A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
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So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
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Saturday, July 6, 2019
Outkast (1992-Present): Legendary, iconic, and innovative duo of musicians, composers, rappers, songwriters, arrangers, ensemble leaders, and producers
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2019
VOLUME SEVEN NUMBER TWO
HOLLAND DOZIER HOLLAND
(L-R: Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland, Brian Holland)
OutKast's blend of gritty Southern soul, fluid raps, and the low-slung funk of their Organized Noize
production crew epitomized the Atlanta wing of hip-hop's rising force,
the Dirty South, during the mid to late '90s. Along with Goodie Mob, OutKast
took Southern hip-hop in bold and innovative directions: less reliance
on aggression, more positivity and melody, thicker arrangements, and
intricate lyrics. After Dré and Big Boi
hit number one on the rap charts with their first single, "Player's
Ball," the duo embarked on a run of platinum albums spiked with several
hit singles, enjoying numerous critical accolades in addition to their
commercial success.
André Benjamin (Dré) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi)
attended the same high school in the Atlanta borough of East Point, and
several lyrical battles made each gain respect for the other's skills.
They formed OutKast and were pursued by Organized Noize Productions, hitmakers for TLC and Xscape. Signed to Antonio "L.A." Reid and Babyface's local LaFace label just after high school, OutKast
recorded and released "Player's Ball," then watched the single rise to
number one on the rap chart. It slipped from the top spot only after six
weeks, was certified gold, and created a buzz for a full-length
release. That album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, hit the Top 20 in 1994 and was certified platinum by the end of the year. Dré and Big Boi also won Best New Rap Group of the Year at the 1995 Source Awards.
OutKast returned with a new album in 1996, releasing ATLiens
that August; it hit number two and went platinum with help from the
gold-selling single "Elevators (Me & You)" (number 12 pop, number
one rap), as well as the Top 40 title track. Aquemini
followed in 1998, also hitting number two and going double platinum.
There were no huge hit singles this time around, but critics lavishly
praised the album's unified, progressive vision, hailing it as a great
leap forward and including it on many year-end polls. Unfortunately, in a
somewhat bizarre turn of events, OutKast
was sued over the album's lead single, "Rosa Parks," by none other than
the civil rights pioneer herself, who claimed that the group had
unlawfully appropriated her name to promote their music, also objecting
to some of the song's language. The initial court decision dismissed the
suit in late 1999. (The Supreme Court later allowed the lawsuit to
proceed; the two parties eventually reached a settlement.)
Dré modified his name to André 3000 before the group issued its hotly anticipated fourth album, Stankonia, in late 2000. Riding the momentum of uniformly excellent reviews and the stellar singles "B.O.B." and "Ms. Jackson," Stankonia
debuted at number two and went triple platinum in just a few months;
meanwhile, "Ms. Jackson" became their first number one pop single the
following February. Both of those major singles and most of the album
material -- all but three contributions from Organized Noize, in fact --
were produced by a trio dubbed Earthtone III (aka André 3000, Big Boi,
and David "Mr. DJ" Sheats).
2003's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album, debuted at number one and spawned a pair of number one singles: the Dré-fronted "Hey Ya" and the Big Boi-fronted "The Way You Move." Speakerboxxx, more true to OutKast's past, could have been issued as a Big Boi solo album, while The Love Below, a diverse and playful affair, could have been an André 3000
release. Regardless of its dual nature, the set won the 2004 Grammy for
Album of the Year. As breakup rumors continued to swirl, the duo
returned with the feature film Idlewild -- a musical set in the
Prohibition-era South -- and an extremely eclectic soundtrack billed as a
proper OutKast album. Big Boi issued a solo album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty in 2010, while André 3000
produced and/or appeared on a series of tracks by the likes of John
Legend ("Green Light"), Beyoncé ("Party"), Lloyd ("Dedication to My Ex
[Miss That])," and Young Jeezy ("I Do").
When Outkast first introduced audiences to Stankonia 15 years
ago, the group made sure listeners knew exactly where they were. They
were at "the center of the Earth, seven light-years below sea level," as
Andre 3000 says in the opening words of the album — "the place from
which all funky things come." They were also in a studio
in the Berkeley Park neighborhood of Atlanta, which Outkast had bought
and named Stankonia shortly before beginning to record the album that
would make the space legendary.
More importantly, Stankonia was a place "where you can open yourself up
and be free to express anything," Andre 3000 later said in an interview. It was here, careening between Atlanta and Atlantis, Outkast conceived an album that would change hip-hop forever. The singles "Ms. Jackson" and "So Fresh, So Clean"
are still irresistibly quotable. The deep cuts are still some of the
most rewarding experimental hip-hop around. It was the album most
hip-hop skeptics had to admit they liked. More than most other albums in
the early '00s, Stankonia helped hip-hop build its foundation in the mainstream, where still it stands unfuckwithable today. While
proving how hook-y and marketable the genre could be, it gave the world
a glimpse of how far the borders could expand. Spread across a tapestry
of funk, psychedelic hard rock, gospel and jazz, Outkast's Stankonia
proved hip-hop could outline spiritual conundrums just as effectively
as it could describe the traps lining the edges of the ghetto. Music
still feels the reverberations today.
Source: Mic/Getty Images
Welcome to Stankonia. The album hit the shelves at a pivotal moment in Outkast's career. The duo were coming off a smash success with Aquemini, which had earned a perfect five-mic rating from the Source, the "bible of the genre," Creative Loafing notes. If Outkast wanted to surpass Aquemini with the next release, they knew they would need to reach beyond what hip-hop had attempted before. "We're in the age of keeping it real, but we're trying to keep it surreal," Andre 3000 once said of
the album's mission. He and Big Boi made a point of listening to no
hip-hop while recording so as not to fall into any of the cliches they
saw developing in the genre. Instead, they turned to Prince, George
Clinton and Little Richard, but were careful not to go too deep. "I
don't want this to be the generation that went back to '70s rock," Andre
3000 told Vibe. "You gotta take it and do new things with it." The
results are clear in "B.O.B," a searing fusion of Hendrix rock
distortion and hyper-fast dancing breakbeats; "Humble Mumble," with its
dreamy ballad piano lines floating over unrelenting syncopated snares
and scratches; and the apocalyptic funk guitar work of "Gangsta Shit."
Each beat is more experimental than the last, veering dangerously close
to random at times, each another challenge to hip-hop to step its game
up. Finding that funk: The
lyrics match the searching nature of the beats, with Andre 3000 and Big
Boi's words narrating their quest for the funk. Said "funk," however,
was a metaphor for so much more. "I guess we're talking about an individual freedom," Andre 3000 told Fader.
"Finding that gateway that opens you up, that frees you up mentally so
you won't be stuck in a... a... I don't want to say a corporate
mindstate, but more like a trained mindstate." That search for
freedom helped open up hip-hop for so many to follow. It gave those who
worked on the album and in Atlanta's extended Dungeon Family scene an
impeccable credential, helping launch the careers of Cee-Lo Green,
Killer Mike and Future (cousin to Rico Wade, one of the producers in
Organized Noise, responsible for three Stankonia tracks). Andre 3000 basically wrote the blueprint for the quirky genius in hip-hop, a model MCs like Young Thug to Kendrick Lamar are rewriting today. "Outkast
has opened up so many doors, for not just for myself, but artists of
color," Janelle Monáe, one of today's torch-bearers of the alternative
hip-hop, said in an interview with Complex.
"They basically rewrote how hip hop could sound, what it could look
like, how we could dress, things we could say, the live instrumentation
in music." Source: Mic/Getty Images
That freedom came with a bit of a price. The
overwhelming creative energy the album barely managed to contain also
likely sowed the seeds for the group's eventual dissolution. Listening
to the album now, one can hear Andre 3000 and Big Boi's flows start to
diverge into idiosyncratic territory: Andre's becoming more melodic,
stream-of-consciousness and lyrical while Big Boi is growing a more
firm and confident Atlantan flex.
Even the way they describe the
album's birthplace one can see the difference. "Stankonia is whatever's
the funkiest shit ever," Big Boi told the Fader.
"It could be that purple, or that funky-ass music." Compare it to Andre
3000's New Age, self-actualization explanation and once can see
beginning of the fray. The confidence in these new visions would eventually lead to the group splitting their efforts into Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, their next offering, essentially two solo efforts packaged as one. When they rejoined forces for 2006's Idlewild,the results were disappointing for those expecting that same uncontrollable chemistry.
Today,
Big Boi is continuing the group's mission to channel the funk, while
Andre 3000 has lost all inspiration to do anything music or
Outkast-related. In a 2014 interview with Fader, he said he felt like a "sell-out" playing the hits they crafted on Stankonia during the group's recent reunion tour. How one could feel like a sell-out screaming the "burn motherfucker, burn American dreams" of "Gasoline Dreams"
to an audience of screaming fans is hard to imagine, but this is how
the cracker crumbles. None of the group's present dysfunction changes
how momentous it was when Outkast threw open the gates of Stankonia and
welcomed the whole world to come and join. Hip-hop hasn't been the same since.
IF OUTKAST
WERE NOT A MULTIPLATINUM-SELLING HIP-HOP group, they would make a great
cop-buddy movie. Even before Big Boi and André 3000 released Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
— a double album that was, for all intents and purposes, two solo
albums — the pair were such a notorious odd couple, their partnership
could’ve been scripted. As anyone who has followed the duo’s career
knows by this point, OutKast’s core dynamic puts a teetotaling vegan
dandy (André 3000) in the same blunt-smoke-filled squad car as a playa
for life with a fondness for pit bulls, oversize bracelets and extremely
comfortable leisurewear (Big Boi).
When Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
was released last fall, with Big Boi and André 3000 each more or less
sticking to their halves of the jewel box, it felt like a trial
separation that everyone knows is headed for divorce court. They did
(and still do) solo interviews to promote the album. André 3000 had left
Atlanta for L.A. to pursue an acting career and insisted he had no
plans on touring. Big Boi said that Dré always says he won’t tour, and
that he’d eventually come around.
He hasn’t. To complicate things further, the album has become the
biggest of their career — eight times platinum and counting, with
simultaneously released hit singles and, now, three Grammys, including
Album of the Year. André 3000’s “Hey Ya!,” which features no rapping at
all (like much of The Love Below), has become one of the rare
crossover singles that can be regularly heard on hip-hop, rock and Top
Forty radio. Most recently, they received the ultimate nod of
mass-cultural acceptance: They’ve been invited to appear on Oprah.
BOTH DRÉ AND BIG BOI DENY THAT they’re
breaking up. Still, there’s a certain finality to the way Dré discusses
the group’s future. “There’ll be two more OutKast albums,” he says,
referring to their contractual obligation. “I’m willing to accept that
no matter what I do next, it may not be as big as ‘Hey Ya!’ or OutKast.
But it’s a growth thing. Paul McCartney and John Lennon never did
anything as big as the Beatles. But they still did some cool shit on
their own.”
Three days after the Grammys, Dré, 28, began shooting Be Cool, the sequel to Get Shorty,
in which he and Cedric the Entertainer play members of a thuggish rap
group called the WMDs, managed by John Travolta. “I get to dress stupid
over-the-top,” Dré says with obvious delight. “Platinum jewelry, pants
half-down my waist.” There was no name in the original script Dré’s
lines were labeled “André” — so during rehearsals he offered a hundred
bucks to whoever made up the “stupidest slumghetto name.” Cedric won
with “Dabu.”
Dré is driving down Sunset Boulevard in his Toyota Land Cruiser. A
saxophone workout by the Jazz Crusaders plays on the SUV’s stereo. We
pull into a parking garage, and a guard smiles at Dré and waves us
through. “You see that guy?” Dré asks. “Remember that song ‘Pass the
Dutchie’? He did that song. He was in that group when he was a little
kid.” Dré shakes his head. “He said they paid him $500.”
Though Dré is often portrayed as a shy eccentric, upstairs at Katana —
a trendy Asian restaurant designed to look like a set from Blade Runner,
only with more models he accepts a steady stream of well-wishers with
ease and a near-constant grin. Jermaine Dupri stops by for an elbow
bump, as do members of Tha Dogg Pound, a guy who says he directed Friday After Next
and a young lady who says her girlfriend — “the white girl back there” —
wants Dré’s number. Dré seems briefly nonplused by the request but
gives her the number.
With the ubiquity of “Hey Ya!,” André 3000 has emerged as the more
recognized half of OutKast. The song deserves the airplay, channeling a
giddy, birth-of-rock-&-roll energy that comes as close to perfection
as pop songs ever do. And any man willing to step out in a muumuu
becomes especially conspicuous in the fairly conformist world of
hip-hop. Tonight, Dré is wearing a Ralph Lauren Mackinaw over a checked
blue oxford shirt and loose blue pants with yellow stars garnishing the
leg seam. A tweed cap covers his hair (in cornrows for Be Cool), and his flashiest piece of jewelry is a vintage silver flower ring.
“Most of the clothes in the ‘Hey Ya!’ video I designed,” notes Dré as
he reaches for some edamame. He’s starting his own clothing line,
Benjamin André, which will concentrate, at first, on the all-important
accessory. “You can have on some total bullshit,” he says, “but if you
have cool socks, or a hat, or a pocket square, it’s like, ‘Oh, that
shit’s fly.'”
How about when you guys started out? Hip-hop is
such a macho world. In the very beginning, I tried to make sure I fit
in. We looked like regular cats. I had an Atlanta Braves jersey on in
the first video. You had to look macho. It wasn’t until our second
album, when I started producing, that I decided to make things more
personal. I studied the way different artists looked. Prince, Sly Stone —
they were dope for their time. And the jazz guys, too. They were on
heroin, but they looked good. Then I went to Jamaica and decided to grow
out my dreads. I wanted to keep them covered while I was growing them
out, so I found this white Indian turban. It looked cool. Then I started
wearing silk scarves, and it went from there. In hip-hop — well, in
music, period — people don’t have that style anymore. Did you expect to do as well as you guys did at the Grammys?
Honestly? I thought we’d win that many awards, but not in those
categories. I thought “Hey Ya!” would get Record of the Year. When
Coldplay won, I was like, “Oh, really?” I’m a White Stripes fan, and
right now they’re considered the saviors of rock & roll, so I
thought they would give Album of the Year to them. Was it a fun night? Norah Jones called me the
night before and said, “Are you ready?” I said, “I guess I’m as ready as
I’ll ever be.” It was stressful, because a lot of attention was on us. I
don’t like that. The best moment was when we won Album of the Year and
Big Boi gave me a hug. The embrace lasted five — eight, nine no, maybe
fifteen seconds. The Love Below was originally supposed to be a
solo album. At the last minute, management and the record company said
it wasn’t a good time to do that, so Big Boi did Speakerboxxx. But I was taking so long to finish The Love Below
that he wanted to release that as a solo album. A lot of people don’t
know the album almost wasn’t made. So there were a lot of emotions in
those seconds. How about when you guys started out? Hip-hop is
such a macho world. In the very beginning, I tried to make sure I fit
in. We looked like regular cats. I had an Atlanta Braves jersey on in
the first video. You had to look macho. It wasn’t until our second
album, when I started producing, that I decided to make things more
personal. I studied the way different artists looked. Prince, Sly Stone —
they were dope for their time. And the jazz guys, too. They were on
heroin, but they looked good. Then I went to Jamaica and decided to grow
out my dreads. I wanted to keep them covered while I was growing them
out, so I found this white Indian turban. It looked cool. Then I started
wearing silk scarves, and it went from there. In hip-hop — well, in
music, period — people don’t have that style anymore. Did you expect to do as well as you guys did at the Grammys?
Honestly? I thought we’d win that many awards, but not in those
categories. I thought “Hey Ya!” would get Record of the Year. When
Coldplay won, I was like, “Oh, really?” I’m a White Stripes fan, and
right now they’re considered the saviors of rock & roll, so I
thought they would give Album of the Year to them.
Was it a fun night? Norah Jones called me the
night before and said, “Are you ready?” I said, “I guess I’m as ready as
I’ll ever be.” It was stressful, because a lot of attention was on us. I
don’t like that. The best moment was when we won Album of the Year and
Big Boi gave me a hug. The embrace lasted five — eight, nine no, maybe
fifteen seconds. The Love Below was originally supposed to be a
solo album. At the last minute, management and the record company said
it wasn’t a good time to do that, so Big Boi did Speakerboxxx. But I was taking so long to finish The Love Below
that he wanted to release that as a solo album. A lot of people don’t
know the album almost wasn’t made. So there were a lot of emotions in
those seconds. Are you feeling burned out on music? I wouldn’t
say burned out. But definitely uninspired. But anything could come along
any day. I’m starting a band. You know the guitar player from the ‘Hey
Ya!’ video, Johnny Vulture? Um, yeah. [In the video, Dré plays every member of the band, including Johnny Vulture.] Johnny started a band called the Vultures. He and André 3000 hate each other, because André 3000 thinks Johnny took his sound. What else do you have planned? I want to go to Juilliard to study classical music. Really? When? I’ve been thinking about it for
about a year. But things got kinda busy. This record took off. I can’t
be in school right now. But I’m taking saxophone and clarinet lessons.
I’d study classical composition and music theory. Like, now, I was
working on songs for Gwen Stefani’s album, and I could tell her how to
sing them but not the range. BIG BOI AND DRÉ MET AT TRI-CITIES High,
an arts magnet school in Atlanta, when they were still Antwon Patton
and André Benjamin. The pair quickly bonded over music. Both had
far-flung tastes — though, surprisingly, it was Dré who was most into
Prince and Funkadelic, while Big Boi was obsessed with Kate Bush, whose
early hit, “Wuthering Heights,” has a chorus that goes (really) “Heathcliiiiiff, it’s meeeee, it’s Cathy, I’ve come hooome….” “My uncle turned me on to that,” Big Boi says. “Nobody else could
understand it. But that shit’s moving to me. I’d sit and think and play
her records for hours.” One afternoon, after taking note of the extremely high wack-to-non-wack ratio of videos on Yo! MTV Raps,
Dré and Big Boi decided to form their own group. One of Big Boi’s
ex-girlfriends hooked them up with Rico Wade, part of the production
trio Organized Noize, whose hits would eventually include TLC’s
“Waterfalls.” Their “studio,” the Dungeon, was in the basement of an old
house. “The basement wasn’t finished,” Big Boi says. “We have red clay
in Georgia, so the beat machines had dust on ’em. There were old
broke-up patio chairs. You had seven people sitting on steps with their
notebooks out. Guys sleeping upstairs on a hardwood floor. It was some
gritty shit. We’d walk up to this deli inside a gas station and order
the spaghetti special, because it came with five meatballs, so we could
split it.”
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Curious Legacy of Outkast
by Raj Gopal
16 March 2017
PopMatters
Editor’s
Note: This article originally ran 27 July 2015. We are re-running some
of our best music features this week during SXSW.
OUTKAST
(Left to Right: Big Boi and Andre 3000)
When it comes to hip-hop, everyone remembers who kicked down the front door -- but no one remembers who opened the windows
It was pandemonium on the grassy field, a sea of thousands writhing and thrashing as if the world was coming to an end. It was Governor’s Ball 2014, and Outkast
had just kicked off their 20th-anniversary show with “B.O.B.”, a
blistering drumn’n’bass-gospel-rave-rap attack unlike anything that’s
come before or since. The track should come with an advisory warning:
May Cause Listeners to Lose Their Heads and Shed Two Gallons of Sweat. A
comedown was inevitable after an opener like “B.O.B.” But as Outkast
settled into their set, I noticed something funny; during deeper cuts
like “ATLiens” and “Hootie Hoo”, the younger pockets of the crowd would
begin shuffling and checking their phones, the hallmarks of people who
aren’t totally feeling it. This continued throughout Outkast’s eclectic
set -- energy constantly shifted like tides, as different pockets of the
crowd perked up or simmered down depending on the flavor, tempo, and
age of the song being played. As I danced hard enough to make my
fellow concertgoers nervous and uncomfortable, I wondered how Outkast
was doing this. How had they brought teenage white girls and middle-aged
black men to the same place, for a shared purpose? How could they
provoke such wildly varying reactions within a single crowd? And what
did this say about the legacy and future of Outkast? * * * Hip-hop
today is borderless. New York rappers crib from Houston. Jamaican
dancehall has wormed its way into chart-topping hits. There’s a guy in
Calcutta remixing a Gucci Mane song right now. At the center of
these swirling trade winds sits Atlanta, which has come to define the
mainstream (Mike WiLL Made It, TI, Lil Jon), and the vanguard
(iLoveMakonnen, Young Thug, Migos). Back in 1995, however,
hip-hop was a closed system guarded by the East and West Coast, and a
battle raged over which side truly represented the culture. For the
gatekeepers on the coasts, Southern rap didn’t even belong in the
conversation; they considered it booty music made by backwoods posers.
So, when two drawling 19-year-olds from Atlanta won Best New Rap Group
at the Source Awards in 1995, the New York crowd positively revolted,
throwing heckles and curses at the group. Those two Southern boys were Antwan “Big Boi” Patton and Andre “3000” Benjamin, and with their platinum-selling debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,
Outkast were the first Southern group to break the coastal stranglehold
on hip-hop. Like the Beatles sparking the British Invasion, Outkast put
Atlanta on the map and cracked the door for every Southern rapper that
would follow. That debut is one of many reasons why Outkast is probably
the most important hip-hop group since NWA. They were just getting
started. Over their next five albums, Outkast continuously pushed
themselves into foreign territory, revolutionizing what mainstream
hip-hop could sound like with each succeeding album. The divide between
gangsta and conscious rap was a false choice; every perspective and
subject matter was worthwhile to Outkast. On Aquemini
alone, they talk about child rearing, drug dealing, racial politics,
technophobia, gypsies, aliens, and the apocalypse. They could be
jokesters, realists, gangstas, and family men all at once. That
eclecticism extended to the music. Outkast used live instrumentation to
fuse hip-hop with funk, gospel, rock, rave, ragtime, and anything else
they could get their hands on. They were instrumental in expanding
hip-hop’s palette, and at their best, on songs like
“SpottieOttieDopalicious” and “B.O.B.”, they blew apart the very idea of
distinct genres. And with 2003’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Outkast helped usher hip-hop into the mainstream. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
was the first (and last) hip-hop album to permeate seemingly every
corner of American culture, sitting high on critics’ year-end lists,
winning over the establishment with a Grammy for Album of the year, and
selling over 11 million units. To this day it stands as the best-selling
hip-hop album of all time. Perhaps most importantly, Outkast popularized slang words we now take for grantedlike crunk and skeet. Life in the 21st century would be an unbearable grind without the majesty of skeet. Groups
like Run-DMC and NWA may have laid the foundation for today’s hip-hop,
but no group covered more ground or had a wider influence than Outkast.
Their influence can be heard in Kendrick Lamar’s thematic scope, Big
KRIT’s defiant southernness, Lil Wayne’s cosmic weirdness, and Drake’s
earnest crooning. From the granular issues of what it can sound like and
be about, to the global issues of where it can be made and who it can
sell to, Outkast courses through the veins of hip-hop in America. * * * And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that Outkast’s star has begun to fade. Sure,
critics still fawn over the group, but since when have critics
reflected the tastes of the common man? In the eyes of many, Outkast
have gradually been reduced to their singles—ironically, a group with
one of the deepest catalogs in music has become Those Guys That Did “Hey
Ya!”. If Spotify and YouTube plays are any indication, young people
listening to early-'00s rap now prefer Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent to
Outkast. And besides constant shout-outs from Big KRIT, the hip-hop
community doesn’t speak of Outkast in the [hushed tones used for other
all-time greats. List makers usually, and I’d say unfairly, put them
below groups like Run-DMC, Public Enemy, and NWA. Put simply, Antwan and
Andre are legends hiding in plain sight. So why hasn’t Outkast been carved into the face of hip-hop's Mount Rushmore? Part
of the problem is that, unlike so many others, they can’t be defined by
one watershed moment. Public Enemy and NWA got caught in a crucible of
racial unrest. The Wu-Tang Clan’s debut felt like a punch to the face.
Biggie and 2Pac were martyrs taken too soon. Vanilla Ice set white
rappers back ten years. Outkast’s accomplishments, however, were
less tangible. Their constant reinvention didn’t make for easy
narratives, and they avoided attention-grabbing beefs and polemics,
preferring to expand frontiers rather than vanquish enemies. Everyone
remembers who kicked down the front door. No one remembers who opened
the windows. If anything, “Hey Ya!” was their Big Moment. But the
song was an anomaly, totally disconnected from the sound and history of
the group. It cleaved their fanbase in two -- the hip-hop fans surprised
by Outkast’s move into bar mitzvah music, and the new fans uninterested
in the group’s earlier work. Yes, everyone liked Outkast, but with
different fans embracing different parts of their catalog, a common
legacy couldn’t crystallize. This gets to the deeper issue of how
artistic legacies form.. Musicians endure either by embodying a bygone
era or inspiring modern imitations. Despite their accomplishments,
Outkast evolved so frequently and hung around so long that they don’t
feel emblematic of one time or style—not in the same way that artists
like 2Pac or Run-DMC evoke very specific moments in hip-hop. In some
ways, Outkast was undone by their own longevity and eclecticism. Although
they’ve influenced dozens of artists at a thematic and historic level,
direct imitations of Outkast have been rare. Even songs that extensively
sample the group, like J. Cole’s “Land of the Snakes” or Big K.R.I.T.’s
“R4 Theme Song”, don’t really try to match Outkast’s ambitions. Not
that following the ATLiens is easy. How would you even go about
imitating the elusive, contradictory point of space that Outkast
occupied? Is it any surprise that music today doesn’t sound like the
bluegrass rap of “Rosa Parks”, the Bridal Chorus-sampling ode to baby
mama’s mamas of “Ms. Jackson”, or the genre-collage insanity of
“B.O.B.”? Songs like these blend wildly different eras, perspectives,
and genres to make something singular. They can’t be nailed down to a
tangible time or place--they sound like they were made in the year 3000,
in Stankonia. For better or worse, Outkast’s music just sounds like...
Outkast. * * * Because of these issues, Outkast’s legacy
has become a strange kind of divergent, nebulous popularity, and that
legacy has helped to drive Big Boi and Andre further apart. After
Outkast split, Andre seemed to be cutting a new path for himself
musically, dropping a string of outstanding guest verses in 2007 and
giving fans hope for a solo release. But the guest verses eventually
slowed to a trickle as Andre fished for inspiration in clothing design,
Cartoon Network shows, acting, Gillette commercials—pretty much
everything but rap. There are probably a lot of reasons for
Andre’s slowdown—a depletion of ideas, waning interest in hip-hop, old
age in rap years—but Outkast’s legacy has also been a factor. Every time
Andre releases a verse, the Internet content mill goes into overdrive,
endlessly comparing the verse to his Outkast peak and speculating when
the group’s next album may come out. For a man who’s always been leery
of the limelight, that degree of attention must surely be paralyzing. It
has also served as a constant reminder that anything he releases could
besmirch Outkast’s spotless record. As any artist will tell you, high
expectations and a fear of failure can strangle creativity.. And
so, today, the prospect of an Andre solo album seems less likely with
each passing year. His increasingly ambivalent interviews, the “SOLD
OUT” tag he wore during the reunion shows --these are not the signs of
someone raring to return to the studio. They’re the street signs at an
artistic crossroads. Hell, after eight years of waffling, things are
looking more like an artistic roundabout. It’s frustrating for fans, but
Andre has never followed the beaten path. All we can do now is wait for
him to make a turn. *** Big Boi has often been given short
shrift as the less-talented member of the group—the Art Garfunkel to
Andre’s Paul Simon. The truth is that Big Boi was just as important as
Andre. His focus, ear for hooks, and experimental-but-restrained
production style allowed Outkast to blast into space without drifting
out of orbit. Unfortunately for Big Boi, discipline doesn’t attract the
spotlight.
The end of Outkast, then, was a new beginning for
Big Boi, a chance to step out of Andre’s shadow and into the spotlight.
With his 2010 solo debut Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty,
he made the most of that chance, crafting an album full of bouncy,
layered beats, infectious hooks, and innovative ideas. The album sounds
like a smoke session in a candy-colored strip club, and that’s all
because of Big’s quicksilver flow and steady hand in the studio.
But
things had changed since Outkast’s last work. Southern rap had drifted
from funk and soul towards trap and EDM. Dwindling sales had made record
labels risk-averse. In that climate, and without Andre’s flamboyant
commercial appeal by his side, Big Boi’s experimental funk simply wasn’t
a sure bet for Jive Records. So, just a few years after ruling the
world as half of Outkast, Big Boi found himself shunted to the side by
Jive, who blocked the album’s release for two years and eventually
allowed him to quietly release it through Def Jam. The result: despite universal acclaim, a tracklist full of bangers, and a hilarious album title, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
only sold 175,000 copies in 2010. To put that in perspective, the album
placed #183 on 2010’s Billboard Top 200, selling fewer copies than
timeless classics like Kidz Bop 17 and the Crazy Heart soundtrack. His next effort, the more experimental and confessional Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, sold even fewer copies despite critical acclaim. In
today’s musical landscape, Antwan Patton has become a man without a
country -- too unconventional to fit into the Southern hip-hop scene he
helped establish, still overlooked compared to Andre, and unable to
match Outkast’s commercial success by himself. But Big Boi seems content
to soldier on, with or without Andre. Forever pimpin’, never slippin’
-- Big’s been doing it for the last 20 years. * * * After
more than two decades in music, Outkast has become a host of
contradictions. They’re incredibly influential, but their influence was
too abstract and their work was too unique to leave visible fingerprints
on contemporary music. Their versatility and longevity won them a huge
fanbase, but that versatility made it difficult for a legacy to
crystalize. It’s all come together to make Outkast is easy to like but
hard to agree upon. Because of this legacy, each has gotten what
the other worked for: Big Boi, ever the crowd pleaser, keeps working
while being unjustly ignored by casual fans. And Andre, who’s done his
best to avoid mainstream tastes and attention, now finds himself frozen
in the spotlight. As they’ve moved in opposite directions, the legacy of
Outkast has become both a gift and a curse for Andre and Big Boi --
something they can fall back on but never quite live up to. In
many ways, 2014’s reunion tour felt like the meeting point of all these
contradictions: a homecoming on stage despite enduring discord in the
studio; a reminder of their relevancy and a hint of their waning
connection to the present; a reunion, and ultimately, a swan song.
Because as much as Big and Dre claim that the spirit of Outkast never
dies, and that a new album may come someday, I can’t shake the feeling
that this was the end. Part of me sees the beauty in Outkast
staying gone. By stopping when they did, Big and Dre got the rare chance
to end their story on their own terms. They’re rightfully protective of
that closure. But I miss them all the same. I miss their
thoughtful joy, their hopeful melancholy, their compassionate anger,
their poetic pimping. Part of me wishes the story could go on. * * * Andre
and Big Boi capped their Governor’s Ball set with “The Whole World”, a
weird song any way you slice it. It’s a rap-waltz with a 6/8 time
signature, a sing-along chorus, a fiery Killer Mike verse, and a
venomous attack on the voyeurism of fandom. That contradiction -- biting
cynicism under a sheen of joy -- made “The Whole World” an especially
odd choice as a closer for a reunion concert. Up on stage, Big
Boi basked in the energy for one last moment, grinning like the Cheshire
Cat. Then, two stagehands carried a large costume trunk on stage with
business-like efficiency. They opened the trunk, and without a word or a
moment’s hesitation, Andre climbed inside, folded his arms, and froze
still, his face completely blank. The stage crew continued to work as
if this was all completely ordinary. But this gesture felt like something out of The Twilight Zoneas
if Andre 3000 was a puppet that had magically become animate for one
performance, and now his puppet-master-roadies were casually returning
him to his box. It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen. I had
slipped into a dimension where metaphors became reality, where the
personas of Andre 3000 and Big Boi were puppets perennially trapped in
suspended animation, being made to play-act as a happy, united group. It
felt like a hallucination, and with all the loose substances and vapors
wafting around the festival, it very well might have been. No one in
the crowd seemed to notice this carnival of absurdity. I haven’t seen
any press coverage about it. But it’s the one memory from the concert
that remains clear in my head.
As the crowd shuffled off into the
hot, suddenly quiet night, the stagehands closed Andre’s trunk and
carried him off stage. I stood on my toes and craned my neck to catch
one last glimpse, the music still ringing in my ears.
But Outkast was gone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Raj Gopal is a writer based in New York. He has edited and written work for the Jazz & Grooves music blog, the Pennsylvania Punch Bowl Humor Magazine, AGD Impact Magazine, and the book A Drive to Excellence. Follow him on Twitter @RGopal01.
Andre 3000 and Big Boi of Outkast at the Tabernacle on October 30, 2000 in Atlanta.
OutKast had been hitting home runs for four years when they dropped their critically-acclaimed third album Aquemini in late September of 1998. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,
released in ‘94, was a critically acclaimed, Platinum-selling debut
that established the duo as formidable rhymers with a uniquely southern
approach -- the sound of legendary production trio Organized Noize’s
velvety productions and the perspective of the two
fresh-out-of-high-school MCs forged a template for Atlanta’s hip-hop
identity. The follow-up, the even more successful ATLiens,
dropped in 1996, and pushed beyond the youthful wannabe-pimp image
forged on their debut, as ‘Kast got spacier and more cerebral, over a
backdrop as lush as it was soulful.
But there was a reason why Aquemini resonated as deeply and
widely as it did. Hip-hop’s audience had exploded between 1996 and 1998
-- years after Andre (not yet 3000), infamously declared “The South got
something to say” as the duo was booed at the 1995 Source Awards -- and
hip-hop’s “third coast” had bum-rushed the game and was reshaping the
rap landscape. And Aquemini, the album that seemed to be confirmation of everything, was OutKast’s masterpiece. By 1998, the South was beginning to leapfrog the West
Coast as hip-hop’s second most important hub. In the early 1990s, Cali
acts like Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Ice Cube and 2Pac wrested the
national spotlight away from New York City, only to have the Big Apple
claw its way back via major crossover success for artists like The
Notorious B.I.G. and Wu-Tang Clan, with The Fugees and Jay-Z later also
enjoying high-profile commercial hits. The 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur
and subsequent deterioration of Death Row Records left the West Coast’s
popular standing into freefall. Around the same time, the South was
surging. In-roads had been made for years. Pop rappers Kris Kross
had gone Platinum in 92, artsy Arrested Development won Grammys in 93
and bass stars Tag Team saw unexpected crossover success with “Whoomp!
There It Is” that same year. But these disparate acts hadn’t really
announced ATL’s hip-hop identity, and the South was still fairly
marginalized from a national perspective. Following OutKast’s
Platinum-selling debut in 1994, a wave of southern rap acts were
suddenly gaining national showcase on mainstays like BET’s Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps,
which was then in its final years. Over the next four years,
established artists like Houston legend Scarface and Eightball & MJG
of Memphis enjoyed newfound visibility, as did newer acts like South
Circle and Memphis native Tela of Tony Draper’s Houston-based Suave
House Records, and even OutKast’s fellow Dungeon Family members Goodie
Mob.
Meanwhile, southern-based labels like Suave House, J.
Prince’s Rap-A-Lot, Master P’s upstart No Limit Records, and the
fledgling Cash Money Records were making inroads into a market that was
hungry for gritty gangsta shit, and related to the southern perspective.
In 1997, No Limit broke through to the mainstream, with P’s Ghetto D album starting on its way to multi-Platinum success late that year. As far as hip-hop was concerned, the South had arrived. But
OutKast was always pushing against the grain. And as southern hip-hop
was finally breaking through, Big Boi and Dre still set themselves apart
from the emerging wave. On “Return of the G,” Andre raps:
“It’s the return of the gangsta thanks ta' Them n---as that thank you soft And say ‘y'all be gospel rappin'’ But they be steady clappin' when you talk about Bitches and switches and hoes and clothes and weed Let's talk about time travelin' rhyme javelin Somethin' mind unravelin'…” It was an opening bar that threw a middle finger up to anyone who
tried to put OutKast in a box. Similarly to how De La Soul reveled in
their oddness almost a decade prior in their video for 1989 hit “Me,
Myself and I,” OutKast was making it clear that conformity was not in
the cards. From the declarations of “Return of the G” to the
tongue-in-cheek “Pimp Trick Gangsta Clique” sketches that would pepper
their new album, it should have been obvious where these guys stood,
creatively -- in a space of their own. Aquemini is the perfect synthesis of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik’s earthy grit and ATLiens’
ethereal spirit; an ambitiously varied collection of tracks that run
the stylistic gamut. The sonic foundation was the kind of soul-infused
hip-hop the South had become known for, but melded with a P-Funk-like
affinity for Afrofuturistic imagery and and odd prog rock samples from
bands like Genesis and Camel -- even Henry Mancini’s theme from Police Woman.
The musicality is as rich as anything Dre and Big Boi had done with
Organized Noize; here working alongside the two emcees and Mr. DJ, who
themselves produced as Earthtone III. The eclectic sensibility feels
born of an alchemy that can only come from Andre Benjamin and Antwan
Patton’s uniquely complementary creative gifts; and that ability to be
unerringly quirky while maintaining the relatable SWATS-bred aura they’d
always had was never better showcased than here. There’s a ghostly essence throughout Aquemini,
a vibe that seemed to be at the heart of so much of what was coming out
of mid-1990s Atlanta. It was a uniquely ATL spirit; birthed on Joi’s
1994 debut The Pendulum Vibe, bred on 1995’s underrated standalone Society of Soul album Brainchild, embodied on 1996s ATLiens, informing Witchdoctor’s A S.W.A.T.S. Healing Ritual in 1997 and defining Goodie Mob's excellent Still Standing,
released earlier in 1998. OutKast’s third album is the pinnacle of a
stirring mix of soul, funk, hip-hop and rock that was the Organized
Noize sound and The Dungeon Family’s spirit. As opposed to repurposing sounds via funk/soul/jazz samples, as East
Coast producers had done, this was more directly reconnecting music born
in the Bronx to its broader heritage in African American sounds that
had grown below the Mason-Dixon, using more traditional, organic
musicianship. It made OutKast torchbearers for a specific kind of Peach
State spirit of innovation. After all, Otis Redding, James Brown and
Little Richard are all from Georgia; and all could be considered
founding fathers of soul, funk and rock & roll. They took
pre-existing forms and repurposed them via their own unique voices; and
OutKast was now doing the same. Hip-hop needed the spirit and the
spirituality that red clay artists gave it, and no other album
illuminates how potent that specifically southern voice could be. Sampling
in hip-hop was once again under scrutiny in the late 1990s, as
hitmakers like Trackmasters, Sean “Puffy” Combs and Jermaine Dupri were
scaling the charts with slick hits that were basically retreads of pop
and R&B smashes from the 1980s. The dense, collage-like sampling
approach of The Bomb Squad and Prince Paul had been virtually erased by
clearance issues and litigation, and the more streamlined approach of
pop rap hits was drawing criticism for its lack of creativity. Organized
Noize’s production had always featured little-to-no samples, and
OutKast thrived in that mode -- even without their mentors behind the
boards. They had no aversion to sampling, but there was always an
artistic standard to maintain. “Some people get out there and
abuse [sampling] and use no creativity whatsoever,” Big Boi told
Chicago’s John Reed in 1998. “They might take a whole song, just 3 and a
half minutes, just busting on somebody else’s beat. But what OutKast
likes to do is, we do creative sampling; we sample a horn riff or some
kind of drum kick or a snare or anything, you’ll never know where it
came from because we alter it so much to fit what we’re doing. It’s
OutKast.” The earthy southern sound of Aquemini and other classic rap
albums of the era would soon be replaced by more high-energy,
synth-heavy production as the ‘90s came to a close. Cash Money Records
would break big in late 1998, following the multi-Platinum success of
Juvenile’s hit album 400 Degreez. Via a slick, bounce-driven
sound helmed by superproducer Mannie Fresh, hits by Juvie, labelmates
like B.G., The Hot Boys, The Big Tymers, and a teenaged Lil Wayne would
put the label squarely in the mainstream rap spotlight at the dawn of a
new decade. Also throughout 1998, the seeds of crunk music were
beginning to bear fruit. Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz dropped their
debut Get Crunk Who U Wit in late 1997, and regional hits like Three Six
Mafia’s “Tear Da Club Up ‘97” and Pastor Troy’s “We Ready (No Mo’ Play
In GA)” had been southern club staples throughout the year. Crunk was
hyperkinetic and aggressive, like the angry stepchild of bass music and
Beats By the Pound. By the early 2000s, the slicker sounds of southern
producers like Juicy J, Jazze Pha and DJ Toomp would flourish on
mainstream airwaves, having usurped the earthier music associated with
southern producers like Mike Dean, T-Mix, Pimp C and Organized Noize
from a decade prior. Even OutKast’s smash follow-up to Aquemini, 2000s Stankonia, was more futuristic and digital than what they’d done in the 1990s. The success of Aquemini
was significant but muted. None of the album’s singles were as
successful on the Billboard Hot 100 as previous hits like “Player’s
Ball” or “Elevators,” but the album itself was widely hailed as a
masterpiece -- earning the then-coveted distinction of 5 mics from The
Source magazine. Released on the same day as A Tribe Called Quest’s
seemingly final album The Love Movement, it seemed to confirm
that OutKast was now the gold standard for mainstream creativity in
hip-hop, having assumed the baton from that legendary Queens crew as
Tribe dissolved over the late ‘90s. Andre 3000 was now being more
regularly hailed as one of the most peerless rhymers in the game, and if
Big Boi was becoming overshadowed by his more unconventional partner,
it didn’t mean he was overlooked, as he grew into one of the most
consistent scene-stealers in hip-hop, appearing on hits by everyone from
Missy Elliott (“All N My Grill”) to Slick Rick (“Street Talkin’”) and
YoungBloodz (“85”). The
album also brought some unwanted litigation. Civil rights icon Rosa
Parks filed suit in 1999 against OutKast and LaFace Records
(subsequently Sony/BMG), claiming use of her name on Aquemini’s
hit single without permission constituted false advertising and
infringed on her right to publicity. She also claimed it defamed her
character, and interfered with a business relationship involving a
gospel album called A Tribute to Rosa Parks. A federal judge
dismissed part of the lawsuit in 1999, but ultimately the suit would be
fully settled in 2005, six months before Parks’ death. The episode
uncomfortably connected an album steeped in Black southernness to the
complex history of that same Black southernness, and served as an
example of the divide that often kept the Civil Rights generation at
odds with the brazenness of the hip-hop generation. Twenty years
later, the third album from OutKast feels like the culmination of
everything the duo, Organized Noize and The Dungeon Family seemed to set
out to accomplish back in 1993/1994. It’s arguably the last great
hip-hop album from the South’s first great era, as both 400 Degreez
and the rise of crunk music would push things in entirely new sonic
directions in the years to come. It’s the high-water mark for OutKast,
who have no shortage of amazing albums in their discography. It’s Big
Boi and Dre, both still fully committed to the idea of OutKast -- that
is, this synergy that was signified in the album’s name, the yin/yang
magic of 3000 and Sir Lucious before they became pop superstars and
pulled in different directions. It’s not always commendable -- the
homophobia of “Mamacita” has not aged well -- but it’s remained one of
the most brilliant albums of the ‘90s, hip-hop or otherwise, because it
successfully melds so much. The spirit of 90s Atlanta, from Yin Yang
Café to Club 559 to the country hole-in-the-wall spots one could hit up
within 20 miles of downtown -- it’s all there in the sound. In 1998,
OutKast made The A sound and feel like the funkiest, most futuristic
place on earth. And you know what? It was.
Ten years removed from their last major album, 2003's chart-conquering Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, we trace Big Boi and Andre 3000's path from Southern vanguards to the most universally beloved rappers in the world.
Ten years after from their last major record, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,
we trace Big Boi and Andre 3000's path from Southern vanguards to the
most universally beloved rappers in the world with a career-spanning
essay followed by separate pieces on each of their six albums.
Weird Storms in the Wrong Season
by Jeff Weiss
November 5, 2013
Pitchfork
Before there was love below, there were boos. The two dope
boys in a Cadillac had made a left turn and wound up in the middle of a
civil war at Madison Square Garden's Paramount Theater on a soggy
August night in 1995. Brawls erupted in the audience. Tensions were
hair-trigger. When OutKast shocked the Source Awards audience by winning Best New Rap Group, it was like being fed to the firing squad.
The first shots took the form of words. Earlier that
evening, Suge Knight—6-foot-3, 330 pounds, Blood-red button-up
shirt—glowered at the audience like a hellbound offensive lineman: “If
any artists out there want to be artists and stay a star… and don’t want
to worry about the executive producer… all in the videos… all on the
records... dancing.” Knight let that last word linger, a personal grenade hurled at Puff Daddy. “Come to Death Row!”
Snoop Dogg escalated the confrontation to the entire
seaboard: “The East Coast don’t got no love for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
and Death Row?” he sneered, marine-blue bandanna tied around his neck,
brandishing a club at the hostile New York crowd—a murder trial already
awaiting him back home. “Well… let it be known!”
OutKast was collateral damage. It didn’t matter that Puffy
directed the video for their debut single, “Players Ball”, or that
they’d previously opened up for Biggie. The New York crowd only
acknowledged Bad Boys and boom-bap. Mobb Deep. Boot Camp Clik. Nas.
Wu-Tang or protect your neck. They looked at the southern players like
country cousins eating chitlins and smoking stress. What good is a '77
Seville when you’re riding the subway?
This mentality missed Atlanta's Andre Benjamin and Antwan
Patton. Their red clay funk emerged from the Dungeon—the nickname for
the basement studio owned by Rico Wade, one third of their production
squad, Organized Noize. They’d come up on Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous
Teachers, A Tribe Called Quest, and Rakim, just like everyone else in
the room. They’d break danced and bought Ron G mixtapes at the 5 Points
Flea Market. Their realness was beyond reproach.
The heckling that night transcended personal disrespect;
it implicitly attacked the drawl, slang, and soul food of the culture
that spawned them. As Andre threatened on the duo's platinum-selling
1994 debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik: “Talk bad about
the A-Town and I’ll bust you in your fucking mouth.” Barely 20 years
old, Dre had yet to adopt the “3000.” He’d recently gone sober,
vegetarian, and grown dreads, swapping his Braves jersey for a polyester
turban. Standing before a crowd in Karl Kani, Phat Farm, and Versace,
OutKast looked and felt alien. The meaning of the group’s name had come
to life in front of the howling mob. Andre silenced them with six words:
“The South got something to say.”
OutKast
understood that the most profound answers are often implied. Rappers
unable to exit their own orbit might have directly addressed the
incident at the Source Awards. OutKast located it within a deeper
pattern of dislocation. They were able to internalize the last century
of black musical visionaries including Son House, Chuck Berry, Jimi
Hendrix, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, George Clinton,
Prince. But they also completely lack precedent. They take you from
Atlanta to Atlantis and back in the same stanza.
Their identity as outsiders gave them perspective, their
empathy allowed them to connect, and their wisdom offered the ability to
see through bullshit. They could write a song about “floating face down in the mainstream”
on a certified platinum album. We routinely celebrate the
contradictions of artists as a badge of complexity, but OutKast was the
rarity able to reconcile commerce, human decency, and purity of vision.
There are no cynical radio grabs. No guest appearances from that
season’s hot rapper. Every musical decision is organic.
The
name illustrated their approach. Earlier aliases included 2 Shades Deep
and the Misfits—the latter nixed after a teenaged discovery of Glenn
Danzig. Both were literal outcasts as new students in the 10th grade at
Tri Cities High. Andre skateboarded, wore floral print shirts, and rode
BMX bikes. He grew up across the street from the projects, where they
watched fights out of the window for fun.
Big Boi soaked up a country influence during his early
years in Savannah. In high school, he maintained a 3.68 grade point
average and a secret Kate Bush obsession. Most of their classmates
bumped bass music. When they auditioned for Rico Wade, they freestyled
for eight minutes over the instrumental to Tribe’s “Scenario”.
During an era when artists were expected to choose sides,
OutKast opted out of false binaries. They’re haunted by flashbacks of
injustice while rolling in Eldorados through East Point. But they
realize that it’s more honest to confront your past than run away from
it. The slang, finger waves, and Mo-Joe’s chicken wings were in their
DNA. So were UGK, 8Ball & MJG, and the Rap-A-Lot artists who first
gave a voice to the South. Not to mention the entire Dungeon Family,
whose influence on OutKast is unrivaled.
Southernplayalisticadalicmusik was
the coming of age story of two baby-faced hustlers puffing and pimping
in Adidas and Khakis. Organized Noize’s greasy Muscle Shoals funk, 808
booty-bass drums, and grimy East Coast SP-1200 slaps wrote the template
for every dirty south rap album with aspirations of being soulful.
When OutKast called themselves “ATLiens,” it was a partial
rupture. They set themselves apart from their city and species—weird
storms in the wrong season. But they also identify with the soil and
struggle. They are black men in the South, where Confederate ghosts and
rebel flags are constant shadows. As they lament on Southernplayalistic’s
“Git Up, Get Out”, no one’s running for office but “crackers.” Yet the
song’s message is deceptively traditional: Quit smoking your life away,
pay attention to your parents, rely only on yourself.
ATLiens was
the act of levitation. Every time you look in the sky, they’re back in
the Dungeon, staring at ceiling fans searching for inspiration. When you
search for them in the Dungeon, they’re at the mall getting harassed by
hyena-like fanboys. They dip from outer space to honor everyone from
their Atlanta bass predecessors to Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster
Flash. After all, everyone liked Kraftwerk.
The last song on 1996’s ATLiens is called “13th
Floor/Growing Old”. It’s a hymnal, a sermon against avarice and sin, a
confessional, a declaration of black solidarity and southern pride—a
meditation on the transience of existence. It’s a psalm for those still
searching: church music that’s been secularized, cosmic dub, gospel
music given an extraterrestrial groove. Then the scratches hit you:
“Ninety-six gonna be that year.” This is hip-hop.
Most rap albums are rooted in some mixture of the present and the past. ATLiens hovers
over both—with one eye wired to the future. It explores catacomb
thoughts at 3 a.m.: mortality, exclusion, spirituality, consequences,
and the desire to transcend. It’s mournful and ethereal, but still
street. It expanded what rappers could talk about and how it could
sound. If OutKast were going to take the pulpit, they needed a church to
preach in.
First they were pimps. Then they were aliens or genies. Then no one knew what to call them. The Aquemini liner
notes capture Andre adorned in a platinum glamour wig, bumblebee yellow
jersey, and sunglasses that ostensibly inspired "Adventure Time". Another shot makes him look like the man in the yellow hat from Curious George leading the Grambling Marching Band.
All doubts were crushed on the album’s first raps.
Snapping on those who get the “wrong impression of expression,” Andre
shuts up whispers about whether he’s on drugs or gay. Rap had seen
afro-futurist eccentrics before, but since hard-core hit in ’94, no one
but Kool Keith had dressed so flamboyantly. (And even Keith disguised
himself as Dr. Octagon or Black Elvis.)
Andre had reached that rarefied level of “I don't give a
fuck” that Kanye West has frantically sought since his first Givenchy
kilt. His clothes weren’t a bug-out costume or artistic pose; they felt
as creatively surreal as the music. No one on earth or Alpha Centauri
could have convincingly pulled them off. Ask Fonzworth Bentley.
The penultimate song on Aquemini is
a nearly nine-minute underwater spiritual called “Liberation”. Guests
include Cee-Lo, Erykah Badu, and Dungeon Family high priest Big Rube.
Like the album itself, it is many things at once. It’s a psychic
liberation from genre, expectations, and lingering shreds of convention.
It is a manifesto of self-determination, free expression, and a requiem
for the enslaved. It is funk. It is soul. It is hip-hop. It is gospel.
It is swamp jazz, the blues, and remnants of oral tradition. Voodoo.
It’s OutKast, astrologically intertwined and fully emancipated.
Consensus generally favors Andre over Big Boi. This is a
fatal misunderstanding of their partnership. If Andre steered more than
half the journey on the first two records, Big Boi caught up by Aquemini. His
flow is as liquid and low to the ground as a busted fire hydrant.
Several hooks, including “Rosa Parks”, belong to him. If Andre is the
interstellar satellite, Big Boi is the spy on the streets. The wildest
indulgences have checks and balances. You need Big Boi to have Andre.
The poet and the player was the tagline; the truth is that you never
knew who was who.
Aquemini is
a declaration of total freedom without taking your toes out of the
soil. Nearly every member of the Dungeon Family contributes memorably,
but OutKast assumed more creative control than ever before. Andre
started making beats, playing Kalimba, and recruiting gifted session
musicians from around Atlanta. (The hoedown harmonica sizzle on “Rosa
Parks” belongs to his step-dad, the Reverend Robert Hodo.) George
Clinton appears on a song that sounds like it was written for a Terry
Gilliam adaptation of Brave New World.
It’s a capsule of a time, place, and movement, but never
feels dated. No hip-hop album before or since blended such rich
musicality with artful narrative. When Andre opens “Da Art of
Storytellin’ (Part 2)” with a storm warning, the beat and vocal effects
batter like a hurricane. “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” sounds as
sentimental and drunk as the narrator engulfed in Old E, who never made
it to the disco door. Samples are sparse. It’s not old music being
re-interpreted; it’s old ideas being reincarnated.
During the late 90s, rap typically gravitated towards either austerity or excess. Aquemini matched
neither category. “Skew it on the Bar-B” is as lean as an ostrich.
“Nathaniel” is a 70-second rap dialed-in from jail—just long enough to
acknowledge those still waiting to be set free. Half the songs snake
past five minutes. No single cracked the Top 40, yet the album went
double platinum.
Released on the same day—September 29, 1998—as albums from Jay-Z, A
Tribe Called Quest, and Black Star, OutKast earned the highest praise. The Source instantly canonized Aquemini with
the first perfect score ever given to a Southern rap act. That fact
might feel like a footnote 15 years later, but at the time, it was a
coronation. (I’ll never forget a guy on my high school basketball team
in Los Angeles buying the magazine and screaming outside the gym like a
town crier: “OUTKAST GOT FIVE MICS IN THE SOURCE!!!!”) They opened the door for the entire region. If you listen to OutKast’s last words on Aquemini, you'll hear a familiar phrase: “The South got something to say.”
Stankonia.
The studio name seems like an afro-futurist Xanadu. Between their third
and fourth albums, OutKast acquired and re-blessed Bobby Brown’s
“Bosstown” in downtown Atlanta. The former house of “Humpin' Around”
became hip-hop’s Electric Ladyland, Paisley Park, or Abbey Road—a place
where merely invoking the name inspires psychedelic shades and astral
sounds.
You’d think that starting your album with the chanted
hook, “burn muthafucka, burn American dream,” would do little to endear
you to the American record buying public. Political rap had been
commercial kryptonite since Ice Cube first met Smokey. But Stankonia transformed
OutKast from Southern vanguards into the most universally beloved
rappers in the world. They crossed over from "MTV Jams" to
triple-platinum "TRL" staples. They won two Grammys. They became the
token group worshipped by people who hated hip-hop “except for...”
OutKast mastered the art of sending mixed messages. They
tell you that hip-hop is more than just guns and alcohol—but admit that
it’s that too. Buried beneath the sweet contrition of #1 single “Ms.
Jackson” is the sad disintegration of love and a child caught in the
crossfire. Stankonia might initially channel Public Enemy, but
it quickly shifts into “So Fresh, So Clean”, a blue tuxedo-soul ode to
gator belts, patty melts, and Monte Carlos. Official remixes followed
from Fatboy Slim and Snoop Dogg. Andre even shouted out his love of drum
and bass in interviews. The evidence is “B.O.B.”, the only song
murderous enough to one-up England’s the Prodigy and appeal to fans of
Prodigy from Queensbridge.
The
back-and-forth between hip-hop and dance music had existed since Chic’s
“Good Times” became “Rapper’s Delight”, but during the early 00s, the
genre was in a particularly insular zone. A generation emerged with few
musical reference points outside of rap. When Stankonia won the Best Rap Album Grammy in 2002, it beat out Ja Rule, Eve, and Ludacris (and, to be fair, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint). The victory was a reminder of how far out the groove could extend.
The civil war had shifted from East vs. West to
underground vs. commercial. OutKast might have shared the subterranean
allergy towards pop concessions, but they rejected ideology or false
purity. You can make a great rap album using only four tracks; OutKast
were using all 88 and knew the difference. Andre described it best when
he said, "We’re in the age of keeping it real, but we’re trying to keep
it surreal."
But
even surrealism needs the occasional contrast. OutKast clocked
substantial hours in outer space, but still made time to check back in
on the block. Despite the rainbow funk jams and Purple One falsetto, the
album also introduced Killer Mike and explained why you should never
let gold diggers order strawberry lemonade and popcorn shrimp at the
Cheesecake Factory. There are skits about prenuptial agreements. “Toilet
Tisha” loosely resembles Prince re-imagining “Brenda’s Got a Baby”.
In hindsight, you can see the beginning of the creative
rifts. The pair traveled separately. Many of Andre’s beats started with
him riffing on an acoustic guitar at home. And judging by the amount of
abstraction and aqueous funk jams, you can generally figure out what is a
Big Boi idea and what is an Andre 3000 one. Stankonia is OutKast at their most experimental, meandering, and free. It is rap’s White Album. No idea is too bizarre. Each song could spark its own sub-genre—if you even knew where to begin.
Samuel
L. Jackson introduced OutKast as “the music of inclusion” at the 2004
Grammys, but Big Boi and Andre didn’t perform together. Instead, Big Boi
crooned his #1 single “The Way You Move” backed by Earth, Wind &
Fire as part of a funk tribute, and Andre closed out the show with his
own #1 single, “Hey Ya”. He wore a fringed neon green jumpsuit, green
headband, silver boots, and displayed copious nipple. There were back-up
dancers, explosions, a marching band, and massive rapture. No boos
occurred until the next day, when Native American activists publicly
demanded an apology from Andre and CBS for perpetuating stereotypes.
Jimi Hendrix’s estate let the homage slide. After all, the proper
context was evident.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below took home three
Grammy’s that night. During their winner’s speech for Album of the Year,
Andre interrupted himself to tell the crowd that Stankonia wasn’t their first album. “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,” he said, repeating it twice to let it sink in.
Nine years had elapsed since the Source Awards. Biggie and
2Pac had become rap’s martyred saints. Suge Knight was incarcerated.
Snoop Dogg had signed and left the South’s No Limit Records and his
biggest hit that year was “Drop It Like It’s Hot”, with a beat courtesy
of Virginia’s Neptunes. Bad Boy generally amounted to Puffy commanding
“da band” to fetch him cheesecake. While New York’s biggest star, 50
Cent, was propelled by Dr. Dre’s production and a sing-song flow lifted
from Southern rap.
OutKast had not only become the most successful rap group of all-time, they were the biggest band on Earth. The Love Below/Speakerboxxx sold
11 million copies and swept almost every critic’s poll. There are
people who think the Beatles are too sappy. Prince is too weird.
Radiohead is too icy. James Brown wore everything a little too tight.
But everyone agrees on OutKast. At their peak, the duo’s popularity
rivaled income tax refunds, cute puppies, and free samples.
The last official OutKast album was 2006’s Idlewild,
which doubled as a soundtrack to the much-delayed film of the same
name. There are experiments with blues, vaudeville, marching bands, and
Lil Wayne—who had eclipsed the mostly inactive group as the Southern
standard-bearer. The album essentially amounts to a bonus track tacked
onto the end of their union.
You can spot their influence across contemporary music:
Kendrick Lamar, Cee-Lo, Curren$y, B.o.B., Big K.R.I.T., Janelle Monáe,
even Tyler, the Creator. Andre defined the idea of the eccentric genius
for a generation. Yet OutKast is inimitable. There is no blueprint or
trail of crumbs. You listen to their records and wonder how they did it.
It’s like visiting the pyramids and concluding that they had to be the
handiwork of aliens.
Roughly twice a year, Andre or Big Boi gives an interview
that journalists and fans tout as evidence of a future OutKast album.
The rumors are inevitably and quickly crushed. Andre remains free to
star in shaving-cream campaigns and vent on the occasional guest verse.
Big Boi releases solo albums and tours the country, the janissary to
their memory, still spitting Southern player raps over saxophone funk.
But even though they haven’t made music in a decade, they
didn’t break up. They still represent what they stood for. There is no
acrimony or sad cash-in reunion tours. We remember them the way we
remember those who died at their peak: permanently immortal, practically
perfect. They had managed to say it all.
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik didn't
necessarily invent Southern rap or the Atlanta sound. It did define an
early strain of it, though, which is accomplishment enough for a debut
held down by a couple of teenagers who'd just met two years before.
That's with the benefit of hindsight; it's a little hard to hear
OutKast's first record with fresh ears, knowing what came afterwards.
But note that Southernplayalistic is a freshman effort where
even the skits are worth preserving, and try to remember the last time
anybody was this good at anything when they hadn't even hit their 20s
yet.
This is a record where three largely unknown quantities
had yet to be proven: OutKast themselves, the Organized Noize production
team, and Atlanta as a hip-hop scene with a recognizably unique
identity. That last goal—to diversify the influence of the Miami-derived
bass scene and create a wider picture of Southern culture beyond what
Arrested Development and Kris Kross were doing—put the musicians in a
position that, on record, feels easy to meet. Big Boi and Andre 3000 let
their drawls ride out, already having mastered the early phases of
their respective styles using immaculately-timed beat-counterpoint flows
and abrupt, electric mid-verse runs of rapidfire syllables. Meanwhile,
the production took the 808 kicks and blips of bass music and made them
the base of a dense, heavy, live-band sound that drew off the traditions
of 70s soul; it resonated as familiar to heads who recognized those
same waypoints from Dr. Dre's G-funk or RZA's Hi/Stax-chopping
minimalism but brought it closer to the source in both means and soil.
Most of all, this album is an introductory lyrical
snapshot of an Atlanta viewed with skepticism or curiosity, where you're
welcomed to the city and its black way of life by an airplane captain
who makes a point of noting that they still fly the Confederate battle
flag over the Georgia Dome. The title track is ripe with tangible
details: soul food metaphors, Big Boi's neighborhood references to East
Point and College Park's “hemp-smoke style,” and the repeated
invocations of Atlanta as a blue-skied, sun-baked home to nothing but
pimps. But those defining home-turf representations are coupled with
something more complicated.
From
the get-go, OutKast were caught in a coming-of-age narrative, where
they acted the parts of always-strapped hustlers on one hand and young
men striving to be better people on the other. It wasn't an uncommon
dichotomy in hip-hop, but the tone they used—anxious, frustrated,
confused, staring down the future—had rarely felt so unburdened by ego.
Andre's rep as the less player-leaning lyricist would grow later on, but
even here ambivalence runs through his threats; when he talks shop with
a Beretta on “Ain't No Thang”—“one is in the air and one is the
chamber, y'all ask me what the fuck I'm doin, I'm releasin' anger”—he
sounds more like someone backed into a corner than an instigator. And
Big Boi's hustler credentials are driven by someone who feels like he's
always been out of options, where a line like “born and raised as a
pimp” on “Claimin' True” echoes as much as fate as a point of pride; as
he vents against the “D-E-V-I-L” on “D.E.E.P.” there's echoes of a
militant hidden beneath the player. When OutKast have crews to
represent, they appear as similarly afflicted allies: Goodie Mob make
their first album appearance on Southernplayalistic, and their
presence feels as much like a chorus of consciences as a group of
cohorts. Cee-Lo and Big Gipp's verses on “Git Up, Get Out” are powerful
performances in themselves, but they also make that struggle to survive
feel bigger than just a handful of individuals.
When ATLiens came out in 1996, everything had changed for Andre Benjamin and Antwan Patton. Southernplayalisticadillacmusik
had turned them from aspiring-rapper kids on the verge of being let
down softly by their mentor Rico Wade to actual rappers, ones who had
done things like fly with Puff Daddy on a private plane to Howard
University to open for Biggie Smalls. The hip-hop media began to
cautiously examine and approve of them: In a lead review in the The Source,
Rob Marriott bemoaned "the all-out assfest that has become southern
hip-hop's defining image" before positioning OutKast as "the antidote"
and awarding Southernplayalistic four-and-a-half mics. It was
complicated, reductive praise, but it was praise nonetheless, and it
shifted the conversation around them. They were ambassadors now—or
mascots, depending on how glumly you looked at it.
And on ATLiens, they sounded pretty glum. The
album's theme might have been space travel, from the opening "Greetings,
Earthlings" to the sci-fi comic in the CD booklet, written by Big Rube.
But there is nothing weightless about ATLiens, the moodiest
OutKast record. The dominant emotion is white-knuckled and careful, like
they were managing an actual NASA launch and had to exert every effort
to make sure they weren't incinerated. "Softly, as if I play piano in
the dark/ I learn to channel my anger, not to embark," Dre raps on the
title track, his voice pinched. "My face is balled up 'cause I ain't in a
happy mood," he spits on "Two Dope Boyz". You can hear a contained
panic simmering in the lyrics, a determination to escape their
surroundings laced with a growing fear that all escape pods have been
deployed.
ATLiens is a classic OutKast album, but it's also
a bit of a little brother in their story, perhaps because of its
doleful countenance. There is almost no uncomplicated fun to be had, and
Dre and Big Boi were growing almost comically stern in their boasts:
Dre compares his flow to "cod liver oil" on "Wheelz of Steel", while Big
Boi calls himself "the lyrical cleansing nuisance" on "Millennium". On
"Two Dope Boyz", Big Boi is at pains to clarify that he only rhymes "to
prove a point." OutKast would go on to be anguished, soulful, sad,
enraged; ATLiens is maybe the only time they sounded this angsty.
If the lyrics tensed, the music exhaled, calmly pointing
to new directions. The album opens with chamber pop, jazz flute, and a
quote from “Summer in the City” on “You May Die”; Organized Noize
produced 10 of the album’s 15 tracks, but ATLiens also marks
the point when OutKast became producers. The farsighted Andre had taken
the small pile of cash they'd amassed from "Player's Ball" and bought
himself a state-of-the-art home studio—an MPC3000, an ASR-10
synthesizer, a Tascam mixing board, and a drum machine. Buying gear
doesn't magically make you a producer, of course, but Andre and Antwan
sat down thoughtfully at this new equipment and turned out, among other
things, "Elevators (Me & You)", their biggest hit yet and one of the
most indelible beats in hip-hop history.
With
that one quietly unearthly song, they expanded the possibilities for
themselves in a way that can only be accomplished with pure sound. Andre
assembled the track and Big Boi wrote the hook, and the result hit on a
mixture of glowing and exultant, friendly and coolly mysterious. It is a
feeling you can't imagine living without once you've experienced it,
one that preserves its power played on earbuds walking in the snow or
booming out of a car in a summer parking lot. Their other productions on
the album moved in different directions: The rippling, textured "E.T.",
which features no drums and moves more like a piece of musique concrete
than southern hip-hop; “Wheelz of Steel”, which channeled Wu-Tang
gloom, cut-up with furious scratching from Organized Noize’s Mr. DJ; the
gnarled funk of the title track. But "Elevators" is the album's heart
and nerve center. Rappers still turn to the track when they need to tap
into that inscrutable feeling, one that hasn't been duplicated or even
approximated by anyone since. It was the clearest indication on ATLiens that Antwan and Andre were bound to reach orbit. On their next record, they did.
By 1998, OutKast had two platinum selling-records and a
decent amount of critical adulation, but still struggled to get what
most artists crave most: respect. Listeners who were drawn to the street
stories of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik pushed away the science fictions of ATLiens,
and Andre 3000—once reliably thuggish in a baseball jersey and
jeans—experimented with bowties and white linen, an offense more damning
in a conservative and often homophobic rap community than any lyric he
could’ve dreamed of. “You have to be a strong nigga to take that
ridicule,” he told The Source that year.
By the time Aquemini came out, OutKast had
explored the temporary promises of materialism and the supposedly more
lasting ones of spirituality. Each new answer turned out to be as weak
and corruptible as the last. “When you rap and say anything kinda
conscious, all the conscious people approach you,” Dre told Creative Loafing in 2010. “After ATLiens
I got it all, from books on sex to [metaphysics] and religion. But you
also find some of the fakest people with dreads pouring oil on you.”
Disillusionment pushed them to extremes. The harshest moments on Aquemini
are more unforgiving than anything they’d recorded before: On “Da Art
of Storytellin’ Part 1”, Big Boi doesn’t have time to fuck a girl he
meets in the mall because he has to pick up his daughter, so he settles
for a blowjob in the parking lot, and—in a voice that stinks of both
pride and disgust—rewards the girl with “a Lil’ Will CD and a fuckin’
poster.”
By contrast, its softer moments offer real-world redemption more cathartic and understanding than the distant promises of ATLiens.
A verse after Big Boi jizzes in the mall parking lot, we see Dre
standing next to a girl on the corner, staring at the stars and talking
about what they want to be when they grow up. The girl thinks for a
minute, and in the album’s single most startling line, turns to Dre and
says “alive.” We later learn it didn’t quite work out that way, but the
point has been made: After imagining the paradise of other planets,
OutKast had returned to a hard world in which keeping a pulse might be
the best you could hope for.
Even Aquemini’s
most spirited songs—“Rosa Parks” and “Skew It on the Bar-B”—sound like
the combative work of underdogs hungry to be given their fair shake.
“Rosa Parks” especially, with its hollering, harmonica-driven bridge, is
both the album’s most radio-ready song and its most defiantly
regional—not just southern, but country, a mode completely underrepresented in mainstream rap at the time. (Accents don’t get hidden, either: “Tell” becomes tale, “wanna” becomes woanna, and “damn” makes its distinctive metamorphosis into dayum.)
When Raekwon shows up on “Skew It”, it’s practically a diplomatic
mission: Without him, as he remembers it, the record would’ve never made
it to New York.
This goes the album's music, too, which tends toward
gospel and southern soul over pure funk or jazz, which favors live-band
sounds without making the purist’s mistake of shunning synthetic ones,
which is rural in its DNA but refined in execution. Funkadelic is
usually cited as a major influence, but the comparison is more useful
on Stankonia than Aquemini. Even Funkadelic’s laid-back tracks feel like they’re teetering at the edge of a nightmare. Aquemini—anchored
by Preston Crump’s mellow, sustained basslines and the swing-friendly
drum tracks of Mr. DJ and Organized Noize—sounds sober and observant,
its slow pace less a product of disorganization than of supreme
confidence.
Aquemini isn’t fun. Colorful, yes; searching,
yes; angry, yes; enchanted by the same phony healers and
child-support-dodging deadbeats that it saves its most bitter criticism
for, yes—but not fun. It tells me something I want to hear about people:
That they make their first mistakes by accident and their second
because of a flaw in their design; that their tendency to say one thing
and mean another is what makes their life a life instead of an
algorithm; and that accepting them ultimately isn’t an act of
resignation but compassion.
When Dre and Big Boi made it, they were only 23: Young
enough to hope, but old enough to know that hope can sour into cynicism
just as easily as it can become love. Or, as Dre puts it on Aquemini’s
title track: “Faith is what you make it/ That’s the hardest shit since
MC Ren”—testimony from someone at the juncture of looking for answers
and realizing that there might not be any.
OutKast was always a project about balance. That player and the poet dichotomy
was not an exact one when draped directly on the two humans in the
group, but it served as a nice shorthand for their collective
yin-and-yang dynamic. They wore as many oxymorons as Dre does ascots
today: conscious gangstas, retro futurists, pop experimentalists. Stankonia pulls
at all of these threads harder than anything they had done previously.
It's not the best of their four proper albums by any stretch of the
imagination—it might actually be the worst and it's certainly the least
consistent—but it's the one that does the most.
Look at the singles alone: "B.O.B.", a violent display of
spazzed-out rapping-ass rapping, which cracks the 150 BPM mark (probably
qualifying it as the fastest rap hit of all time) and eventually turns
into a gospel hymn; "Ms. Jackson", which perfectly condenses the most
complicated of human relationships into a four-and-a-half-minute pop
song. Then there's "So Fresh So Clean", a reset button back to the
Curtis Mayfield pimp funk of their debut. Future/present/past. They
bobbed and weaved quickly around this timeline, moving from P-Funk
psychedelic guitar solos to trunk punishing 808 kicks and back again.
The ideas were ricocheting off one another so quickly that it's hard to
even notice when they fail. (We now know that this semi-controlled chaos
was partially the side-effect of a break-up already happening in slow
motion, but goddamn it was a glorious first step towards implosion.)
In
the press surrounding the album's release, Big and (especially) Dre
frequently made a point to mention that they had been explicitly
avoiding listening to rap music while making the record, but they were
clearly reacting to it. Specifically, to the many micro scenes
throughout the South that were finally bubbling over into the mainstream
after years of local marination. In the mid-90s the nationally visible
Southern rappers—OutKast, Geto Boys, UGK, Eightball & MJG—were all
products of different cultures, different cities, and different
aesthetics, but they had also grown to share certain commonalities.
These were acts who tangibly prioritized things like musicality,
spirituality, and introspectiveness.
By the turn of the century, the national image of the
Southern rapper and the expectations of Southern rappers had begun to
morph significantly (check those tongue-in-cheek Pimp Trick Gangsta Clique skits on Aquemini).
Labels like New Orleans' No Limit and Cash Money, and Memphis'
Hypnotize Minds had regional roots as deep as OutKast's but now they
were crossing over nationally with records that were sonically and
socially more abrasive than what the Dungeon Family was selling. The
beats got thinner, the ideas more blunt.
Stankonia saw OutKast actively pushing back
against that tide while simultaneously dipping their toes in the pool.
Advance versions of the record, leaked in the golden age of Napster,
featured a slightly different mix of "Gangsta Shit", in which a
backward-masked voice saying "We have your troops…" was quite
audible. At the time, many interpreted this as their formal shot at the
reign of the military-minded New Orleans camps—and, presumably, this is
why it was buried to the point of inaudibility in the official mix. It
wasn't a diss though. Like everything OutKast does, it was complicated: a
playful challenge to their successors with that old harder than hard
approach.
They warp the emerging image and sounds of the modern
down-south d-boy elsewhere on the record: "Call Before I Come" is like
Trick Daddy's "Nann" reimagined via Shuggie Otis, complete with an
assist from Three 6 Mafia's Gangsta Boo, "Snappin' & Trappin'"
echoes the aggression of Memphis, and the Chopped & Screwed coda of
"Stank Love" was likely the first time many national listeners would
have encountered the Texan style. Even the quasi drum'n'bass madness of
"B.O.B." has its roots in the the earliest of "ignorant" Southern rap
crossovers—Big Boi has claimed that the aims of the record were to
modernize the pace and energy of Miami bass. (Andre's suggested that it
was inspired mostly by contemporary rave hopping and the club drugs
contained within.)
This is all part of the reason OutKast were able to
sustain their credibility even as they got weirder and went pop at the
same damn time—they never consciously presented their work as "the
other." It was always "we do what you do, but we do it differently."
Even in their strangest moments, they never positioned themselves above
the trap, just perpendicular to it.
Every OutKast album title had been a portmanteau, a
clashing of words symbolizing a clash of worlds and the volatile union
between Andre 3000 and Big Boi. So the backslash in Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was
a little pause that spoke volumes, a silent acknowledgment that this
was not an OutKast album even though you were being convinced otherwise. The
two were barely on speaking terms artistically, but their quasi-solo
albums were bound together, both metaphysically and physically. Any
discussion of one would include a tacit appraisal of the other, the
unspoken competition inherent in any rap duo given an actual playing
field. But on a more crass level, you couldn’t choose between Speakerboxxx and The Love Below in a record store. You were buying an OutKast double album or you were buying nothing.
And a lot of people bought Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,
both metaphysically and physically: It sat atop the 2003 Pazz & Jop
critic’s poll and has sold over 11 million copies. Hard as it is to
believe, OutKast had not achieved their commercial nor critical pinnacle
with the universally beloved Stankonia. But while “B.O.B.” was a comprehensive survey of genre, “Hey Ya!” hit every demographic imaginable
and was richly rewarded—it wasn’t pop, rock, R&B, black, white,
young or old, it was one of the last truly universal songs of the iPod
era and the reason Gnarls Barkley exist.
Still, it shouldn’t have taken us ten years of hindsight
and a cruel dearth of Andre 3000 output to recognize the sheer absurdity
of the excitement surrounding an album whose main draw was Andre 3000 not rapping. For all of its supposed adventurousness, The Love Below is not only baldly derivative, but derivative of one source. It’s Andre’s souvenir from Prince Fantasy Camp.
Carnality is seen as a manifestation of spirituality on The Love Below, a rebuke of Andre’s previous assessment from ATLien’s “Babylon”: “They call it horny because it’s devilish.” The Love Below is
more or less a concept album about God granting Andre the perfect
woman, a reward for being an altogether stand-up dude, except for that
one time in Japan (“and head don’t count… aw, I knew you’d understand”).
His pitch shifted vocals don’t even bother to distinguish themselves
from those of Prince alter ego Camille, and he slops them all over
synthesized funk, clumsy jazz, airy “The Cross”-style flanged guitars,
and endless canned vamps. And, most crucially, like many
latter-day Prince albums, it’s about 95% singing and 5% rapping… and
Dre’s singing is about as good as Prince’s rapping. For that reason
alone, “Where Are My Panties?” is the second-best song here because it’s
actually a skit. And besides “Hey Ya!”, the skits are about the only
thing that still holds up on a record that’s lovable but barely
listenable most of the time.
All of which makes it a shame that Speakerboxxx was
never able to stand on its own. Big Boi’s two subsequent solo albums
are of vastly different artistic merit, but suffered the same fate: the
endless meddling of label reps and song doctors couldn’t prevent 2010's Sir Lucious Leftfoot and 2012's Vicious Lies & Dangerous Rumors from
suffering immediate chart deaths right on the table. Would all of that
been necessary had Big Boi capitalized on OutKast’s commercial momentum
and a still-healthy record industry in 2003? Or would Speakerboxxx have fared only slightly better than, say, Killer Mike’s Monster or Bubba Sparxxx’s Deliverance?
Speakberboxxx is not perfect, but as a mass appeal
hip-hop record, it’s pretty much flawless. Though overshadowed by “Hey
Ya!”, is there any doubt “The Way You Move” would’ve been a hit had it
been credited to Big Boi rather than OutKast? How could anyone listen to
the Afro-electro funk/quiet storm fusion of “Ghetto Musick” compared to
Andre’s Lovesexy envy and say Big Boi was the unadventurous one?
How could you forget the last great Goodie Mob song ever? How could a
song featuring Big Boi, Killer Mike, and Jay-Z get released in 2003 and still be overlooked?
Somehow, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below still benefits
from its unique structure—it’s the rare double album that simply cannot
be stripped for parts into a cohesive single disc. And while it
represents an ionized version of OutKast, the essence remains. You get
one of the strongest hip-hop records of the decade and one of the
most talented rappers ever going on the sort of non-rap tangent that
results in career suicide about 99% of the time. Separated, they may
have been hits, but hold the double-CD in your hand and remember: Holy shit, this batshit thing sold 11 million copies and rock critics loved it more than the White Stripes. Granted, the success of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below may
owe itself to people who may never buy another hip-hop record. But it
was a success all the same, proof there’s no wrong way to do the right
thing.
Perhaps it’s a sign that I need to broaden my social
circle, but here’s a list of movies I’ve been able to discuss in depth
with my colleagues over the past seven years: Cash Money's Baller Blockin’, Master P's I’m Bout It, Redman and Method Man's How High, Roc-A-Fella's Paper Soldiers and State Property, Three 6 Mafia's Choices: The Movie, and the absolute motherlode, Cam'ron's Killa Season. Yet I might not have a single friend who has seen, or will ever see, Idlewild.
This seems impossible. Unlike the aforementioned, Idlewild is a real Hollywood
production and has numerous advantages over your typical vanity movie:
It features actors with legitimate acting experience, including Andre
3000 and Big Boi. Beyond that, because OutKast is one of the most
popular and beloved musical acts of all time, their movie had a real
budget and was released to actual theaters; you didn’t necessarily need
to be an OutKast fan to see Idlewild, just someone looking for a
way to kill a Friday night. Moreover, it has a plot that’s something
other than rappers playing barely fictionalized versions of themselves: Idlewild is exactly like Purple Rain, except OutKast invent rap in a Depression-era speakeasy, and one of them is named Rooster. (I can’t remember which one, though.)
But even if Idlewild the album revealed little about Idlewild the movie, it proved to be a total spoiler, because the actual plot of the film was secondary to the meta-context of making the
film: After years of trying to will their dream project into existence,
OutKast finally got the greenlight… after they had all but stopped
working together. Would Idlewild result in Andre 3000 and Big Boi being OutKast again? Anyone expecting a Hollywood ending could look at the dead center of Idlewild’s tracklist: “Hollywood Divorce”.
The connotation of bitter acrimony from that track is actually somewhat misleading: Idlewild moves with the finality and begrudging purpose of someone cleaning out their old apartment just enough to
receive that security deposit. In spite of the strangely thrilling
prospect of revisiting the one OutKast album unsullied by over analysis
and radio airplay, Idlewild is a punishing listen—or at least
karmic payback for the duo’s godlike run of the previous decade.
Twenty-five tracks clock in at 77 minutes and yet both of those numbers
seem like laughable lowball estimates. For those skeptical of the film,
the soundtrack was their worst fears confirmed: a record full of ideas
that were clearly sat upon for years and then rushed out with Andre 3000
and Big Boi working with separate agendas but without any of the
gleeful experimentation that marked their solo albums.
If someone gushes to you that Idlewild is
OutKast’s “weirdest” album, they are likely obsessed and impressed with
their own contrarian thinking. Though the experience of listening to Idlewild is
certainly weird—it’s still tough to ascertain how OutKast could release
a movie and an album in 2006 that completely vanished without making a
mark on pop culture in any way whatsoever. You may have forgotten the
hungrier guest artists whose performances respected the fact that this
is still an OutKast album. Namely, an untamed Killer Mike, an
unheralded Janelle Monáe, and Lil Wayne in his Best Rapper Alive mania.
But it’s more bizarre to hear OutKast so uninterested in itself, so
utterly lacking in invention, so joyless.
There’s as much stylistic breadth on Idlewild as
on previous records, but here it’s of the iPod variety: no integration,
no Organized Noize, just costumery. At the very least, Andre’s solo
excursions are sourced from a wider range than they were on The Love Below, but they're just as derivative: Cab Calloway on “Mighty ‘O’”, “Higher Ground” on “Idlewild Blues”. Idlewild literally
ends on “A Bad Note”, eight minutes of migraine inducing “Maggot Brain”
mimicry that may have been intended as a joke but felt like a final
insult; this is the thanks we get.
For OutKast traditionalists who felt like the praise accorded to The Love Below was a backhanded slight to Big Boi, Idlewild provided some schadenfreude—justice was served, but not in any way that proved meaningful. Big Boi was likely starting to craft Sir Lucious Leftfoot
already and while his technical skills are still sharp, he at least had
the foresight not to squander his best material here. Instead, on songs
like “N2U” and “Peaches”, the libido feels lecherous. Women are either
treated as burdens or trophies on these songs and, perhaps to align with
the 1930s blues aesthetic of the film, all of them are up to no good.
Andre 3000 likewise lets real life trample upon this supposed fantasy
construct and brings none of his flower-child levity—he attacks welfare
recipients, music critics, Hollywood execs, and basically everyone who
questions why he’d do anything other than the one thing he’s better at
than anyone else drawing breath on planet Earth: rapping.
As the final excruciating seconds tick off from “A Bad Note”, there’s a comfort in how little OutKast left to the imagination; Idlewild is
not generating its legend from never being followed up. In fact, the
existence of a track like 2008’s completely inexplicable “Royal
Flush”—which had Dre and Big Boi rapping astoundingly well on the same
beat—only serves to show just how easily OutKast could reunite and how
good they could be. It also shows how easy it is for them to say no.
It’s hard to imagine now, but back when Outkast
won Best New Rap Group at the Source Awards in 1995, the pair were
openly heckled on stage. Living up to their namesake, Big Boi and André
3000 were ostracized by East and West Coast gatekeepers who felt that
the Dirty South couldn’t add anything new to their ongoing battle.
Little did they know that Outkast would go on to record the best-selling
rap album of all time and redefine the limits of what hip-hop can
achieve.
It’s been 25 years since Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
changed the game completely, relocating hip-hop’s centre of power away
from the coasts towards Atlanta and its neighboring cities. Given how
the Dirty South would go on to propel rap’s chart success for years to
come, it’s easy to see why Outkast’s legacy remains so crucial to
hip-hop as a whole.
However, their unprecedented success with later projects like Speakerboxxx and The Love Below
also hampered the group’s impact somewhat as well. Once “Hey Ya!” shook
the airwaves like a polaroid picture, Outkast couldn’t shake the song’s
impact, and that ended up being the track they’d become known for most,
even though it only included half of the group and deviated plenty from
their signature sound.
If it’s hard to deny the exuberant joy of “Hey Ya,” then it’s even
harder to deny that Outkast deserve recognition for so much more than
just that song too – and that’s where we come in. Join us here at
Highsnobiety as we head on down to the cosmic world of Stankonia and
celebrate what makes everyone’s favorite ATLiens tick.
Outkast after their performance at the Marcus Amphitheatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1995
Getty Images / Raymond Boyd
Welcome To Atlanta
By 1994, hip-hop was thriving in the midst of a true golden age that
was characterized almost entirely by the rigid dichotomy of East vs.
West. In a year where legends like Nas and The Notorious B.I.G. also
made their debut within this framework, the odds were initially stacked
against Southern rappers like Three Stacks and Big Boi, but this
outsider status ultimately became their strength, providing Outkast with
a genuinely unique outlook which helped set their music apart.
Soaring in from outer space with “Players Ball,” Outkast proved they
had plenty of fresh things to say from the moment they first landed on
earth, even if their signature sound hadn’t fully cohered by this point.
That turned out to work in their favor though, as it’s hard to imagine
what people would have made of Outkast if they’d arrived with the funky
and often bizarre flavor of later years. Instead, their debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik hit hard because it brought something new to the table without rewriting the rules entirely.
The futuristic, game-changing beats that Organized Noize developed
for the album were initially grounded by lyrics that rooted Outkast
firmly in the streets of Atlanta. Infusing Southern sensibilities with
elements of East and West Coast rap, the group simultaneously sounded
both fresh and nostalgic. Finding success in these kind of
contradictions would later come to define Outkast’s sound completely,
but at the beginning, André and Big Boi shared a similar “playa”
aesthetic that helped them establish a footing in the industry, despite
their initial underdog status.
Getty Images / Hector Mata
Liberation
Although early tracks like “Crumblin’ Erb” and “Get Up, Get Out”
hinted at the woozy, soulful promise of their later albums, it wasn’t
until Outkast released a follow up two years later that the Two Dope
Boyz would successfully amalgamate their own individual sounds with a
natural and fully realized interplay between the two as well.
While Big Boi successfully honed his ‘street’ lyricism and a nimble flow on ATLiens,
André released his otherworldly persona, tackling metaphysical notions
of life and spirituality while dressed in forward-thinking fashion. On
paper, this sounds like a strange fit, but by combining two different
and yet equally valid aspects of black identity, Outkast were able to
anchor themselves in something relatable while simultaneously pushing
boundaries via their eccentric lyrical content.
This complex and yet wholly organic approach helped expand the limits
of hip-hop in ways no one has quite been able to emulate since and
nowhere is this more clear than on Aquemini,
Outkast’s third and arguably greatest album. By this point, it was
already becoming clear that André and Big Boi were heading in different
directions artistically, but these separate paths still merged
beautifully here, suggesting that any attempt to define Outkast purely
through oppositional terms is fruitless.
With a title that literally combined their star signs together, Aquemini
proved that the divide between gangsta and ‘alternative’ rap is a false
one, foreshadowing Generation Z’s own disregard for genre on the charts
today. Outkast themselves were keenly aware of this, playing around
with their image in videos like “Rosa Parks” where the pair make a point
of agreeing to combine both of their aesthetics at once. Why limit
yourself to one thing when you can do both?
Getty Images / Scott Gries
Stanklove
It’s no wonder then that Aquemini became the first Southern
hip-hop album to earn a five-mic rating from The Source and by the time
that Stankonia hit stores in 2000, it was clear to everyone that Outkast
were already one of the greatest hip-hop groups of all time. Rather
than just look to the past and celebrate the present like so many of
their peers were prone to do, André and Big Boi continued to cast a
collective eye towards the future as well, spreading some stanklove
across genres far and wide.
The heady mix of dance and rap that characterized “B.O.B.” would
still be a game-changer if it was released today and even more
commercial offerings like “Ms Jackson” and “So Fresh So Clean” never
compromised the essence of Outkast. Through a potent concoction of
gospel, jazz and psychedelic soul, Stankonia demonstrated how
marketable hip-hop could be without selling out, keeping one foot in the
streets and the other out in space. Through these means, Outkast
continued to straddle a fine line between chart-friendly hooks and
creative artistry, even though it became clear in hindsight that the
group’s yin-yang dynamic would soon come to an end.
André once summed up Outkast’s appeal when he said that: “We’re in
the age of keeping it real, but we’re trying to keep it surreal,” and
this division eventually came to fruition with the release of the
group’s double album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. While Big
Boi leaned harder than ever into the real on his half with sardonic wit
and gangsta rhymes, André floated away completely, exploring the surreal
via celestial dimensions of love and cosmology.
Hip-hop has been the dominant force in music for a few years now, but
back in 2003, the amount of units that Outkast shifted with their fifth
studio album was unprecedented, and even today, it remains the best
selling hip-hop release of all time. Singles such as “I Like The Way You
Move” topped the charts and raised Outkast’s profile even further, but
“Hey Ya!” was the album’s breakout single, positioning André and Big Boi
firmly in the mainstream like never before.
Outkast performing at the 2014 Voodoo Music + Arts Experience at New Orleans City Park
Getty Images / Tim Mosenfelder
The Whole World
Although they were no longer outcasts in a traditional sense (and
hadn’t been for some time by that point), the legacy Outkast left behind
following the release of “Hey Ya” is still somewhat clouded – and it’s
not just because of the muted response Idlewild received either.
Much of their early work has since been drowned out by the “alright
alright alright” refrain of “Hey Ya!” which dominates any discussion of
Outkast these days, much like it does weddings across the country too.
Few discourses on classic hip-hop involve the likes of ATLiens or Aquemini
until the contributions that Tupac, The Notorious B.I.G., and that
other Dre made are mentioned first, even though these albums are just as
influential.
Outkast themselves even had to speak up for the group’s wider body of work back when Speakerboxxx/The Love Below took home a Grammy for Album of the Year. During his speech, André had to remind the audience that Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was their first album, not Stankonia, suggesting that the majority of Outkast’s legacy was given short shrift even back then.
That’s not to say their early contributions have been ignored
completely. Even though André rarely records music anymore and Big Boi’s
solo work is unfairly overlooked, Outkast’s essence still beats at the
heart of hip-hop, whichever way you look at it, and the excitement their
2014 reunion incited proves they’re far from forgotten.
A wide range of artists including Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and even
Lil Wayne can all trace their inspirations back to Outkast, whether
it’s through their emotional vulnerability, their cosmic strangeness or
the thematic scope of their biggest albums. The Dirty South’s
stranglehold on the charts remains strong too thanks to artists like
T.I., Young Thug and Migos, something which was practically unheard of
before Outkast shifted the industry’s focus to Atlanta.
Despite their widespread influence, few acts directly strive to
emulate Outkast in their music and why would they? What Big Boi and
André 3000 shared was entirely unique to them and given the impact they
made, their presence can still be felt throughout the industry today.
After all, the ATLiens may no longer be together in a traditional sense,
but “Outkast is everlastin’” and that’s more than we can say for most
of the people who first heckled them at the Source Awards back in 1995.
The duo is one of the most successful hip-hop groups of all time, having received six Grammy Awards. Between six studio albums and a greatest hits
release, Outkast has sold over 25 million records. Meanwhile, they have
garnered widespread critical acclaim, with publications such as Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media listing albums such as Aquemini and Stankonia among the best of their era.
History
1992–95: Formation and debut
André 3000 and Big Boi met as teenagers at Atlanta's Lenox Square shopping center (pictured).
Benjamin and Patton met in 1992 at the Lenox Square shopping mall when they were both sixteen years old.[5] The two lived in the East Point section of Atlanta and attended Tri-Cities High School.[5][6] During school, Benjamin and Patton participated in rap battles in the cafeteria.[5]
Benjamin's parents were divorced and he was living with his father.
Meanwhile, Patton had to move with his four brothers and six sisters
from Savannah to Atlanta. Benjamin and Patton eventually teamed up and
were pursued by Organized Noize, a group of local producers who would later make hits for TLC.[1]
The duo initially wanted to be called "2 Shades Deep" or "The Misfits",
but because those names were already taken they later decided to use
"OutKast" based on finding "outcast" as synonym for "misfit" in a dictionary.[7] OutKast, Organized Noize, and schoolmates Goodie Mob formed the nucleus of the Dungeon Family organization. OutKast signed to L.A. And Babyface imprint prior to graduation[8] which would later become LaFace Records in 1992, becoming the label's first hip hop act and making their first appearance on the remix of labelmate TLC's "What About Your Friends". During the holiday season of 1993, they released their first single, "Player's Ball". The song's funky style, much of it accomplished with live instrumentation, was a hit with audiences. "Player's Ball" hit number-one on the BillboardHot Rap Tracks chart.[1] 'Player's Ball' also topped the R&B charts for six weeks.[9]
Their debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,
was issued on April 26, 1994. This initial effort is credited with
laying the foundation for southern hip hop and is considered a classic
by many. Every track on Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was produced by Organized Noize
and featured other members of the Dungeon Family. Follow-up singles
included the title track and "Git Up Git Out", a politically charged
collaboration with Goodie Mob that was later sampled by Macy Gray
for her 1999 hit "Do Something." On this early material, both André and
Big Boi contrast lyrical content reflecting the lifestyles of pimps and gangsters with politically conscious material commenting on the status of African Americans in the South. OutKast won Best New Rap Group at the Source Awards in 1995.[1]
Within the mess that was the East Coast - West Coast feud, André came
up on stage followed by boos from the crowd and said, "But it's like
this though, I'm tired of them closed minded folks, it's like we gotta
demo tape but don't nobody want to hear it. But it's like this: the
South got something to say, that's all I got to say." As eloquently
stated by rapper T.I., "Outkast, period. Outkast. That's when it
changed. That was the first time when people began to take Southern rap
seriously."[10] In the same year, the group contributed "Benz or a Beamer" to the popular New Jersey Drive soundtrack.
1995–99: Breakthrough with ATLiens and Aquemini
After Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
was certified platinum, LaFace Records gave OutKast more creative
control and advanced money for their follow-up album, which they
recorded from 1995 to 1996.[11]
The duo took the opportunity to recreate their image. On a trip to Jamaica with producer Mr. DJ, the two decided to abandon their cornrow hairstyles in favor of a more natural aesthetic, vowing to stop combing their hair.[12]Dungeon Family member Big Rube
observed an increase in the duo's confidence after returning from their
first tour, remarking, "They started understanding the power they had
in their music. They started showing a swagger that certain artists
have—the ones that are stars."[13]
The two also became more accustomed to playing live, particularly Big
Boi, and André 3000 significantly changed his lifestyle, as he adopted a
more eccentric fashion sense, became a vegetarian, and stopped smoking
marijuana.[14]
The members also underwent changes in their personal lives; in 1995,
Big Boi's girlfriend gave birth to their first child and André 3000 and Total's Keisha Spivey ended their two-year relationship.[15]
The double platinum album, ATLiens, was released on August 27, 1996. The album exhibited a notably more laid-back, spacey production sound, taking influence from dub and reggae.[16][17] On ATLiens,
André 3000 and Big Boi abandoned the "hard-partying playa characters"
of their debut album in favor of more spacey, futuristic personas, and
produced many of the songs on their own for the first time.[15][18] Their tracks have an outer-space feeling to them- a feeling that, ironically, has warmed the community right up to them.[19]
Critics praised the group's maturing musical style on the record,
which debuted at number two on the U.S. The album would climb to number
three on Billboard's top R&B/Hip Hop chart.[20]Billboard 200 chart and sold nearly 350,000 copies in its first two weeks of release.[21][22] The single "Elevators (Me & You)" reached number 12 and spent 20 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.[23]ATLiens
further solidified OutKast as the flagship representatives of the 1st
generation Dungeon Family and the Southern hip hop movement. The album
helped the group earn more recognition among East Coast hip hop fans in the East and West coasts.[1]
For this album, OutKast joined with partner David "Mr. DJ" Sheats to form the Earthtone III production company, which allowed the group to produce some of their own tracks. "ATLiens" was the group's second Top 40 single (following "Player's Ball" from their first album), and reflected the beginning of André's increasingly sober lifestyle:[24] "No drugs or alcohol/so I can get the signal clear," he rhymes about himself in the single "ATLiens". OutKast's third album Aquemini
was released on September 29, 1998. It was also certified double
platinum and reached the number-two position on the Billboard 200 album
chart in the United States; its title was a combination of the zodiac signs of Big Boi (an Aquarius) and André (a Gemini).[17]
Producing more material themselves, both Big Boi and André explored
more eclectic subject matter, delving into sounds inspired by soul, trip hop, and electro music. The album featured production by Organized Noize and collaborations with Raekwon, Slick Rick, funk pioneer and musical forebear George Clinton,
and Goodie Mob. Outkast forged the connections between Hip Hop and the
black freedom struggle with their controversial song "Rosa Parks"
featured on the album.[25]
2000–01: Stankonia and Greatest Hits
Originally titled 'Sandbox', the pair's fourth album, Stankonia
was released in October 2000 to positive reviews. The album was seen
as a change in the group's musical style, as it had a more commercial
and mainstream appeal, compared to their previous three albums which
were darker and deeper. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 in
the U.S., and would eventually be certified quadruple-platinum. Stankonia's first single was "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)", a high-tempo-influenced record. The second single, "Ms. Jackson", combined a pop hook with lyrics about divorce and relationship breakups, particularly André's breakup with singer Erykah Badu; the titular "Ms. Jackson" character being a doppelgänger
for Badu's mother. It was at this time that André changed his stage
name to the current "André 3000," mostly to avoid being mixed up with Dr. Dre.
The single became their first pop hit, landing the number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and the number-two position on the UK Singles Chart.
The album's final single was the Organized Noize-produced "So Fresh, So
Clean", featuring a credited guest appearance from regular guest
vocalist and Organized Noize-member Sleepy Brown and garnered a remix featuring Snoop Dogg. All three singles' videos had heavy MTV2 airplay, and OutKast won two 2001 Grammy Awards, one for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for "Ms. Jackson", and another for Stankonia as Best Rap Album.[26] Pitchfork named Stankonia the 4th greatest album released between 2000 and 2004 in its 2005 feature.[27]
Later on the webzine selected Stankonia as the 13th best album of the
2000s. And B.O.B. was chosen number one song of the decade by this same
webzine.[28] In December 2001, OutKast released a greatest hits album, Big Boi and Dre Present...OutKast, which also contained three new tracks. One of these new tracks was the single "The Whole World", which won a 2002 Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Killer Mike
also was featured on the song, gaining some exposure among areas
outside of his native Atlanta. The other two new songs were called
"Funkin' Around" and "Movin' Cool (The After Party)".
2002–04: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
OutKast spent 2 years working on their 5th effort, before releasing a double album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,
on September 23, 2003. It is essentially two solo albums, one by each
member, packaged as a single release under the OutKast banner; the two
members also appear and co produce on each other's discs for a few songs
apiece. Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is largely a funk and Dirty South blended party record; André 3000's The Love Below features only brief instances of hip hop, presenting instead elements found in funk, jazz, rock, electronic music, and R&B.[1]
The album is also OutKast's biggest commercial success yet,
having debuted on the Billboard 200 albums chart at number-one and
stayed there for several weeks. The album eventually sold over five
million copies, and, as double-album sales count double for Recording Industry Association of America certification, the album was certified diamond for 10 million units shipped in December 2004. Its latest certification, in May 2006, reaches 11 million copies in shipping.[1]
The first two singles from the album(s), which were released nearly simultaneously, were Big Boi's "The Way You Move" and Andre 3000's "Hey Ya!" The video's storyline has "The Love Below"—a fictional band with all members, through the use of special effects, played by André—performing in London. "Hey Ya!" was the number one song on the very final weekend of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. It was also number one a week later on the very first weekend of American Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest. The singles spent ten weeks at number one on the Hot 100
singles chart, with "Hey Ya!" spending nine weeks and "The Way You
Move" taking over for one week in February 2004. These singles were seen
as a breakthrough for the hip-hop industry, being among the first
hip-hop songs to be widely played on adult contemporary radio stations.[1]
OutKast's next official single was not released until the summer of 2004. "Roses", a track featuring both members from The Love Below
half of the album, did not meet the level of success as either of its
predecessors, but it became a modest-sized hit on urban radio and the
American music video networks. The video for "Roses" is loosely based on
the musicals West Side Story and Grease.
It featured sparring 1950s' style gangs, one representing Speakerboxxx,
and one representing The Love Below, parodying the widespread arguing
among critics and fans as to which half of the album was better. It
deviates from these musicals in its final act, however, by featuring
Andre 3000 defecating in a bouquet of roses before entering a Ramping Shop
and presenting them to the receptionist. This closing scene was
nominated as a finalist for the BET "Realest Music Video of All Time"
award. The final singles were André 3000's "Prototype", which was paired with a science fiction-themed video about alien visitors, and Speakerboxxx's "Ghettomusick", which featured both members of OutKast and a sample from a song by Patti LaBelle, who also makes an appearance in the video.[1]
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won the Grammy Award for the
2004. OutKast was one of the headlining acts at the show, and gave two
performances: Big Boi performed "The Way You Move" with the Outkast
backing band during a medley with Earth Wind & Fire, George Clinton and Robert Randolph, while André 3000 performed "Hey Ya!" as the show closer after they had been presented with the Album Of The Year Award.
Big Boi performing in 2006 in Atlanta
2005–06: Idlewild Members also began working on a joint film, Idlewild, directed by OutKast music video director Bryan Barber. Idlewild, a Prohibition-era musical film set to a blues-influenced hip-hop soundtrack, was released on August 25, 2006 by Universal Pictures. The Idlewild soundtrack was released August 22, 2006. In an interview for Billboard, Big Boi stated "This is an OutKast album. It isn't like a soundtrack where we go get this person or that person".[29] Originally planned for early 2005, Idlewild's release date was pushed to December 2005, before being delayed into 2006.[29] The album debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of 196,000 copies.[30] It also entered at number one on Billboard's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums,[31] at number one on the Top Rap Albums,[32] and at number two on the Top Digital Albums chart.[33] The album dropped to number seven on the Billboard 200, selling 78,000 copies in its second week.[34] It spent nine weeks on the Billboard 200.[35] In the United Kingdom, Idlewild debuted at number 16 on the UK Albums Chart.[36] It fell to number 28 in its second week on the chart.[37] While it charted within the top-twenty in several other countries, the album spent a minimal number of weeks on most charts.[38][39] On August 26, 2006, the album was certified platinum in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America, following shipments in excess of one million copies in the United States.[40] It was certified gold in sales by the Canadian Recording Industry Association in November 2006.[41] The first single of the album, "Mighty 'O'", features both André 3000 and Big Boi; the song takes its lyrical hook from the Cab Calloway song "Minnie the Moocher" ("Mighty-ighty-ighty O") and seems to be an example of the album's mix of hip hop and more traditional American jazz and blues. Next, similar to previous OutKast albums such as Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, two singles—one
solely by Big Boi, the other solely by André 3000—were released
simultaneously. The second single, almost exclusively featuring Big
Boi, is the marching band–influenced "Morris Brown", featuring guest artists Sleepy Brown and Scar, both artists on Big Boi's Purple Ribbon label. The song's title is a reference to Atlanta's Morris Brown College, with the school's marching band providing the instrumentation.
The third single, André 3000's "Idlewild Blue (Don'tchu Worry 'Bout Me)" delves into the blues genre, complete with a blues-style acoustic guitar riff and a harmonica element reminiscent of Aquemini single "Rosa Parks". In tune with the film, Idlewild
reflects OutKast's original style tempered by 1930s influences. The
fourth single, "Hollywood Divorce" was released in November 2006, and
features verses from Lil' Wayne and Snoop Dogg and is produced by André 3000.
2007–13: Hiatus and solo work
In 2007 after the sixth album under the OutKast name, Idlewild, Big Boi announced plans to release a full-fledged solo album. While he had released a previous solo album in Speakerboxxx, it still was technically under the OutKast name. The album was later titled Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. The album's first promotional single, "Royal Flush", was released in 2007, and featured Raekwon
and André 3000. After many delays and setbacks, the album was finally
released internationally on July 5, 2010. Guest artists include singer
Janelle Monáe; Big Boi's own new group Vonnegutt; plus established
rappers T.I. and B.o.B.[42]Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
received general acclaim from most music critics, earning praise for
its inventive sound, varied musical style, and Big Boi's lyricism.[43][44] In a July 2010 interview for The Village Voice, Big Boi revealed that he was working on the follow-up album to Sir Lucious Left Foot, entitled Daddy Fat Sax: Soul Funk Crusader, stating that he was "maybe about six songs into it",[45] and that he was "planning on doing a bunch of sax samples, tenor, soprano, and probably have at least a couple sax players come into the studio for the next record".[46] The project later evolved into the 2012 album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors.
André 3000 returned to rapping in 2007, after a hiatus from the genre, appearing on various remixes, including: "Walk It Out", "Throw Some D's", "You", Jay-Z's "30 Something", and original songs such as UGK's "International Players Anthem", Devin the Dude's "What a Job", Fonzworth Bentley's "Everybody", and with Big Boi "Royal Flush" and the leaked single "Lookin For Ya". He also appeared on John Legend's album, Evolver, on the track "Green Light",
which was released on October 28, 2008. Prior to the release, Benjamin
commented: "It's going to be a surprise for a lot of John Legend fans,
because it is a lot more upbeat than John is—than people think John is. I
was actually happy to hear it. This is a cool John Legend song."
Benjamin has stated that he is making a solo rap album, and that the
response to his remixes is part of the motivation for it.[47] In September 2011 it was announced that OutKast was moved to Epic Records following restructuring within Sony Music Entertainment. Epic Records is headed by LA Reid who has worked with Outkast in the past.[48] In 2012, Andre 3000 was cast to play Jimi Hendrix in a biopic film titled Jimi: All Is by My Side, which was later released on September 26, 2014.
In late 2013, it was reported that Outkast would reunite at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
in 2014. This was later confirmed on January 8, 2014, when it was
officially announced that the duo would headline the festival on April
11 and 18.[49]
It was later announced on January 13, 2014 that Outkast would be
performing at more than 40 festivals around the world throughout the
spring and summer of 2014 to celebrate their 20th anniversary, including
one of the largest festivals in the UK, Bestival.
Despite rumors, Big Boi has insisted that the duo are not currently
working on a new album together. Outkast returned to Atlanta for their
#ATLast homecoming shows over the weekend of September 26, 2014, selling
out within minutes of tickets going on sale. The shows had a large
variety of openers, ranging from R&B singer Janelle Monáe and rappers Kid Cudi, 2 Chainz, Future, Bun B, and Childish Gambino. Outkast's Dungeon Family associates Sleepy Brown and Big Gipp also appeared onstage with the duo, rapping and singing on their respective songs.[50][51] At Atlanta's One MusicFest, the Dungeon Family, Goodie Mob, Organized Noise, Killer Mike, and Outkast appeared performing their rap hits.[52]
Musical style and influences
Outkast's musical style and lyrical content have evolved throughout the group's career. Rolling Stone described their music as "idiosyncratic" and "inspired by the Afrocentric psychedelics of George Clinton and Sly Stone."[53] The band's debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik incorporates analog elements such as Southern-styled guitar licks, languid soul melodies, and mellow 1970s funk grooves.[54][55] It also features digital hip hop production elements such as programmed snare beats, booty bass elements,[54]ATLiens and Aquemini feature outer space-influenced production with echo and reverb effects.[56] With Stankonia, OutKast became the first hip-hop act to openly acknowledge rave culture as an influence.[57]Stankonia and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below would draw on sources such as psychedelia, gospel, funk, techno, soul, electro, and rock music.[58] During the late 1990s, rappers tended to embrace slow, laid-back beats in their productions. On several tracks on Stankonia, the group employed faster, more chaotic tempos to reflect rave culture and the introduction of new drugs such as ecstasy into the hip-hop scene.[57] One central motif of OutKast's songwriting is the duality of the
two members and their differing personalities, with Big Boi as "the
player" and Andre 3000 as "the poet".[59]
Big Boi generally covers the more conventional hip-hop topics such as
his childhood in the South, sex, and partying, while Andre 3000
discusses more unorthodox themes.[60] In contrast to much of hip hop music in the late 1990s, OutKast did not tone down its Southern regional qualities, like the harmonica break on "Rosa Parks" and distinctive Atlanta
slang and diction throughout. The duo experimented with several
delivery styles on the record, using "relaxed, hyper, distorted, speedy
and conversational presentations."[61] OutKast often discusses the status of women in the South, and contrasts with the misogynistic attitudes common in hip-hop music. In Slate,
Alex Abramovich praised the duo for "[tending] to shy away from the
misogyny and violence rap is so often (and not always unjustly)
condemned for."[62] In his book Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide,
Oliver Wang writes that songs such as "Slum Beautiful" and "Toilet
Tisha" "reimagine 'round the way girls, not only as just more than
one-dimensional accessories, but as objects of affection with lives and
concerns that are worth exploring."[63]
Collaborations and other work
During the recording of Stankonia OutKast and Mr. DJ began producing tracks for the artists on their Aquemini Records imprint through Columbia, including Slimm Cutta Calhoun and Killer Mike, who made his debut on Stankonia's "Snappin' & Trappin." In 2002, OutKast participated in the only Dungeon Family group album, Even in Darkness, along with Goodie Mob, Killer Mike, Sleepy Brown, Witchdoctor, and Backbone among others, and featuring Bubba Sparxxx, Shuga Luv and Mello. In 2002, the group and Killer Mike contributed the lead single "Land of a Million Drums" to the Scooby-Doo soundtrack.
On February 27, 2011, it was announced that Big Boi is creating a joint album along with Killer Mike and fellow Atlanta rapper Pill.[64] Later that day, Big Boi posted on his Twitter account that he was mixing Killer Mike's album entitled, PL3DGE.[65] In 2010, Andre 3000 was featured on Ciara's remix for her hit single "Ride", from the album Basic Instinct.[66] On January 14, 2011, a song with Ke$ha called "The Sleazy Remix" was leaked.[67]
On June 7, 2011, Beyoncé's song "Party" was leaked, it features
Benjamin, it is his first collaboration with the singer. It is also
featured on Beyoncé's fourth studio album entitled 4 released June 24, 2011. On August 24, 2011, Lil Wayne's album Tha Carter IV leaked, featuring a song entitled "Interlude" with Benjamin and fellow rapper Tech N9ne
performing. Also in 2011 Andre featured on Chris Browns "Deuces" remix
as well as on a Lloyd song, "Dedication To My Ex (Miss That)", with Lil
Wayne. In 2012 Andre also appeared on Drake's second album Take Care, on the song "The Real Her" which also featured Lil Wayne.
In 2012 Andre 3000 featured on Gorillaz "DoYaThing" with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. The song was released as a free download in February that year as part of a Converse promotion.
Andre 3000 was featured on Frank Ocean's 2012 album Channel Orange
on the song "Pink Matter". On January 11, 2013, Big Boi appeared on a
remix of the song, adding a verse before Andre's. In response to the
added verse, Andre issued a statement on January 15 insisting that the
track did not constitute an OutKast reunion.[68] Phantogram revealed in an interview with Variance Magazine in February 2014 that they plan to release an EP with Big Boi.[69] The resulting album Big Grams was released in September 2015.
Big Boi appeared on Nick Cannon's Wild 'n Out Season 3 as one of the many guest stars, as well as guest starring and appearing as a musical guest on Chappelle's Show performing his song "The Rooster". He is currently reaching more into acting, having appeared in T.I.'s film ATL, OutKast's film Idlewild and starring in Who's Your Caddy?. He appeared in the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Wildlife", which aired November 18, 2008. Big Boi played hip-hop artist "Got$ Money".
In April 1999, OutKast and LaFace Records were sued by Rosa Parks over Aquemini's
most successful radio single, which bears Parks' name as its title. The
lawsuit alleged that the song misappropriates Parks' name, and it
objected to the song's obscenities.[70] The song's lyrics are virtually unrelated to Parks, except for a
reference in the chorus: "Ah ha, hush that fuss / Everybody move to the
back of the bus". The song, which OutKast maintained was intended partly
as homage,
refers to Parks metaphorically: the purpose of the song's chorus is to
imply that OutKast is overturning hip hop's old order, that people
should make way for a new style and sound. In the initial suit, the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Ann Arbor granted summary judgment for OutKast.
Later on appeal, however, the issue of whether OutKast violated the Lanham Act for false advertising
was reversed and remanded for further proceedings. This was based on
the Court's determination that the title "Rosa Parks" had little
artistic relevance, whether symbolic or metaphorical, to Rosa Parks the
person. Parks' representation hired lawyer Johnnie Cochran to appeal the decision in 2001, but the appeal was denied on First Amendment grounds. In 2003, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal to overrule the lower court's decision.[citation needed]
The judge ruled that the song was an "expressive work" and that it was
protected by the First Amendment. The judge stated that there was a
definite linkage between the song and Rosa Parks.
In December 2003, André told UK journalist Angus Batey that, following a Detroit
concert in the midst of the legal battle, relatives of Parks had
approached him and implied that the case had less to do with Parks than
with the lawyers.[71]
In April 2005, the judge in the case appointed an impartial
representative for Parks after her family expressed concerns that her
caretakers and her lawyers were pursuing the case based on their own
financial interest. The case was settled on 14 April 2005, with Outkast
and the co-defendants, SONY BMG
and its subsidiaries Arista Records and LaFace Records, admitting no
wrongdoing but agreeing to develop and fund educational programs
concerning Rosa Parks.[72][73]
"Rosa Parks: Biography",
section "Outkast & Rosa Parks." Biography.com. A&E Television
Networks. April 2, 2014; updated January 16, 2019. Retrieved February
24, 2019.
THE MUSIC OF OUTKAST: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH OUTKAST:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
16 March 2017
Getty Images / Hector Mata
Getty Images / Scott Gries
Benjamin and Patton met in 1992 at the Lenox Square shopping mall when they were both sixteen years old.[5] The two lived in the East Point section of Atlanta and attended Tri-Cities High School.[5][6] During school, Benjamin and Patton participated in rap battles in the cafeteria.[5]
Benjamin's parents were divorced and he was living with his father.
Meanwhile, Patton had to move with his four brothers and six sisters
from Savannah to Atlanta. Benjamin and Patton eventually teamed up and
were pursued by Organized Noize, a group of local producers who would later make hits for TLC.[1]
The duo initially wanted to be called "2 Shades Deep" or "The Misfits",
but because those names were already taken they later decided to use
"OutKast" based on finding "outcast" as synonym for "misfit" in a dictionary.[7] OutKast, Organized Noize, and schoolmates Goodie Mob formed the nucleus of the Dungeon Family organization. 
2005–06: Idlewild
In late 2013, it was reported that Outkast would reunite at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
in 2014. This was later confirmed on January 8, 2014, when it was
officially announced that the duo would headline the festival on April
11 and 18.[49]
It was later announced on January 13, 2014 that Outkast would be
performing at more than 40 festivals around the world throughout the
spring and summer of 2014 to celebrate their 20th anniversary, including
one of the largest festivals in the UK, Bestival.
Despite rumors, Big Boi has insisted that the duo are not currently
working on a new album together. Outkast returned to Atlanta for their
#ATLast homecoming shows over the weekend of September 26, 2014, selling
out within minutes of tickets going on sale. The shows had a large
variety of openers, ranging from R&B singer Janelle Monáe and rappers Kid Cudi, 2 Chainz, Future, Bun B, and Childish Gambino. Outkast's Dungeon Family associates Sleepy Brown and Big Gipp also appeared onstage with the duo, rapping and singing on their respective songs.[50][51]
Media related to Outkast at Wikimedia Commons
