Bombs squad

OutKast explode hip-hop

by Kelefa Sanneh

In the six years since the wide-open Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik (LaFace/Arista), OutKast have grown more insular, with music that's more complex and lyrics that are increasingly impenetrable. In the process, they've been celebrated as one of the last of a dying breed -- a true album-oriented hip-hop band, willing to experiment with tone, texture, and technology in order to create grand artistic statements.

Confession time: that analysis isn't terribly original. In fact, it's stolen almost verbatim from a review of Kid A (Capitol), the new album by the British art-rock band Radiohead. It probably says something about pop-culture synergy when five spacy lads from far away and a couple of Cadillac-driving, pot-smoking black guys from the dirty South can strike such parallel chords. OutKast have always sounded like brothers from another planet: as their house philosopher, Big Rube, pretentiously once put it, "An OutKast is someone who is not considered to be part of the normal world."

No one could have predicted any of this back in 1993, when the group released their debut single, "Player's Ball," an impeccable slice of Southern hip-hop soul that deftly evoked Christmas in the ghetto. Then things started getting weird. On the 1996 album ATLiens (LaFace/Arista), the group's two MCs, Andre and Big Boi, re-emerged as country-ass space-age visionaries, spitting hyperliterary rhymes on top of stripped-down, echo-soaked beats that owed more to the minimalist studio wizardry of King Tubby than to the sleek funk of Dr. Dre. Big Rube's platitude was starting to make sense: on one particularly disjunctive track, the motor-mouthed Big Boi declared, "I'm thinking of checking my traps/And busting my raps/And throwing my craps," while the neo-naturalist Andre mused, "Trees brighten, green, turn yellow, brown/Autumn caught 'em/See, all those leaves must fall down/Growing old." By the time OutKast had found moderate crossover success with their third effort, the rootsy, eccentric, and near-perfect 1998 album Aquemeni (LaFace/Arista), the secret was out: an alterna-rap outfit was rewriting the rules of hip-hop.

Or so you'd think. See, rap doesn't really work like that. As monolithic as it may seem, the rap world actually thrives on diversity and novelty; innovation is more the rule than the exception. In other words, OutKast live in their own strange world, but so do Jay-Z and Eminem and Mystikal and M.O.P. and Nelly and the Wu-Tang Clan and nearly every other rap act worth talking about. The alternative-versus-mainstream dichotomy that's so much a part of the rock world doesn't really work in the realm of rap, despite labels like "gangsta" and "socially conscious" that critics sometimes deploy to validate their own prejudices. Radiohead's sonic experiments may get them labeled as "anti-rock," the implication being that they've increased the distance between themselves and the rock mainstream. But OutKast's success is a reflection of the truth that, in hip-hop, the avant-garde is never very far from the pop charts.

I suspect that OutKast have been thinking about this alternative-versus-mainstream stuff too, because Stankonia features a posse cut that seems designed to confuse and offend alterna-rap fans. The track is called "Gangsta Shit," and the chorus asks, "Do you really want to know about some gangsta shit?" On planet Stankonia, "gangsta shit" would appear to mean three notes of electric guitar and a dizzying array of rhyme styles. As Andre -- now known as Andre3000 -- puts it, "We'll pull your whole deck/Fuck pulling your card/And still take my guitar, and take a walk in the park/And play the sweetest melody the street ever heard/Now bitches sucking on my nouns, and I'm eating their verbs."

Of course, rappers are always eating verbs and getting their nouns sucked -- as rap enters its fourth decade, overblown rhetoric still pays the bills. When you stop to think about it, the whole enterprise of hip-hop is pretty crazy: rappers spit carefully constructed rhymed couplets while pretending it's the most natural thing in the world, alternately boasting about their exceptional lyrical prowess and confirming their status as tellers of unadorned truths. Stankonia seizes upon this paradox, eschewing conversational delivery for a more self-conscious approach. Words are screamed, sung, shouted, stuttered, or howled; there's falsetto that would make D'angelo swoon, and Andre3000 seems to have fallen in love with a voice processor (from angry god to giggly schoolgirl with a turn of the knob) that shows up on just about every track. There's something ridiculous about the old-school (think 19th-century) poetic conventions that still govern most rap music, and OutKast want to make sure you don't forget it.

Given all these efforts to upset form and convention, all this time spent warping the familiar sound of the human voice into something strange and new, it's hard not to be reminded of those creeps from Oxford. But OutKast's experiments are warmer and greasier than anything Radiohead have yet to cook up on their rainy European isle. Stankonia is an improbably upbeat CD, filled with sex jokes and tall tales and public-service announcements, couched in language so elliptical it sounds like folk wisdom. On "Red Velvet," Andre3000 and Big Boi warn high-rollers against bloodthirsty thieves by singing, "Them dirty boys turn your poundcake to red velvet." Ambient voices drift in and out of the mix; a woman mutters, "Let me take him to the hotel room -- you know how it's gon' go." She's either a groupie or a thief or both, and the ambiguity reflects the twin currents of sex and pride that run through the album.

Stankonia isn't without flaws -- in fact, it's noticeably less perfect than the other three albums that OutKast have released over the past decade. The tuneless posse cut "Snappin' & Trappin'" features some okay computer music, but the chest-thumping verses never quite coalesce into a good song. And "Toilet Tisha" is a wretched synth-ballad about a pregnant teen named, yes, Tisha.

Still, Stankonia does nothing to diminish OutKast's status as the hardest-rocking rap group since Run-DMC. And the best tracks here are as good as anything they've ever released. "Humble Mumble" starts off with a crude drum-machine beat, then explodes into a dazzling live funk workout, as Erykah Badu (Andre3000's ex-wifey) delivers an enigmatic chorus: "Humble as a mumble in the jungle of shouts and screams/That's the way the cracker crumbles so I guess I've got to reroute my dreams." The ecstatic electro-dub confection "Call Before I Come" is a whimsical guide to the etiquette of casual sex ("I won't just pop over out of the blue") that's twice as charming as any hip-hop love song this year. And on "Ms. Jackson," Andre3000 and Big Boi take turns apologizing to "all the baby mamas, and mamas' mamas" over a trippy beat that gives it the feel of a fractured hymn.

Got all that? Good. Now forget it. Because once Stankonia has had a chance to sink in, all anyone's going to want to talk about is "B.O.B. (Bombs over Baghdad)," the disc's barn-burning debut single. Maybe you've seen the video on late-night MTV and wondered whether you were dreaming: the guys race through a kaleidoscope landscape at 155 BPM (Big Boi cited this figure during a recent performance in NYC), firing off tongue-twisting raps and then stopping exactly halfway through for a guitar solo (inexplicably omitted from the album version), an a cappella breakdown, a church choir singing "Bible music/Electric revival," and the return of the Miami-bass (or is it hardcore techno -- it's hard to keep dance-music genres straight at that speed) beat that started off the song. No, Saddam Hussein doesn't put it an appearance: the title signifies intensity, not geopolitics, and the moral of the story is, "Don't even bang unless you plan to hit something."

But who needs the Iraqi strongman anyway? "B.O.B." is the year's most exuberant single, and maybe it's only fitting that it's on one of the year's most confounding -- and most fearless -- albums. Let the critics try to separate the good guys from the gangstas, the alternatives from the mainstream. And let the androids wallow in their paranoia. OutKast will keep on dropping bombs.