André 3000 album New Blue Sun joins a long history of flutes in pop music.

For at least four years now, former OutKast rapper André 3000 has been spotted in airport terminals and coffee shops, from city to city and around the world, tootling on various flutes. In fact, Key & Peele all but predicted it in 2015, with a sketch that spoofed André’s eccentricity by dressing him in a Pied Piper outfit and having him propose an experimental album that would feature only “one spoken word per track.” Still, for those who hadn’t been paying attention, this flute album could seem like one of the more outrageous left-turn albums in music history, comparable to Lou Reed’s 1975 all-feedback opus Metal Machine Music, Neil Young’s 1983 synthesizer-heavy Trans, Lil Wayne’s 2010 rock LP Rebirth, or perhaps most nearly, Stevie Wonder’s mystical and mostly instrumental 1979 double album Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants.” While most reactions last week leaned toward intrigued bemusement, a few fans got genuinely angry over the idea of André’s forsaking lyrical flow for lilting flute. New Blue Sun certainly stands at the far end of the continuum of “no songs, just vibes,” but that’s also an approach that can be grounded in multiple flute traditions, whether it’s Afrofuturist spiritual jazz or New Age atmospherics to accompany inner journeys. The earliest known jazz flute solo on record was by Cuban musician Alberto Socarras, on 1927’s “Shootin’ the Pistol” by the Clarence Williams band, but you have to strain to hear it, demonstrating the problem. Flute provided the hook to the 1972 Main Ingredient soul hit “Everybody Plays the Fool,” leading scads of listeners to mishear it as “Everybody Plays the Flute.” Flutes were everywhere on jazz-fusion classics like Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” and Lonnie Liston Smith’s “Expansions.” This is also the era from which so much later hip-hop would sample its sounds: Deserving special notice is the great funky flutist Bobbi Humphrey, whose albums, such as the 1973 Blue Note masterwork Blacks and Blues, would go on to be sampled by Eric B. and Rakim, KMD, Madlib, Mobb Deep, and Digable Planets, among others.