Andre 3000 brought wicked sartorial flair, an ace producer’s ear for cool sounds, and Buzzcocks. Big Boi brought common sense, hooks, and Kate Bush. Together with a galaxy of collaborators like Sleepy Brown, Mr. DJ, Rico Wade, and Ray Murray, Outkast recorded some of the richest hip-hop of its era — they’re sentimental in surprising ways, almost cute. I love them. I miss them.
1. Aquemini (1998)
A benchmark of studio craft and imagination. Every song offers an aural bauble. About the spoken passages in “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” Andre later said: “Instead of spoken word, Big likes to call it ‘smokin’ word.’ That was his smokin’ word.” This sums up Aquemini, an album on which Outkast rivaled white bands like XTC and a certain Liverpudlian quartet. “Skew It On the Bar-B” is a model for how disparate rappers can push each other to fascinating ends. The harmonica break over that tap dance beat in “Rosa Parks” is beamed in from an imaginary 1932 in Jawjuh. On “Synthesizer,” George Clinton, teleported from Chocolate City, offers one of the tautest quips in an album full of them: “Said she’d lap dance on your laptop while your laptop’s in your lap.”
2. Speakerboxx (2004)
Throw your fuckin’ neck out listening to the superior first half of Outkast’s 2004 double album monster. In top form, Big Boi leads guests from Jay Z and Killer Mike to Cee Lo through a tour of black American music since 1970: psychedelia, soul, rattling synth blues. Yet the simplest moment is among its strongest, a collaboration with Andre (“Knowing) whose chorus warns listeners what to expect from The Love Below (“From this point on, it only gets harder”). Until 2006 I considered my favorite Outkast release. I mean, “Ghetto Musick”?
3. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik (1994)
Re-discovering this album inspired this list. What a fun record! Too often overlooked in favor of their output after 1996, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik is the only Outkast album on which Andre and Big Boi had no hand producing; they were still learning how to work in a studio, how to amalgamate influences, the most prominent of which is West Coast gangsta, The Chronic edition: “Ain’t No Thing” takes the it-was-a-good-day ethos to Atlanta for chicken waangs, and “Claimin’ True” weaves keyboard swirls, whistles, and organ trills into a backing track that mimics a police siren. But its attention to geographic detail places it in the company of Buhloone Mindstate, Reachin’… , and Illmatic; this is a world they created, into which we have a God’s-eye point of view. “Call of the Wild” gives Goodie Mob a lectern from which to explain our fucked up educational system to white folks in Buckhead (“You know you fucked up when you let my mind creep,” Andre boasts on “D.E.E.P.”). The bass-heavy “Hootie Hoo” returns to straight male adolescent pleasures. If Outkast had flamed out after “Player’s Ball,” they would still be remembered.
4. Stankonia (2000)
I had a problem with their pop breakthrough, I’ll be damned if I can remember why — too dense? The chonkyfire guitar on “Gasoline Dreams,” Erykah Badu’s hypnotic cameo on “Humble Mumble,” Andre rapping, “Blindfolds can’t cover three eyes” on “Spaghetti Junction,” every frantic moment of “B.O.B.,” Kim and Cookie dishing about gettin’ (small) dick at the club. Oh, right: “the back half drags,” I’d said. “Red Velvet” and especially “Toilet Tisha” refutes this stupid notion.
5. ATLiens (1996)
A line from Aquemini‘s “West Savannah” best applies to the approach two years earlier: “Sade’s in my tape deck/I’m moving in slow motion, boy. Their sparest release boasts an aural warmth belied by the cold precision of the duo’s rhymes (“Millennium”) and putdowns (“Lookin’ up in your face I see a coward and a dimwit” goes my favorite bit in “Decatur Psalm,” way before a choir steals the song in the last third). “Jazzy Belle” deserves frequenter mentions as one of their best singles despite the cruelty of the portrait (“Toilet Tisha” two albums later will mitigate their secondhand misogyny). Some of their silliest, awesomest rhymes too (“That ain’t hip-hop/you find that shit in the gift shop”). When I recall how the backward drums and Pornography-era Cure synth on “Ms Jackson” startled me in late 2000, it astonishes me that I forget how strange “Elevators” sounded in summer ’96.
6. Idlewild (2006)
“Hollywood Divorce” and “Morris Brown” remain endearing oddballs; there are less rewarding ways to spend the millions that Outkast earned from Speakerboxx/The Love Below than on a Tusk whose stylistic hopscotching doesn’t sound like an end in itself.
Humanizing The Vacuum 