Who: Atlanta’s most adventurous hip-hop duo of all time, OutKast
Album: Stankonia (click here to listen while you read)
Released: October 31, 2000
Why it’s important to you: “I need more of you in my life.”—Ottie, Brooklyn, NY
Their story: Antwan “Big Boi” Patton claims that his approach to making music has remained virtually unchanged since he and André “3000” Benjamin formed OutKast in Atlanta some 20 years ago.
“You just gotta make organic stuff that you’re gonna feel good about,” he says, looking back on his career. “It’s about staying true to what you do and not following trends. That’s the key to longevity. Even with my album now, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty”—and, yes, Big Boi, 35, recites the complete title, thereby ensuring that we don’t confuse his excellent new solo joint with some other Sir Lucious Left Foot out there—“it’s just a reflection of the best music I know how to make.”
And, sure, maybe it’s that simple. But even Patton will allow that he and André were up to something special while at work on Stankonia, the 2000 album that launched OutKast from Southern-rap staples to worldwide pop stars. “By the time we got to that one we actually had our own studio, so we could record whenever we wanted to,” Big Boi says. “We didn’t have to wait for somebody to leave the room. We’d work for days and weeks at a time, from four in the afternoon to seven in the morning.”
That newfound freedom, Big Boi says, resulted in an album that was less about he and André’s tag-team partnership, and more about a sort of brotherly competition. “On Aquemini we spent a lot of time in different studios together,” he says of OutKast’s 1998 disc. “We was camped out all over the place. With Stankonia we was in the same studio but in different rooms. So it was more like, ‘Look what I got!’ ‘No, look what I got!’ We was each trying to surprise the other one with what we had.”
A decade later, Stankonia is still full of such surprises. Cuts like “B.O.B.” and “Gasoline Dreams” throb with an aggressive, punk-informed energy yet somehow slot naturally alongside smoother tracks like “So Fresh, So Clean” and “I’ll Call Before I Come,” the latter a sly funk jam about the lost art of gentlemanly lovemaking. Stankonia also features its fair share of hard-edged Dirty South hip-hop (“Gangsta Shit,” “Snappin’ & Trappin’”), psychedelic soul (“Toilet Tisha,” “Slum Beautiful”) and whatever we’re calling the genre OutKast invented with “Ms. Jackson,” that unforgettable apology to one babymama’s disapproving mama.
In many ways, Stankonia was a complete re-invention for the duo, which is precisely what Andre and Big Boi would become known for in the years that followed. “For the most part we, as listeners, simply fall victim to what I refer to as ‘assembly-line syndrome,’” says Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green, who contributed guest vocals to “Slum Beautiful” and recognizes as much as anybody how Outkast have been able to transcend hip-hop’s tight boundaries with each release. “A visionary mind like André 3000, who just embodies so many different influences and aspirations, doesn’t get into it thinking, ‘Lemme see how I can do multiple versions of the same thing.’ For him it basically boils down to: ‘How many different things can I do and do well?’”
Prior to its release, the press reaction to Stankonia was incredible—as well as immediate. “I remember being on a couple of listserv groups,” says longtime SPIN music editor Charles Aaron, “[and] it was like you could hear people screaming through their messages—like, ‘Holy fucking shit! You’ve got to hear this!’ People were naming things after the songs, using quotations as their sign-offs. It made the world feel really big—and really intimate—at the same time.”
OutKast produced the bulk of Stankonia themselves, but they received help on a handful of cuts (including “So Fresh, So Clean”) from Organized Noize, the Atlanta production crew with close ties to that city’s extended Dungeon Family collective. Rico Wade of Organized Noize remembers the band being completely self-sufficient by the time he got into the studio with them. “Aquemini was really them doing them,” Wade stresses. “So for the next album they was like, ‘We got ’em now, so let’s make up something new. Let’s not just talk about reality—let’s really go out there.’ And their confidence came through. They were so creatively different and so fresh that we as Organized Noize had to keep up.”
According to Wade, “So Fresh, So Clean” represented an attempt to keep OutKast connected to where they came from while still maintaining Stankonia’s next-level experimentalism. “We didn’t want their original fans to say, ‘Damn, they changed,’” Wade says. “It reminded you of [OutKast’s 1994 debut] Southernplayalisticcadillacmuzik and let you know, ‘Okay, we on some outer-space shit now, but we still know what we do.’”
When it came to the album’s singles, Big Boi says he and André insisted on releasing “B.O.B.” first, despite the fact that the band’s label had misgivings about the guitar-streaked song’s commercial potential. “We wanted to give the game a big shock, like a defibrillator,” Big Boi says. “Everything seemed the same at that point, and we wanted to crank it back up and kick the door in. What better way to do that than with that power music?”
In the end, Stankonia topped dozens of year-end lists in 2000, including the Village Voice’s comprehensive Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. But Big Boi says critical acclaim was “never a big deal” to OutKast. “We always want ’em to dig it, and we acknowledge that it’s dope that they think it’s dope. But whether or not the fans love it, that’s what important. And the fans loved it.”
These days the primary concern of most OutKast fans is whether or not the duo will ever release another album. Not counting their iffy soundtrack to 2006’s Idlewild film, the group’s last album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, actually arrived as a two-CD set comprised of one Big Boi disc and one André 3000 disc. Earlier this year, Big Boi also released his first official solo album and continues to perform Outkast songs live. (He’ll be streaming one such show, right here on MySpace, on August 18th.)
But it makes you wonder: Could it be that Stankonia represented both the beginning and the end of OutKast’s hugely rewarding brotherly competition? Could that really have been it? “They’re such intelligent guys that they have to realize how much of an audience there is for them,” says Aaron. “I really do have faith that they’ll appreciate what they have and take advantage of it. They’ve also seen that getting back together is what groups do now. I mean, OutKast reunites and they’ll headline every festival of 2011 or 2012, make millions of dollars, make the best record of the year and just make everyone’s lives better in general.”
“That duality is still there,” Cee-Lo says. “It’s the yin and the yang, the reason why they’re able to coexist. They complement each other more than they contradict each other. They represent the life we’d all like to lead: Being yourself next to someone else.”
