Of the songs that aren’t just lyrical or dance floor victories, most grasp at dreams destroyed: not waiting for intimacy, but after it. While particular genres might dramatize romance at the behest of an available mood, OutKast has grown and grown and grown beyond that, into a level of hardness that is actually quite sad: one that rejects the possibility of love, yet bows to every move of the opposite sex. As OutKast grew closer to uniting the two, their depictions of lovers changed from the “hos” mindlessly populating Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik to the emasculating, problematic bedmate of “Where Are My Panties?” on The Love Below. R&B, on the other hand, celebrates seduction and the interplay between vulnerability and strength. Rap, particularly from the South, plays host to masculine bravado more often than not. The Top 40-lovers who know exactly what you shake it like during “Hey Ya” often do not recognize the OutKast of “Player’s Ball” (It warranted a Sean Combs video in its day.) Ladies who lilt at Love Below pillow talk may visibly cringe at the interplanetary soundscapes of ATLiens.Ī 2003 review characterized Atlanta as the “hip-hop id to New York’s ego.” Accordingly these transformations, rather than simply signaling conceptual turns in music-making, serve as foundations to OutKast’s understanding of what real love can be.
Your cape-and-cane Aquemini aficionado might want to slow down the frenetic gun battle that is Stankonia. They stand always in direct opposition to the cooler, jazzier achievements of their peers on the East Coast, who rarely themselves sang, played an instrument, or spoke of emotional attachment in a deep, intelligent way.Īnd so they have come very far with a wild, unpopular model of producing music, so much so that certain OutKast fans only know an album or two well. OutKast have never culled “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” From the lush studio instrumentation (first pioneered in Southern rap by their producers, Organized Noize) to the committed, heretical shamelessness of their beats, Andre 3000 and Big Boi have always explored music-making unapologetically, at the risk of radically revising their sound despite its positive reception. While a stickler might argue that sampling, improvising, and making mixtapes (as opposed to more formal LPs) is more in the rhythm of modern life, OutKast doesn’t buy that. As modern life splintered and proliferated, popular music rushed to catch up to the visual arts, first with the advances of jazz and then with those of its contemporary offspring, hip hop. In roughly the early 1900s, painting dissolved into abstraction and appropriation, and artists working since then have veered away from realism.
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