot 100, the song hails from the Outkast legend’s first solo album in 17 years, New Blue Sun, and clocks in at a whopping 12 minutes and 20 seconds, dethroning Tool’s 10-minute-and-21-second Fear Inoculum from 2019.
As Billboard notes, the average length of a charting song is three minutes and 15 seconds. For nearly 50 years, the record for the lengthiest song to top the Hot 100 was held by Don McLean’s American Pie (Parts I & II), which runs 8 minutes and 37 seconds. The record was finally broken in 2021, with Taylor Swift’s 10-minute-and-13-second All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault).
Released earlier this month, New Blue Sun is made up of eight tracks, featuring a variety of woodwind instruments, including contrabass flute, Mayan flutes, bamboo flutes as well as other digital wind instruments and synthesizers.
The record, as André 3000 explains, features no bars, no beats, and certainly no singing from the man himself.
“I’ve worked with some of the newest, freshest, youngest, and old-school producers. I get beats all the time. I try to write all the time,” the rapper told GQ magazine.
“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. It actually feels…sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way.”
Listen to I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time below.
