OutKast

New Blue Sun

OutKast will always be fondly remembered as hip-hop’s greatest duo because both André 3000 and Big Boi both rank among the best rappers to ever grace a microphone, and in the great ‘east vs. west coast’ feud, OutKast offered an alternative answer: the south.

They were not the first major southern act—nor even first major southern duo, with Eightball and MJG predating them by a year, both in terms of formation and debut album—but when OutKast won Best New Rap Group at the Source Awards in 1995, it was the start of a paradigm shift that allowed southern rap to be part of the greater conversation. What I personally love them for is that they brought an innovative edge, a musical curiosity, to hip-hop in the second half of the 1990s, after the golden era of the genre had ended and with shiny suit era well on its way, exemplified by bringing in a country-harmonica solo on a song about getting crunk (“Rosa Parks”) or a #1 Billboard hit that played around with two different time signatures seamlessly that some people somehow confused for 11/4 (“Hey Ya!”). They were a rare breed of a music artist that was committed to being popular and experimental at the same time. Clearly, that’s André 3000’s doing, and that’s not even up for debate, made obvious by the directions they took on their respective solo albums smushed together to form Speakerboxxx/The Love Below; Big Boi’s half was a rap album, André 3000’s half was not a rap album.

Neither were infallible. Even if I consider André 3000 among my top five rappers, he sometimes loses the thread: his verse on “Synthesizer”—predicting a genetically-modified future that is here now with the advent of gene-editing technology that was only a sci-fi dream back then—makes a quick detour line about rappers copying styles (“biting verbatim”) that has nothing to do with the subject at all; his very long verse on “A Life in the Day of Benjamin André (Incomplete)” has that ‘impastas’ punch-line that elicits a groan from me. And that’s without mentioning the casual misogyny that I wish he was above: his verse on UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem”—a wonderful song that, between OutKast, UGK and the Juicy J beat originally for Project Pat, feels like the most-southern rap song of all time—has a bit about “If that bitch do you dirty, we’ll wipe her ass out as in detergent,” while his love letter to Erykah Badu on “Hello” keeps repeating “Will this bitch click over for me” in the bridge that he quickly self-corrects to “I mean, will this woman click over for me.”

On the other hand, Big Boi never pretended to care about anything more than rapping which came to a detriment early on while André 3000 began deconstructing flow to see how far he could take it, or started taking his subject matter off the streets. Compare their verses on “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 1)”: Big Boi’s story has lots of sex in it (“Let’s say her name was Suzy Skrew, ‘cause she screwed a lot” and “She said, ‘let’s hit the parking lot so I can sick your duck”) while André 3000’s story is one of the most touching verses in all of rap music (“I said, ‘What you wanna be?’ She said, ‘Alive’”). So when people try to tell me that they were ‘equally’ great rappers, or that Big Boi was better (a position that Andre 3000 maintains), I think of that particular song and think ‘no way, Jose.’

In terms of southern rap from 1994, Scarface’s The Diary is my go-to, but it’s also not really a southern album sonically as it borrows elements from the west coast (as well as teaming up with Ice Cube). By contrast, OutKast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik is a southern album through and through, with Organized Noize mixing live instruments—notably bass and guitar—over drum loops. That said, I wish the live instruments declared themselves more: they’re too often just background fodder for these flows, which are already developed even if the language is pretty simple at times (rhyming stupid with cupid, or interior with inferior) such that the 7-minute “Git Up, Git Out” gets very wearying even if the song’s message is important. “Funky Ride” is another long piece of filler but it also established André 3000’s love for Prince early on. “Ain’t No Thang” is the best song here, whose metal squeak—something out of DJ Premier’s book—is the weirdest sonic element.

ATLiens—a portmanteau of Atlanta and aliens—is too front-loaded and chilled-out for me to consider a classic, but it’s probably their second-best album regardless. The drum thwack on every other quarter note of both “Two Dope Boys” and “Elevators” get tiring quick; their verses on “Babylon” are disconnected from one another, with André talking about sexual discovery and Big Boi talking about his aunt who just passed away; the beat of posse cut “Decatur Psalm” where the female vocal isn’t doing the heavylifting are woefully undercooked, and it’s a shame André 3000 stepped out for it. What I acknowledge it for is that OutKast themselves produce five songs this time, many of which get far weirder than the other Organized Noize productions like the quick drum-rolls of the title track (“Put my glock away, I got a stronger weapon that never runs out of ammunition so I’m ready for war okay”) or the ring tone-like beeps of “Elevator,” and OutKast would go on to produce more songs on their own albums (with or without Mr. DJ as Earthtone III) but are never considered great rapper-producers for whatever reason. The first 8 seconds of the title track is the cover, like stepping through a portal into an unknown world of American south.

Aquemini is their masterpiece. It’s not perfect: things get ‘spottie’ after “Da Art of Storytellin’” but remain mostly ‘dopaliscious,’ with the indelible horn hook of “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and the electric guitar of the perfectly-named “Chonkyfire” (interesting to note that some of the best moments on this album are instrumental considering where André would go later on in his career). Forget the hook of “Mamacita” (everyone’s favourite spanking child which I never seek out but also never skip if it comes on), pick on “Nathaniel” (a literal phoned-in rap) and “West Savannah” (a Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik leftover, which it sounds like). But it’s the greatest southern rap album of all time regardless (a decade of trap from Atlanta and nothing has come close), thanks to multiple contenders for greatest verses of all time, including one from Raekwon, and a very natural eclecticism that’s unfortunately all too rare in rap records. Surprising fleck of harp on “Return of the G” after André 3000’s breathless verse that embedded a hook within it at the same time as taking down the predominant gangsta hip-hop scene at the time; aforementioned harmonica solo on “Rosa Parks” (which, sure, doesn’t have anything to do with the activist that it’s named after, but then again, neither did Tribe’s “Steve Biko”); casual blurring of neo-soul and hip-hop in the 9-minute cooldown “Liberation.” This is all while still offering the southern-cooked funk of their debut and the chill-out of ATLiens. The drum drop on “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 1)” is one of my favourite drum drops in rap, locking in with a gorgeous sky-blue sad keyboard tone that could ride forever, forever ever, forever ever? Forever ever.

Stankonia was considered their masterpiece for a minute—“B.O.B” was Pitchfork’s song of the decade back in 2009 (people who think they went pro-rap overnight weren’t paying attention)—but its legacy has deservedly slid: the rap-rock stuff (“Gasoline Dreams” and the widely-praised say-nothing too-long guitar solo of “B.O.B”) have not aged well, and a lot of the beats are simplistic (not simple) so they reveal all they have right out the gate and don’t reward more replays. “So Fresh, So Clean” is one of the better cuts but most egregious on that front; the keyboard loop just repeats the hook’s melody and it feels like you’re listening to the same few bars for 4 minutes straight; once you hear the backing vocals in the hook (“so fresh and so clean clean”), you’ve heard the song’s ceiling, and that happens right away. Cautionary tale “Toilet Tisha” is histrionic to get its point across. Of the album’s highlights—“Ms. Jackson,” (the first half of) “B.O.B.,” “Xplosion,” and “Humble Mumble”—only “Ms. Jackson” ranks among the duo’s greatest work, and would be their best pop song if not for “Hey Ya!” soon on its way; dig the backing vocal going ‘ooooooooooooohhaaaaaa’ like a kid on a trampoline or halfway between a kiss and a sob. Love the backwards loops (the drums on “Ms. Jackson”; the guitar on “Slum Beautiful”) that they were playing with here, and I wish there was more of them. There was just so much going on in rap music in the year 2000—The Marshall Mathers LP, Supreme Clientele, The Unseen, Train of Thought, Like Water for Chocolate—that it’s hard for me to remember Stankonia as one of that year’s highlights.

While Robert Christgau’s suggestion on how to fix Speakerboxxx/The Love Below would make a better album (“Better for André 3000 to have donated [“Roses,” “Spread,” “Hey Ya!” and “an oddity of his choosing”] to Speakerboxx (sic), thus rendering it the classic P-Funk rip it ain;t quite, and released the rest of The Love Below under a one-off pseudonym that fooled no one, where it would go gold as an avant-funk cult legend long about 2010”), it also wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting as how we received it, which is two over-long solo albums making an over-long double album. No one in hip-hop figured out the double album format, and OutKast’s method was by putting two albums together.

It’s not totally one against the other: André 3000 produces three of the cuts on Speakerboxxx while Big Boi ‘guests’ on “Roses,” which would easily make for one of the album’s main highlights if not for the ‘crazy bitch’ outro (more of that casual misogyny I talked about); the song is 6 minutes despite being a 4-minute song. The growing consensus that Speakerboxxx is the better of the two halves—which was a very hot take up for a long time—is right on the money: Big Boi takes less risks, yes, but he also delivers a bunch of good songs, especially the first five including the intro. “Unhappy” has that digital chirp flickering in and out of the beat; “The Way You Move” was the #1 hit that replaced “Hey Ya!” and Big Boi has been chasing that high ever since. That Big Boi goes all political on “War” reminds me of Rakim on the forever-underrated Don’t Sweat the Technique: two great rappers with nothing to prove actually trying different subject matters and knocking them out the park. Big Boi raps like Killer Mike on that one, who does show up on these late-period OutKast albums as an okay feature.

On the other hand, Andre 3000’s drum and bass take on John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” is a listen-once-maybe-twice novelty, as is the soul duet with Norah Jones that takes its chord progression out of Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”; “Prototype” is too long, and I don’t know what André 3000 was thinking with that bass. His skits waste entire minutes at a time. The major highlights on André 3000’s disc are the pure pop hit “Hey Ya!” (which snuck in the line “I want to make you cumma” into a #1 hit) and the pure rap song “A Day in the Life of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete).”

Idlewild ends their discography on a bad note. It’s another long one but there’s less to salvage than ever, with only “The Train,” “Hollywood Divorce” and “Call the Law”—an early Janelle Monae appearance (when I caught OutKast live in 2014, they invited her on stage to dance for “Hey Ya!”; even crammed in the audience looking up on the stage, you could tell she was short)—standing out among the dreck. “Mighty ‘O’” has their most annoying hook (again, way worse than “Mamacita”); the beat of “Chronomentrophobia” is demo-levels of undercooked; “BuggFace” feels like a Speakerboxxx leftover (once again, they don’t bother rapping on each other’s songs); “Greatest Show on Earth” is a Macy Gray song that somehow made it into an OutKast album so André 3000 sings one or two lines that barely register. The sonic eclecticism that distinguished them now feels like an afterthought, placed all in the album’s last stretch: a cutesy throwback (“When I Look in Your Eyes”), histrionic blues (“Dyin’ to Live”) and a Maggot Brain imitation (“A Bad Note”).

That so many people were surprised that André 3000’s belated solo album New Blue Sun was an album with no bars and was an ambient-new age flute album was sad proof that too many fans treat music as a product and don’t care about context (these are the people who ponder what’s the point in music writing/album reviews). André 3000 had already made it very clear he had hung up the cape in a well-circulated interview with GQ back in 2017 (“I don’t have the pulse anymore. Rhythms change every generation. The intensity and the drums change. And I’m not on the pulse. I can’t pretend”) and tested the jazz waters with his first-actual solo release Look Ma No Hands, an EP that no one cared about. If you were surprised that his first solo album was not a rap album, that’s on you for not paying attention, even though he never hung up the rap cape entirely. He’s the only reason to listen to Rick Ross’ God Forgives, I Don’t, T.I.’s Trouble Man: Heavy is the Head (wherein André apologizes to Big Boi) and Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone; he’s one of the highlights on Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Travis Scott’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. And I’ll forever find it funny that Kanye West brought in one of the best rappers out there and delegated him to only singing backing vocals on The Life of Pablo (“3 Stacks, can you help me out?” “Thirty hours…”).

If you compiled a playlist of all of his good features together, you’d have a stronger album than anything his ex-partner Big Boi put out. Big Boi’s debut album Sir Lucious Left Foot had some ear-worming hooks (Janelle Monae on “Be Still”; the whistled synth of “The Train Pt. 2”; the ridiculous but infectious “back up plan to the back up plan / To back up my back up plan” of “Back Up Plan”), but it’s missing any staying power and would only have been helped if they included the “Skew It” sequel single released just before. His albums after that teamed up with indie rock and electronic musicians—including with Phantogram as Big Gram—that he probably connected with at summer festivals and went even deeper into pop territory without ever once making a good pop song; the Wavves collaboration “Shoes for Running” from second album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors feels like it had a shelf life for exactly one afternoon, blaring out at a tent to a crowd of hot but totally uninterested people sipping marked-up shit beer, although the Little Dragon collaboration “Descending” is reminiscent of what the band would do with De La Soul more masterfully on “Drawn.”

There isn’t a ton of overlap between hip-hop heads and ambient/new age fans—those genres aren’t exactly compatible—and so a lot of OutKast fans checked out New Blue Sun as a curiosity, hoping off before the album finished. At least, that’s what the Spotify numbers tell me: the 12-minute opener has twice as many plays as the next song, which has more plays than the next, and so on. It is not a jazz album despite being advertised as a flute-spiritual jazz album, despite André 3000 bonding with percussionist Carlos Niño at an Alice Coltrane tribute concert, despite some reviews comparing André 3000 to every jazz legend under the sun. Which, I guess, thank God: one can only handle so many ‘this album saved jazz’ remarks. But André 3000’s flute playing on “The Slang Word P(*)ssy” is too regimented to be jazz, the notes feel very internally deliberated, and arrive in neat little packages over the ambient drift; I wouldn’t say that the players emailed André their parts, but the lack of any interplay feels that way. And I do not find the track titles—often revelatory for instrumental songs ever since Debussy named his preludes—funny, and I actively cringe at the first three or the ‘pun’ of “Ninety Three 'Til Infinity and Beyoncé.” The different woodwinds that André 3000 uses—including one with lower register on “That Night in Hawaii” over the deep percussion from Niño—makes the songs feel different enough from one another, but the album never feels like anything more than a novelty, both for André and the audience.

In his latest interview for GQ, André 3000 said that “sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does?” Does it? In hip-hop, you would think so: there are almost no great rap albums from any late-quadragenarian that I can think of (whereas in jazz, there are great records from musicians over 70)—those Nas albums with Hit-Boy are mediocrely consistent; Jay-Z’s 4:44 felt like it should have set a trend that no one, not even he, followed—and there’s a second-hand embarrassment hearing rappers approach the same shit they’ve been doing for twenty-plus years to diminishing returns, simply because they don’t know how to grow up or change, which I already bemoaned on my write-up of the various Wu rappers.

When I read that André 3000 interview, the first thing to spring to mind was something Lupe Fiasco said to the Financial Times, “Rappers only get more skilled as we get older, because we have more experiences to draw from.” That’s theoretically true! But we just haven’t seen it yet. In that André 3000 interview, André joked about potentially rapping about getting older, colonoscopies and bad eyesight, and let me just say, I would listen to that. What a lot of rappers fail to realize is that their core audience is aging with them every day, and maybe one of the reasons why people stop looking for new music when they hit 30 is because they stop finding music that they connect to. We always want music that acknowledges the physical world we live in, which does include money and strippers and clothes, sure, but it also involves growing old, working day jobs, falling in love, and raising a family. Which is why my favourite lines from André 3000 nowadays is the one that’s a pledge for love, “So when we fall, any wall, any stall, any crawl, any pause, any scar, any tar, any dark, will dissolve, kill them all, build-a-bear, build them all, build it where it won’t fall, give it all, give it my all, yeah.”