There’s very little to say about it, which is in large part why it stands out.
On an album that tastes overdone where the rest of OutKast bleeds rare (or at least medium-rare), “N2U” shines, and simply. So what follows is one longtime fan’s opinion. That fierce, false insistence that alone, you are enough.Ĭonsidering the depth of OutKast’s catalog, cherrypicking 10 songs is something of a masochistic endeavor, mitigated only by the sheer pleasure of immersing oneself in all that amazing music in order to make such decisions with authority and confidence. But in its sad, stuck, recurring harmonies, it had become what it remains in Big Boi’s work now: hard - not just any will, but the determination that gets you out of bed after a breakup, or on the dance floor without a date. Though Big Boi has remained the more prolific of the two, it’s still clear that he did not absorb the sensuality - the heart - of Andre’s leaps forward on The Love Below and Idlewild.įor a super-close duo who have not reunited on a track of their own in seven years, the question is clear: “If what they say is, ‘Nothing is forever,’/ then what makes love the exception?” The brazen self-assurance of their music remained until their last real collaboration, 2006’s Idlewild. Apologies, disavowals, partings, epiphanies, infidelities, and deviancies crowd OutKast’s lyrics.Īpparent even on Frank Ocean’s fresh “Pink Matter” remix, on which both Andre and Big Boi rap, they did not fall into the realization together.
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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