How Outkast Ahead of Your Time
In our latitudes, the Outkast duo always knew the public from exactly one song (which, however, absolutely everyone knows), well, and occasionally someone might recall the single from the multi-platinum “Stankonia” about Mrs. Jackson and the bombs on Baghdad . Interestingly, at some point in the United States, they were no longer recognized in the same way – in 2014, hipsters gathering for Coachella found Outkast among headliners and were very surprised at the unfamiliar name of the ancient era of the nineties. Their reactions were even devoted to a separate tambler.
In general, when the zero Outkast disintegrated, they were quickly forgotten. This happened because it was very difficult to characterize their cultural heritage in a short, exhaustive way. Public Enemy and N.W.A. rebelled against the system, Tupac and Biggie had the status of martyrs from hip-hop, and Wu-Tang was the progenitor of the entire New York scene, which dominated another decade after the release of their debut album. Big Boi and Andre 3000, on the contrary, avoided social rush, loud beefs and scandals, devoting themselves entirely to expanding the boundaries of the genre.
And the “same” song that went down in history at the very moment when the dudes decided to scatter about their business turned out to be an anomaly – not a natural continuation of their musical ideas, but something completely different. But the same thing would have happened if any other song had become a hit – everything they did was so diverse and in its own way new, and ironically, this craving for experiments and eclecticism of musical ideas in a sense deprived most of the Outkast directory rights to longevity.
Fortunately, we have the opportunity to conduct a small educational program.
ALBUMS
Each new Outkast record was an adventure blockbuster. After “Southernplayalisticadillacmusik”, recorded on guitars and old synthesizers about the adventures of the fashionable pimps of the 70s, “ATLiens” was released – about Big Boy and Andre in the role of aliens carrying MAD FUTURE to earthlings. Then, retro aesthetics returned to Aquemini, now inspired by the Black Panthers and other political movements for the rights of black. “Stankonia” absorbed all of the above – carnival of images, harsh social rhetoric, inspired by street “common sense”, and futuristic (and at the same time referring to the black classics) sound.
In other words, Andre and Big Boy did the same thing in the 90s that Kanye started doing a decade later – they reinvented themselves again and again each time it seemed that all the frames were already broken and all borders were crossed.
SONG ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF FEMALE ORGASM
Yes, yes, they had such a song! Andre 3000 and Big Boy thoroughly (and at the same time with humor) spoke about all the things that were considered important – also about Roma, aliens, proper parenting, technophobia, fear of the Apocalypse and racial politics in the US (this is only for one and only Aquemini album) . In fact, of course, it was a track (like many others among them) about human values - love, understanding and honesty. Conservative and afraid to seem frivolous gangsta rappers of the nineties often forgot about them, for example.
CONCLUSION
Outkast released a ton of great songs that didn’t look like anything at that time, and then broke up – a couple of years before the advent of hip-hop, when criminal ghetto narratives began to go into the shadows, and here and there they began to appear ideological followers and imitators. And a couple of years ago, Andre 3000 said that rap had exhausted himself for him, and he was no longer interested, and now rap has become the main driving force of pop culture, supplanting absolutely everything else. There is a high probability that when Ilon Mask builds a flying saucer and flies to get acquainted with aliens, it turns out that Andre has already discussed everything with them for a long time.
