100 Best Albums
- 29 SEPT 1998
- 16 Songs
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
- ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) · 2021
Essential Albums
- Speakerboxxx/The Love Below put Outkast in the company of Prince and The Beatles in making pop music that appealed to tens of millions of people, while still feeling as unusual and specific as art. Trust the elders on this: There was not a single wedding/house party/sporting event/graduation/Bar-or-Bat Mitzvah in 2003 or ’04 at which you didn’t hear “Hey Ya!” or “The Way You Move” or probably both, not to mention see everyone from toddlers to the very elderly dancing to them. This was as universal as pop culture got, and if it hadn’t happened already, the moment where it felt like hip-hop became the dominant sound in popular music. On a more granular level, the songs pointed the way to where certain aspects of the culture were going: “The Way You Move“ anticipating the hybrid of rap and R&B that led to Beyoncé and Drake, “Hey Ya!” bringing an “indie” feel into mainstream pop in ways you can still hear in Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey. And that’s only two of the album’s songs. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below wasn’t hip-hop’s first double album—Biggie’s posthumous Life After Death felt like an epic; 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me was more than two hours long—but it was arguably the first time a hip-hop group had explored how rangy and weird a double album could be—and we don’t just mean the André stuff, either. “GhettoMusick”, “Tomb of the Boom”, the big-band feel of “Bowtie” and “The Rooster”: This stuff sounded nothing like anything else in hip-hop at the time, whether mainstream, underground or otherwise, and like, yes, Prince circa Sign O’ The Times, drew curling, swirling connections through the history of Black pop in ways that felt both visionary and effortless. Of course, for pure eccentricity, you can’t do better than “Spread” or “Roses” or “Dracula’s Wedding”, all of which bubble along with the unstable brilliance of a bright mind with a lot of resources chasing their weird ideas to the limits of their imagination—because that’s what they are. Outkast outdid themselves. And bittersweet as it is to say, they didn’t do it again.
- Who else but rap’s most fearlessly creative duo could open their biggest album with a bonfire of American dreams? Outkast’s fourth LP may have launched them into the mainstream, but there’s nothing safe about it: Even its most populist track, “Ms. Jackson”, is a glitchy, galactic soul number about a messy divorce. The collection is peppered with slo-mo funk cuts (“Toilet Tisha”), neo-soul steppin’ anthems (“Humble Mumble”) and political drum ’n’ bass rap (“B.O.B.”). There is no genre, no “mainstream versus underground”—there is only groove.
- 100 Best Albums Regarded by many as the greatest Southern rap album ever, 1998’s Aquemini is the connective tissue between Outkast’s beginnings as regional hip-hop heroes and the duo’s full-fledged pop stardom. While their first two LPs featured no shortage of André 3000 and Big Boi’s tongue-twisting rhymes and the Dungeon Family collective’s off-kilter beats (courtesy of Organized Noize and themselves), Aquemini was the creative leap forward that turned an already critically acclaimed group into thought leaders of the hip-hop avant-garde. Long jam sessions with a rotating cast of live musicians yielded their lushest music and most adventurous arrangements to that point; lyrically, the pair began exploring different avenues of creative thought. But instead of breaking up the band, they leaned into that duality while giving the music a singular cohesive vision. Big Boi (an Aquarius) remained vivid in his tales of harsh street realities, while André 3000 (a Gemini) began embracing more conscious material and flights of kalimba. Together, as Big Boi raps in “Return of the ‘G’”, “We worked for everything we have and gon’ stick up for each other, like we brothers from another mother/Kind of like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.” Produced mostly by the duo and Mr. DJ, Aquemini’s sound is a mix of the distinctly Southern and the distinctly alien. Nowhere is this more apparent than the single “Rosa Parks”, which is built on hollow snares and punishing bass but beams with earthy acoustic guitars and a harmonica solo courtesy of André’s stepfather, Pastor Robert Hodo. Or take the “Da Art of Storytellin’” suite: “Pt. 1” tells tales of earthly vice over a head-bobbing swirl, while “Pt. 2” speaks of the apocalypse through mountains of distortion. Elsewhere, slower songs like the title track, the indelible “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and the sprawling jam “Liberation” shimmer like an update on the opulent arrangements of Isaac Hayes or Earth, Wind & Fire. It’s an album that prophesied the future of Atlanta—a misunderstood scene that was once dismissed as “regional”, but eventually became the center of the rap universe itself.
- You can’t talk about ATLiens without talking about André 3000 getting up at the 1995 Source Awards and saying, “The South got something to say.” Not only did it mark the beginning of a tidal shift in the role the South played in hip-hop (whether it was Master P or Juvenile or Big Tymers or Ludacris or Lil Jon or countless others), it told you something crucial about who Outkast were and how they handled themselves. Yes, they were laid-back and a little spiritual and at the very least coming in at an angle more oblique than Biggie or Tupac, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know how to be hard when hard was necessary. If anything, it was that sense of groundedness that made their more cosmic sides digestible in the first place—like, coming from them, you could believe it in a way that flightier artists might give you pause. “Softly as if I played the piano in the dark/Found a way to channel my anger, now to embark,” André starts a verse on “ATLiens”, ending on the image of his creativity as a gun that never runs out of ammunition. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik is great, but this is when they really arrive. The beats are richer (“Elevators (Me and You)”), the rapping more complex (“Wheelz of Steel”), the imagery both more sci-fi-futuristic but also more deeply rooted in the jazz and gospel that gave Black America something to lean on when racism—whether institutional or otherwise—had taken away pretty much everything else (“13th Floor/Growing Old”, “Babylon”). This was music you could party with if you wanted to party, and think with if you wanted to think, not to mention an album in the novelistic, front-to-back way Prince and Bruce Springsteen made albums. In the end, where they came from couldn’t have mattered less—and that’s part of what made them matter so much.
- This is how it starts: Two teenagers in the Tri-Cities High School cafeteria figuring out how to express themselves through rap. The year is 1992. Not only is Atlanta not yet the global centre of hip-hop it eventually becomes, it’s barely on the map. Or, as the venerated rap magazine The Source puts it in their July 1994 four-and-a-half-out-of-five-mic review (halfway between “slammin’—definite satisfaction” and “a hip-hop classic”) of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik: “The South has always posed a problem for most hip-hoppers. No matter what they accomplish, we’re hard-pressed to give the South its due.” OK—at least they were honest about their prejudice. It turns out the real problem with Outkast wasn’t Outkast, but the culture into which they were received: Five years after De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and four after A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, the idea of smart, emotionally intelligent, slightly left-of-centre Black men was still a hard sell for a lot of hip-hop listeners, or at least exotic in a way that stuck out no matter how low-key the music itself was. Throw in the fact that tracks like “Ain’t No Thang” and “Player’s Ball” seemed as attuned to the violent, party-ready side of rap as the thoughtful, introspective one was confusing: Yeah, it made them three-dimensional human beings—but were these three-dimensional human beings gangstas or nerds? At the time, writers and listeners made a big deal about how supposedly different the album sounded, but the reality is that Outkast and the incredible pool of talent that made up the production team Organized Noize and house band/collective the Dungeon Family wasn’t all that different from what Dr Dre was doing on The Chronic: funky, live-band-oriented hip-hop as connected to classic R&B as electro and hip-hop. Not only did they open the door for the South (starting with their friends in Goodie Mob), they set a precedent for generations of artists who fell outside the harmful-if-convenient stereotypes about how Black male hip-hop artists were supposed to present, from Pharrell to Frank Ocean on down. The easy story to tell is that Big Boi and André 3000 were some kind of odd couple, the steely hustler on one hand and the weirdo dreamer on the other. The realer story is that they both managed to capture the sometimes-bitter, sometimes-sweet realities of their daily lives while also suggesting a cosmic place beyond them. “I’m putting it down like it be hot before we all get shot,” André raps on “Crumblin’ Erb”. “Got only so much time in this bastard.” Now that anyone can understand.
Albums
Artist Playlists
- These ATLiens convinced the world that the South had something to say.
- Their videos are playful and poetic, true to ATLien form.
- Pop music's a slightly stranger animal thanks to this duo.
- Genre hopping with the two eclectic ATLiens.
Live Albums
Compilations
More To Hear
- Twenty years ago, an instant-classic video got its flowers.
- A mind-altering hit of psychedelic proto-trap.
- Estelle chats with Big Boi on the LP’s 25th anniversary.
- Celebrating the music of two massive game changers.
- Celebrating the music of two massive game changers.
- Jams from Outkast, Stevie Wonder, Jackson 5, and Donna Summer.
About Outkast
Back before rappers in the American South got the respect of their East and West Coast contemporaries, Outkast raised the bar for lyricism, originality and creativity. "The South got something to say," André 3000 proclaimed at the 1995 Source Awards as he and Big Boi accepted the award for Best New Rap Group. Atlanta natives André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, both born in 1975, met as teenagers rapping in their school cafeteria before forming a duo and connecting with local producers Organized Noize. Their 1994 debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik—punctuated by a silky single, "Player's Ball"—was a coming-of-age depiction of the pimps, rides and aura of their hood. With thick drawls and lucid lyrics over soulful instrumentation, Outkast continued their art of storytelling with three almost instantly classic follow-ups, ATLiens, Aquemini and Stankonia. Each record offered more amorphous flows and endless imagination than the one before it, with bars promoting non-violence and perseverance, perhaps most explicitly spelled out on socially conscious standout "Humble Mumble". Over time, they played up their complementary personalities: André's poetic pensiveness and eccentricity shined, as Big Boi excelled at quick-witted slick talk. And those contrasts blossomed on 2003's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album featuring Big Boi's funk-infused hip-hop and André's Prince and Jimi Hendrix-inspired ballads. After winning the Grammys' highest honour (Album of the Year) for their ambitious efforts—making them the second rap act to do so—Outkast released the soundtrack to their 1930s-era musical film, Idlewild, then took a break. Since, Big Boi has released lively solo albums, while André goes wherever his spirit takes him. It may be tough to imagine, but before ATL became one of the major hubs of rap music, it was Outkast who convinced out-of-towners that the A was already on the map.
- ORIGIN
- Atlanta, GA, United States
- FORMED
- 1992
- GENRE
- Hip-Hop/Rap