Icon: Outkast
The player and the poet; the funk-faithful homeboy who raises pit bulls and the slightly spacey guitar-wielding dandy who takes movie parts; the championship singles act whose albums work best as whole units: What about OutKast isn’t a dichotomy? Only their incredibly long shadow: for their first decade as a recording act, Big Boi (player, pit bull-raiser) and Andre 3000 (a.k.a. Dre and 3 Stacks; poet, dandy) pushed every rule about what hip-hop could and couldn’t be and do. They began as prodigies, winning the Source Award for Best New Rap Group just out of high school, and they ended (there’s never been an official breakup announcement, but you’d have to be blind or deaf not to notice) as one of the strangest, most far-reaching groups in all of pop. But they never left hip-hop completely behind, and that’s their strength: as the scions of music made from every other kind of music, they figure they can do anything. And on six albums, they did – often better than anyone.
In Chronological Order
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If Dre and Big Boi had never done a thing differently than they do on their 1994 debut, they'd still be deserved southern-rap legends, and Southernplayalisticadillacmusik would still be Exhibit A in the adaptability of the G-funk (or at least post P-Funk) template. "Ain't No Thang" is a low-slung weed celebration that smokes (sorry) most of what was coming out of L.A. at the time, and despite the laid-back ambience of the... music, the MCs are as exuberant as you'd expect from a couple guys just out of high school. As the album's title suggests, they play around with underworld imagery, as on "D.E.E.P.": "I'm getting deeper than a prostitute's vagina/And pimping way more ho's than those peoples out in China." But especially with hindsight, "Git Up, Git Out" seems more like the track that signals the duo's future, and that of their Atlanta compatriots: seven-and-a-half minutes long but evaporating any sense of its own length, with a hook from Cee-Lo of compadres Goodie Mob ("Don't let the days of your life pass by/You've got to git up, git out, and git something/Don't spend all your time trying to get high") that's less preachy than man-to-man common-sense, and indicative of how great the ambition of OutKast and the scene it came from was already.
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Their debut was a unique, high-grade variation on already-established rap themes, but 1996's ATLiens is where Big Boi and Dre moved definitively into their own realm. As the title indicates, the music has a spacey feel to it: the woozy synths of "Elevators (Me & You)" and "Mainstream," the deep bass, swirling hi-hats, and flickering guitar of "Babylon," eerie harmonies from Joi and Whild Peach on "Decatur Psalm." Largely played live, as... parts of Southernplayalisticadillacmusik had been, ATLiens is starkly minimal but comfy, futuristic and lived-in, distilled to a luxuriously thick paste. Both Dre and Boi here step into broader terrain, especially Dre: his ultra-robotic flow on "Babylon" chopping words into intriguing new shapes and making the first line of "Millennium," "Me and everything around me is unstable like Chernobyl," sound both above that instability and rooted in it; Big Boi, meanwhile, begins his verse on "Mainstream" ("Everybody's a player/Rubbing them Kangols on their head/Thinking it's all about your clothes/Nigga, it's all about yourself") by simultaneously cutting the competition and proffering positive thinking as something other than a bromide from an after-school special. There aren't many rappers in their early twenties who'd think up something as reflective as "13th Floor/Growing Old," much less able to make it stick.
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"Even though we got two albums, this one feels like the beginning," Big Boi rapped on "Y'all Scared." He wasn't kidding: If ATLiens is OutKast at its most musically distilled, Aquemini is where they begin expandingand how. Bluesy harmonica solos ("Rosa Parks"), snarling post-Hendrix/Hazel guitar ("Chonkyfire"), swirling roots reggae ("SpottieOttieDopaliscious"), grimy lo-fi drum machines you could mistake for something off the WordSound label ("Y'all Scared"), piano-led minor-key jazz-funk ("Liberation"): all of it... different from what they'd had done before, and all of it sounding like no one else but OutKast. Six years after Arrested Development blew up and four years after they'd pretty much disappeared, "Rosa Parks" tightened and hardened that group's template, imbuing it with more humor and more profundity; the title track meditates philosophically over languid guitar, with Dre noting that "Faith is what you make it/That's the hardest thing since MC Ren." Hitting hardest of all is "Da Art of Storytellin' Pt. 1," in which Dre delivers one of the most heartrending verses in history, about an ex-girlfriend: "Talkin' about what we gonna be when we grow up/I said what you wanna be/She said, 'Alive'." It's the biggest jolt of hard reality on an album already full of them; nevertheless, Aquemini moves so beautifully it can feel like a dream.
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When "B.O.B." recently anointed as the single of the decade by Pitchfork first hit the airwaves, the already heavy anticipation for Stankonia hit fever pitch. Hearing Big Boi and the newly rechristened Andre 3000 spitting hard and jagged over a beat inspired by the drum & bass nights Andre was checking out in Atlanta (he cited Photek as a particular favorite), all capped by a blazing guitar solo, it was... hard not to wonder: How could the full-length possibly live up to that? Easy: by refusing to sit still. Stankonia remains one of rap's most fully startling records: headlong and hook-filled, the way pop is supposed to be when everything's firing at once. "So Fresh, So Clean" updates the ATLiens model with an insidiously playful falsetto chorus (doubled on bass guitar) and clip-clopping drums; "Gasoline Dreams" resembles P-Funk at its most bombed out but never settle for mere mimicry. And then there's "Ms. Jackson." Hip-hop has more than its share of classic break-up songs the format is perfect for airing grievances and regrets but apologizing to your ex's mother is (a) an ingenious tweak of the usual narrative format and (b) an implicit acknowledgement of the devastating ripple effect a longstanding couple's parting of ways can have. There are too many skits, sure, but for everything else, "too much" is just right.
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The persona split between Big Boi and Andre 3000 is very real; the idea that because Andre was Esquire's Best Dressed Man and covered "My Favorite Things" as a jungle track he's therefore the "creative" one in the duo is a ridiculous misnomer. The fact is, Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is a better, more consistent album than The Love Belowand yes, it's two albums, soldered together to become, in effect, the final gigantic... blockbuster of the CD era before the MP3 finished its takeover. But the reason no one has ever agreed on what, exactly, should constitute a saturated single-disc version is that OutKast knows how to do indulgent sprawl as well as they do pop hooks. Everyone and her grandmamma knows Andre's "Hey Ya!" or close enough to fudge itbut this has yet to diminish a song that does absolutely everything right, starting with getting in your head and never, ever leaving. Big Boi's "Ghettomusick" and "The Way You Move" are right behind them. And hey: Andre's "My Favorite Things" is kind of cute, even if Spring Heel Jack got there first.
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It's unfair to consider Idlewild OutKast's version of Bob Dylan's Self Portrait an arrant lazy way out from a legend of which they'd grown weary. If anything, Idlewild is as insanely ambitious as all of OutKast's albums from Aquemini forward, attempting to cram nearly as many ideas and styles into 78 minutes as Andre 3000 and Big Boi had, separately, onto the two-and-a-half-hour Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and adding some new ones, such... as Andre's blues turn, "Idlewild Blue (Don't Chu Worry 'Bout Me)." It's not bad, and little else on the album is, either, though the nearly-nine-minute "A Bad Note," a seeming tribute to Funkadelic's acid-tinged sprawls (such as "Wars of Armageddon"), comes awfully close. Nevertheless, the album a soundtrack to the duo's long-in-the-works film, which fizzled at the box office has its charms, usually when Andre and Big Boi are truly working in tandem. The easy highlight is "Hollywood Divorce," produced by Andre and featuring Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg, featuring Big Boi spitting vitriol at Internet rumormongers: "M&M's with no nuts/Won't show up face-to-face, straight bitch-made/Like puppies on the nipples of a mutt," says the famed dog breeder. But the album is most memorable as the showcase it gave Janelle Mona before she took off on her own.
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