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Powerful and brutal, violent and poetic, these songs reflect OutKast’s shattering of innocuous hackneyed characters and gainful possibilities. Jackson” and “B.O.B.” are among the strongest songs of the decade. Stankonia is an album of such startling invention that its individual pieces of greatness can be obscured. Two years later, a moodier and more confrontational OutKast released their masterpiece of a downstroke. The title blends the words Aquarian and Gemini, the pair’s astrological signatures, and for the last time the two sound confident, optimistic and brotherly. Combining Nas’s street realism with A Tribe Called Quest’s idealized messages of a body politic of self-determining African-Americans, Aquemini stretches the recording limits: mostly produced by the duo and using live instruments, the album captures the pair discussing artistic direction and changing the rules. With allusions from everywhere, and a dramatis personae of idiots and saints, preachers and con men, and, yes, whores with hearts of gold, what prevents the album from sliding into swampy cliché are the propulsive beats and the interplay of the two voices, here better than elsewhere, merged, as if committed to a vision unified.
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A happy anomaly in the industry, OutKast is artistically daring and iconoclastic about rap’s ideals, no matter how deeply fond of the genre itself. For OutKast, this superb album suggested greatness to come.Īquemini starts slowly, with angelic voices, but the preaching soon kicks in, a talk that hectors, compromises, denounces and teases. For most groups, a sprawling musical aesthetic and a thematically unfocused album would spell trouble. “Millennium” and “Elevators” are hot bursts of anti-testosterone spirituality. The disc is fresh and funny, with P-Funk ballsiness and self-defining lyrics that praise ordinary folks, steady love and artistic creation over guns, gangstas and bitches. The operatic narrative never holds, but the music is rarely dull.
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Perfectly produced by Organized Noize and establishing the quirky instrumentation and helter skelter rhythmic patterns that would launch fellow Atlantans like Goodie Mob and Society of Soul, the album is a feel-good stunner: sweeping, soulful and hospitable.ĪTLiens is more of the same, set against an ingenious fantasy borrowed from B-movie horror film effects. This dichotomous interplay between rapping and singing, misogyny and self-determination, replaces organic lyrical certitude for valuable musical diversity. While Big Boi satisfies himself with typical gangsta posing and getting some on the weekend, Dre is already a great singer. Big Boi rocks heavy on the challenging beats and notes borrowed from a wide range of influences: Wu-Tang’s bass-heavy throb, Stax horns, deep country soul, the backdoor preachin’ of Clarence Carter and O.V. Mature, mellow and celebratory, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik blueprints the duo’s musical and thematic direction. Play their albums in sequential order and hear the reality of being young, gifted, and black.
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Matching artistic innovation with successful merchandising like no other music collective since Prince’s, OutKast have taken seriously their role as spokesmen for the disenfranchised, the silenced, the alienated, the Southern, the cast-out. Filtering current sounds through the laid-back crooning of ’70s and ’80s funk, Andre Benjamin (Dre, then Andre 3000) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi) favor music that swings, snaps and sasses. Unafraid to mine their Georgian vibes nor plunder rap’s brief past, OutKast delight the brain and animate the ass. OutKast are not merely rap’s best chance for permanent favor with rock fans they are, on any given day, possibly America’s best band. Formed in 1992 by rival rappers at a suburban Atlanta high school, OutKast - the greatest hip-hop group since Public Enemy - accomplished a great many things in its first decade.