OutKast ascended to pop stardom, then superstardom, then finally myth. It seems inevitable now, but in 1998 their next move wasn’t so obvious. Southernplayalisticcadillacmuzik was an instant Southern rap classic, an astonishing feat for two kids just out of high school, and rather than repeat their debut they transcended it with ATLiens. This was an album of rare vision – OutKast’s Southern scene prided itself on drug and gun talk - a down-to-earth realism. But these guys were down-to-Mars. Big Boi and Dre (soon to rename himself Andre 3000) positioned themselves as cosmic pimps, talented wordsmiths observing the ills of the world from an extraterrestrial perspective. They refused to sample old records and opted to create something fresh – in Big Boi’s words, “If it’s an old school jam, leave it to the old. We wanna have our own school of music.”
Most rap groups would bottom out after making two albums back-to-back of such staggering quality. Not OutKast – Aquemini might find them crashing back to Earth, but they don’t lose an ounce of their creativity. The result is OutKast’s best album, and I don’t care that I’m giving away the result of this week’s judgment call by saying that. It’s that important.
For Aquemini, the duo holed up in their studio with a bunch of professional musicians, jamming on musical ideas and crafting beats organically. From the jump, “Return of the ‘G’” offers a deeper, more seismic groove than anything OutKast or hip-hop had ever given us. You can get lost in just the bass playing on the title track. The grounding in musicianship and interplay yields thrilling results in the songcraft, too – I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Rosa Parks” break down into a harmonica-driven country hoedown. There’s a lot of living people playing the instruments on Aquemini, with deep and simmering influences from funk, soul and R&B. A comparison to the neo-soul scene of the late ‘90s feels obvious – and oh, would you look at that, Andre 3000 had just started dating the visionary musician and neo-soul fixture Erykah Badu!
But no neo-soul record had rappers of OutKast’s caliber on it. Now fully imbued with the alien soul that they first channeled on their journey to the stars, Boi and Dre command these songs. They rap with dumbfounding skill, sounding equally comfortable weaving intricate narratives as spitting freewheeling dope nonsense (see “Skew It on the Bar-B,” which is basically just the duo and Raekwon trying to one-up each other in the booth, competing for the hottest flow).
And when it seemed appropriate, OutKast simply abandoned hip-hop altogether. My favorite song on the album, and one of the greatest songs of the ‘90s, is “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” which conjures up a swampy, romantic groove so intoxicating that time stretches out, the world outside your headphones fades, and all the remains is that fucking incredible horn hook and the luxurious spoken-word intonations of Boi and Dre. If there’s a complaint I can lodge against Aquemini, it’s that the epic funk journeys at the end of the album can be draining. But maybe the real problem with them is that they can’t live up to the standard set by “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”
The result is a massive album, in every way. It has nooks and crannies to get lost in, a visionary sprawl, and a natural gravitas. I have a copy of it on vinyl (one of the few hip-hop vinyls I own, unfortunately) and its massive, singular aura seems to suck all the air out of the space around it. To listen to Aquemini is to be lost in a strange, funky new universe.
The Peak:
With all other worlds conquered, OutKast only had to cross over to the mainstream, and Stankonia did that. The duo and their Dungeon Family production crew returned to looped digital beats, but kept the wild and freewheeling genre mix in play, also adding in electronic, dance and pop influences. Stankonia sounded much more accessible on the surface – “So Fresh, So Clean” was a sizable hit and “Ms. Jackson” a massive one. But even a casual listen to the album revealed that it was just as sprawling, unwieldy, and uncompromising as Aquemini. Lead single “B.O.B.” sunk on release, probably because it was too much – lightning-quick verses over a frenetic beat, complete with guitar and turntable solos and a hype-you-up choral epilogue. But the song’s stature has grown and multiplied a thousand times since its release and now critics recognize it as one of the greatest songs of the decade. It didn’t sound like OutKast had caught up to the mainstream, or even that the mainstream had caught up to OutKast. Rather, the two met halfway for an album that launched them into the public eye while they were still at their most creative.
It’s also, full disclosure, not an album I like much. Sure, the singles are all bangers, and there are some good album cuts (“Gasoline Dreams” and “Humble Mumble” are my choices) but five or six songs out of a twenty-four-song album, replete with interludes and skits, isn’t enough for me. I can’t help but ding Stankonia for sounding unfocused and overlong. This might have been a problem for Aquemini too, but there OutKast consistently brought the excellent songs, and those aren’t here.
But I can remove my glasses of subjectivity to acknowledge that maybe I just haven’t listened to it at the right time or in the right frame of mind. Lots of other people love this album. It’s one of the most acclaimed of the 2000s. One day, maybe…
The Comedown:
Speakerboxxx / The Love Below emerged out of separate solo projects that Big Boi and Andre had coincidentally been working on at the same time. Critics had noted the temperamental differences between the two rappers as far back as Aquemini, but releasing a double album comprised of two separate solo albums seemed to be the breaking point. Paradoxically, it was also the duo’s popular peak. Selling Stankonia – an ambitious political rap epic – to the mainstream was one feat, but managing to go diamond off a double album full of Miami bass, Southern crunk, P-Funk, showtunes, R&B, jazz, and electro-pop is dumbfounding. The planet that OutKast made with Speakerboxxx / The Love Below had such a massive gravity that concerns about its instability were temporarily put on hold while the entire world got down to “Hey Ya!”
I’m tempted to do what nobody has done before and try to review Speakerboxxx / The Love Below as one consistent thing, a unified statement from OutKast that just so happens to almost never have the two members on the same track. But it would be foolish. Big Boi and Andre 3000 were at very different points in their lives in 2003, and it shows. Instead I’ll flip the script in a smaller way and review The Love Below first.
Either Erykah Badu had Andre reeling for three years straight or he had a series of smaller relationships that didn’t work out in the interim; either way, The Love Below is laser-focused on the topic of love and all that entails: romance and separation, sex and sexuality, gender and gender roles. Andre plays every kind of character here, from confident lothario to heartbroken bachelor, one minute fully in the spring of love and the next denouncing an evil woman. It’s as if Andre is desperately inhabiting every kind of persona he can think of so that he can triangulate the reason for the deep and aching pain inside his own soul. Behind every lyric and every situation lies the same question: “Why didn’t it work out?” The tragedy of The Love Below is that he never finds an answer – the album-ending “A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre” has him recounting his life’s story, but only up to the present day. “You give it all your time because that’s all you can think about – and that’s as far as I got.” He can’t imagine a future for himself even after all that soul-searching.
Musically he sounds equally lost. It’s not like the elements on The Love Below don’t fit together – Prince pulled all these musical elements (plus a few more) into a cohesive whole in the 80s, and Andre 3000 is as charismatic a performer as Prince ever was. But the songs themselves are just so aimless. Too many of them descend into a mess of studio experimentation, spoken word, and dull repetition. It’s a 78-minute opus that should be at least twenty shorter. This album is where Andre got his reputation as an unfocused, scattershot dreamer who couldn’t pull it together enough to make a full-length statement.
Which is a shame, because on the occasions he does pull it together, it’s as though he’s reached deep into the veins of the universe, pulled them out, and showed them to us. Fourteen years later, “Hey Ya!” remains the iconic pop song of the 2000s. The moment on the album where “She Lives in My Lap” ends its interminable fade-out, only for Andre to shout “1-2-3!” and bust out the most tragic, catchy, singular tune of his career is a moment where the world is righted. To follow that up with “Roses” is almost unfair. “Roses” is a jaw-dropping testament to Andre’s charisma – he manages to make a top five hit out of the chorus “I know you think your shit don’t stink / but lean a lil’ bit closer, see / roses really smell like poo-poo,” and extends a line in the second verse so absurdly far that the music drops out and it becomes a dark murder fantasy, while making it sound totally natural and even funny, all so that he can find a rhyme for the word “bitch” – and in doing so validates the whole project. The Love Below could’ve been so good with an editor, but we have these two shining singles and a scattered assortment of other good bits. It’s hard to get too mad at a man tearing himself apart, no matter how uneven the results.
Speakerboxxx, Big Boi’s half of the project, is even easier to like. Three increasingly wild solo albums later, we can dispense with the fantasy that Big Boi is as traditional and grounded as we all pretended he was. He just happens to have a sound that intersected well with the sound of mainstream hip-hop in 2003. He also has a sense of how to compact and do justice to his good ideas instead of letting them get away from him. “GhettoMusick,” the album’s opening salvo, covers a lot of ground – by the time Big Boi starts rapping, we’ve already gone through a blistering chorus and mellow interlude section – but he keeps it moving, swapping out the numerous parts whenever one threatens to get boring and putting a lid on it just short of four minutes in. “GhettoMusick” begins an eight-song run of more-or-less flawless music. These songs sometimes let their choruses go on too long, but it’s hardly a problem, because they are in fact wonderful choruses, and when they snap back to Big Boi rapping – rapid-fire, complex, so caught up in its own message that he doesn’t care if you don’t get it at first – it’s bracing and thrilling.
Amid the flurry of rapping that Big Boi busts out, one song sticks out to me: “The Rooster.” Here, he talks about trying to be a father to his oldest son (“Round two, a single parent, what is Big to do? Throw a party? Not hardly, I’m trying to stay up outta that womb”) and even describes trying to change his child’s diapers. The spectacle of a respected Southern rapper talking about his son peeing on him speaks of a different relationship to, well, relationships than Andre has. Big Boi was by this time married to Sherlita Patton (who he’s still married to! Yay!) and the sense of maturity and stability permeates Speakerboxxx. Big Boi here is a guy who knows what he wants and is utterly at peace with his place as a rapper, father, and celebrity. He even puts his son Bamboo on an interlude, egging him on to drop a freestyle. You can hear the paternal affection and genuine care that he gives his son, who manages to crack him up just as much as fluster him.
Far be it for me to chalk up the differences between these two deeply different rappers (who were nonetheless born to make music together) up to the state of their love lives, but especially with Andre, the topic invites itself. The standard critical line on Speakerboxxx / The Love Below is that Speakerboxxx is the better album while The Love Below is at least an admirable effort redeemed by two world-conquering singles. Put together it’s a big, messy, triumphant package that captures the summer of 2003 like few other albums do.
The Verdict:
Well – I already gave it away. It’s Aquemini, the massive statement coming from two rappers who were distinct yet vibing on the same wavelength. But I really have to emphasize that as a front-to-back experience, Speakerboxxx is just a joy, certainly the album you’d put on to have a good time. Aquemini, though, cannot be topped. I declare the come-up album the winner this week.
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