I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this
from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist
is allowed.
Go to 73
“If you're gonna do anything at all, do it. If you're gonna push it, push it."
Straight-up inspiration there from OutKast’s Andre 3000. Until you realise that he was talking about the US’s 1998 bombing campaign in Iraq. The rapper thought the Clinton administration’s attempts to coerce Saddam Hussein into allowing full weapons inspections were half-assed. What kind of message were you sending by “degrading” a few minor military targets?
When OutKast sent a message, they spoke at full volume.
The 1995 Source Awards are notorious for Suge Knight’s baiting of Puff Daddy and the general animosity between hip-hop’s East and West coast factions that would in time lead to the murders of Tupac and Biggie.
In the midst of this mayhem, Atlanta duo Big Boi and Andre 3000 headed to the stage to collect the award for Best New Rap Group. Jeers erupted from the charged and hostile crowd. Andre 3000 had enough. In 30 seconds of barely concealed frustration and fury, he castigated the hip-hop community’s closed-mindedness and proclaimed: “the South’s got something to say”.
Those six words became a rallying cry for a whole swathe of Southern producers and rappers who had long felt ignored by the dominant New York and Los Angeles scenes. Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike said the speech cut the umbilical cord tying young hip-hop artists to the music’s mother cities. It convinced the South to go its own way.
25 years later, hip-hop’s sounds and styles, its drawls and dances, rhythms and rhymes are mostly of Southern origin. The influence of NY and LA was crushed by GA, TX, SC and FL.
The South went bang and it was OutKast who pulled out the pin.
Blowing up
OutKast’s Source Award had come on the back of their distinctive debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. The title of follow-up record ATLiens was a declaration of independence, proudly signposting both the group’s home city and their status as outsiders, beaming strange new sounds down to planet hip-hop.
The duo went even further with 1998’s Aquemini, pairing the psychedelia of George Clinton’s Mothership with the bounce of Atlanta’s crunk music to create a truly distinctive world. The South was now speaking a different language that everyone else desperately wanted to learn.
Yet as the 20th century drew to a close, Big Boi and Andre 3000 felt disillusioned with hip-hop all over again. Other artists were content to imitate the new sounds that OutKast had helped to disseminate. An ice-age had descended because rappers had nothing to say other than how big their diamonds were. It was time to blow everything up again.
When OutKast retreated to a new studio to record their fourth album, Big Boi and Andre 3000 had stopped listening to hip-hop. Instead they were steeping themselves in the sounds of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix and Prince. Looking back at the innovators for inspiration on making the music of the future.
Having bought the studio off Bobby Brown, OutKast renamed it Stankonia and established it as “a place where you can open yourself up and be free to express anything”. As long as you had something new to say, a new sound to explore.
Stankonia the album opens with Big Boi bemoaning all those other artists copying the Atlanta sound who “ain’t even from the A-town”. Then in comes the ferociously bouncy Gasoline Dreams to show them how to do it right. But at the same time, they’re torching that sound, clearing the way for something new: “burn motherfucker”.
What follows is truly remarkable. No-one in hip-hop sounded as fresh or clean as So Fresh, So Clean. No-one had ever written a heartfelt apology to their baby mama’s mama like Ms. Jackson. And no-one had ever dropped anything as explosive as B.O.B.
1…2…1…2…3
The quiet twinkling bells at the beginning of B.O.B. give no indication of what’s to come. Except maybe (1) there’s an unusual (2) intensity to them (1) that suggests something (2) is about to (3)…WHAT THE FUCK?
There’s a blast of broken beats cut with chopped up bass blazing away at 155 BPM. At first it feels like the familiar Atlanta bounce but there’s a lot more going on. Andre 3000 said he was inspired by the drum’n’bass he heard in clubs while on tour in London and wanted to make a hip-hop track that reflected the times.
He didn’t just mean the underground sounds of the late 90s. The impending turn of the century was making the world feel frantic. The ferocious assault of B.O.B. is the sound of “people in the street losing their minds – that’s the tempo”.
The pace of the beats is easily matched by the rappers. Andre 3000 leads with a breathless flow that references Prince, the AIDS epidemic, cooking crack and buying nappies before Big Boi unleashes a torrent of outrageously good wordplay and relentless rhyming.
In between is an insane chorus with Andre 3000 restating his “if you’re gonna push, push it” sentiment as the warlike “don’t pull the thang out unless you plan to bang", while a gospel choir chants the hook “bombs over Baghdad”.
The latter lyric is another idea picked up in London. Andre 3000 recalls hearing a BBC newsreader use the phrase while in the UK on tour in 1998 – presumably while reporting on that year’s bombing campaign in Iraq. Yet, the rapper claims no political intent, saying he just like the sound of the words and knew he’d find a use for them somewhere.
When he did, it was to castigate hip-hop for its lack of ambition and fire. It was an urgent warning about lazy sampling and consumptive raps, a challenge to create truly explosive music like his heroes from the past. B.O.B. heads for the stratosphere and waits to see if other artists dare follow.
This intention didn’t stop the song becoming entangled with a more martial meaning. Following the controversial 2003 invasion of Iraq, B.O.B. was coopted by pro-war supporters with US soldiers reportedly singing the hook as they celebrated victories in battle. Tennis player, Jennifer Capriati started using the song as her entrance music in order to show her support for her nation’s troops.
The band were ambivalent about this interpretation. Years later Big Boi said that while he didn’t like the song’s coopting by hawks, he never spoke out because he believes that people should take whatever meaning they want from a record. And now there were more and more people to do that with OutKast’s music.
Stankonia was a hit, in large part due to the success of the Ms. Jackon single and video, which pushed OutKast into the mainstream. Three years later, as the US was once more dropping bombs over Baghdad, Andre 3000 and Big Boi dropped their biggest records yet. The singles Hey Ya and I Like the Way You Move both reached the top of the US charts, with the former becoming one of the 21st century’s most iconic songs.
Yet they also foretold the end of OutKast. Each track is a solo performance and the lead single from a pair of distinct albums, Speakerboxx/The Love Below, created by the rappers individually but released as one OutKast double album. The signs of separation were not new. Much of Stankonia was created independently, while the pair had their own buses on the subsequent live tour.
While there are stories of conflict between the rappers about the music they were making, the gradual uncoupling was amicable and simply a manifestation of what Andre 3000 called OutKast’s commitment to “personal expression and individualism. They remained critical editors and sounding boards for each other’s songs, with Big Boi especially key in ensuring that Andre 3000’s experimental instincts still resulted in music that people wanted to listen to.
Invitation to the future
That blend of trying something new while also filling a dancefloor is exemplified by the second half of B.O.B. After a repetition of the chorus, the breakbeats are dismantled further while a guitar wails through a truly wild solo that would have Jimi Hendrix and Prince nodding their heads in approval.
Next come some manic record scratches, bringing the unique sound of hip-hop’s formative years to its fresh eclectic future. Then the beats drop out and Andre 3000 starts up a new chant: “bob your head, rag top”, a reference to a popular ATL dance style. One mantra is replaced by another as the gospel choir returns chanting “power music electric revival”.
While this is something you might expect to hear on a George Clinton record, there’s no nostalgia here. The revival is not a reversion. What could be regression becomes progression. This is a call-to-arms. OutKast are laying down a marker. Now it’s up to everyone to take things from here and push it.
A beat returns but no longer the broken beat assault of before, instead it’s a more measured, open rhythm. This is a new message, an invitation to the world. Here is where you come in. Whatever style, whatever sound, whatever tempo, whatever time – it’ll fit nicely here. Just as long as it bangs.
Speaking of which...
If you like this, try:
Rosa Parks
So Fresh, So Clean
Ms Jackson
Hey Ya
Roses
I Like the Way You Move
Shutterbug - Big Boi
(I could go on)
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