No group has consistently gotten it right like OutKast. They can be moving emotionally, but they can make other key body parts move too. It all comes together on "Stankonia," which manages once again to give progressive hip-hop a good name.
The album's secret sauce is its understanding that music matters more than beats. You get the feeling producers Organized Noize only listen to mainstream rap to learn what not to do. Case in point being the sensory-overload smart bomb "B.O.B.," will either get you playing air guitar or give you an epileptic fit. It'll freak anyone within 50 paces out and it's my pick for single of the year.
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Conceptually, OutKast's fourth album is a bit more down-to-earth than its third album "Aquemini." They start the album throwing gasoline on the American dream, and search for answers on "Stankonia," presumably a planet in which the usual myopic dismissals of hip-hop get smashed.
No rap act tries harder than OutKast, and even the most die-hard fans will get lost in the sauce here.
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While "Slum Beautiful" twirls psychedelic guitars over sincere pillow-talk quite nicely, other experiments don't exactly work out. "Snappin & Trappin'" mires in gangsta-isms, while the altogether draining quiet-storm closer "Stanklove" fits in the same fast-forward category as Southernplayalistic's "Funky Ride."
Dre earns the title of most eloquent man dressed like a genie, or a drum major, and the CD booklet is a must-have for this year's fashion. In "Gasoline Dreams," which might as well be an instruction manual for rap-metal losers, Dre grounds his point in over wah-wah madness: "The highway up to heaven got a crook on the toll / Youth full of fire and got nowhere to go."
OutKast has always had perspective, ever since they railed against the S.A.T.s on their first album. But while "scholars" like Common are often concerned with more-real-than-thou condescension, OutKast's genius lies in its ability to extrapolate the problems of hip-hop into more worldly terms.
"If you want a revolution, start with your corner," Big Boi advises on the shifty samba "Humble Mumble." And OutKast does, suffusing its intellectualism not with just the dismissal of wack MCs, but with articulate street poetics.
"Red Velvet" dissects the fear and loathing of rap stardom, claiming that those who bling-bling should "do it with some class," or as Dre puts it, "Bill Gates don't dangle diamonds in the face / Of peasants when he's Microsoftin' in the place."
But if Dre is OutKast's deep threat, than Big Boi is the flashy ground game. Adopting the handle Billy Ocean, he entices females to get out of his dreams and into his car on the mackadocious "So Fresh, So Clean." He achieves new heights in gaudy pimp talk, claiming he's "cooler than Freddy Jackson sippin' a milkshake in a snowstorm," and more into "Three's Company" than Jack Tripper.
"Stankonia" questions whether or not OutKast is too experimental for its own good, suggesting it is taking hip-hop places it is not yet prepared to go. But experimental as it is, the album only proves the lasting talent of the rappers.
"Aquemini" was as close to perfect as rap albums get, and "Stankonia" is probably the best album OutKast could make to follow it. And if this sort of brilliance is not up to Dre and Big Boi's high standards, then what does that say for the rest of hip-hop?
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