An Ode to the ATLiens: How Outkast Made Me A Hip-Hop Head

Yesterday, Friday February 24^th, it was revealed in a GQ interview with Andre 3000 that contrary to many rumors, he is not currently working on a 7^th OutKast album, and has no plans on recording another OutKast record.  While this is not an official “breakup”, with Andre’s many interests and general apathy towards Rap in recent years, the writing is pretty clearly on the wall.  This event was the impetus for my following post.

Growing up, I wasn’t much of a Rap fan.  I didn’t have anything against it, I just wasn’t terribly interested in it.  I remember enjoying the occasional Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg track I would see on MTV around the Chronic/Doggystyle era, but for some reason I thought that the only good Rap songs were the ones with videos (cut me some slack, I was between 8-11 years old at the time), so I never really tried to get into the genre.  All the way into my freshman year of high school, my CD collection consisted of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Blink-182, The Offspring, and whatever other rock groups were popular at the time (cut me some slack, I was a generally stupid youth).

Then in the winter of my freshman year, I was watching MTV, and a song called “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” by some group named OutKast popped up on the screen.  Over the course of the next five minutes and four seconds, my mind and all the musical thoughts therein were simultaneously blown to smithereens and shaped towards my future love and obession with Hip-hop.  I wasn’t able to process anything that I’d just heard. Were people really able to rap like that? Was that a guitar solo in the middle there?! Is that a freaking choir?!?!?!  After the song ended, I immediately hopped on Napster and downloaded the song, as well as a couple of the more popular ones there, my curiosity sufficiently piqued to dive in and see what I had been missing.

As I got more and more into hip-hop, and into artists with much different sounds like Mobb Deep, Nas, and Wu-Tang, OutKast was still the gold standard. To this day, I still cite ATLiens as the single greatest album I’ve ever heard.  No matter what track I start with, I am incapable of hitting the skip button until the LP is completed.  Its an incredibly deep album that rewards repeat listens and really makes you think about big, important issues.  This isn’t just background music while you write a paper.  This is “do not disturb”, noise-canceling headphone music, music to be savored and given your full attention to.

For my money, their follow up to ATLiens, Aquemini, is the SECOND best album I’ve ever heard. Aquemini is the album that really made it apparent that Outkast was moving far away from anything that bore resemblance to “traditional” rap music, and ended up opening my mind as well.  One of my favorite tracks off that album, “SpottieOttieDopalicious” is a 7-minute long epic, where the “verses” are just spoken word stories from Andre and Big Boi.  The beat, which OutKast produced themselves, is a 70’s funk throwback, with a heavy bass line and gorgeous trumpets.  The album closes with “Chonkyfire” which is disappointing only because it ends and doesn’t continue on ad infinitum.

The most amazing thing about OutKast is that throughout all the sound changes and subject matter changes the group has gone through, every single one of their proper album releases (aka, dismissing the Idlewild soundtrack) are stone cold, undeniable classics.  Southernplayalisticaddilacmuzik, which was recorded when both Andre and Big Boi were just 18 years old, is still a lyrically impressive album, and revolutionary for being the first southern rap album to use live instrumentation instead of using a sample machine.  Stankonia broke the group into the mainstream with some of the biggest hits of their career with “Ms. Jackson” & “So Fresh, So Clean”.  Speakerboxxx/The Love Below sold over 11 million copies, and was the first Rap album to ever win the Album of the Year award at the Grammys.  The argument can be made that Outkast has had the greatest career of any Rap act in the genre’s history.

All of which makes the news that OutKast is for all intents and purposes finished hurt that much more.  This was the group that served as the gateway to what has turned out to be a lifelong obsession, and a defining moment of my youth.  While both have and promise to continue to be active as solo artists, it’s still not the same.  Big Boi’s solo debut Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty is great, and I eagerly await his 2012 follow up Daddy Fat Sax: Soul Funk Crusader (btw, how awesome are these names? I think we know who came up with “Southernplayalisticaddilacmuzik”) but without Andre, Big Boi’s music doesn’t quite stretch the boundaries of Hip-Hop like Outkast did.  And as The Love Below proved, without Big Boi around to help him keep at least one foot in reality, Andre is liable to record anything BUT a rap album. 

Still, as disappointing as this news is, I’m still incredibly grateful for all the quality music they’ve released and I’ve had the pleasure to listen to.  If Andre 3000 and Big Boi never come together to release a 7^th album, I still have 5 classics and 1 damn good soundtrack to keep me company. 8 hours of the best music in Hip-Hop history is not a shabby legacy to leave behind.

And because I goddamn feel like it, my 20-song Outkast playlist of the first 4 albums, because otherwise limiting it to 20 tracks would be absolutely impossible.

1. Southernplayalisticaddilacmuzik
2. Player’s Ball (Original)
3. Git up, Git Out
4. Hootie Hoo
5. Two Dope Boyz (in a Cadillac)
6. ATLiens
7. Elevators (Me & You)
8. Mainstream
9. 13^th floor/Growing Old
10. Aquemini
11. Slump
12. Da Art of Storytellin’ (Part 1)
13. Da Art of Storytellin’ (Part 2)
14. SpottieOttieDopalicious
15. Chonkyfire
16. Gasoline Dreams
17. So Fresh, So Clean
18. Ms. Jackson
19. B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad) 
20. We Luv Deez Hoez