FEATURE:
So Fresh, So Clean
Revisiting the Phenomenal Stankonia
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I could have done this as a Vinyl Corner…
but I wanted to spend a few moments talking about OutKast’s Stankonia in another light. We are now (just) in a fresh decade, so that means a lot of people will be ready to see which sounds and artists define the 2020s. Maybe it is too early to predict where music will head, but the first year of this decade is an important one. Some truly genius albums have arrived since the start of this century, but OutKast’s fourth studio album set the bar immensely high as early as 31st October, 2000. Rather than it being a Halloween fright, it is an absolute treat from André ‘André 3000’ Benjamin and Antwan ‘Big Boi’ Patton. OutKast formed in 1992 in East Point, Georgia, and had been making steady steps up to the point of Stakonia. Named after their recently-purchased Stankonia Studios in Atlanta, André 3000 and Big Boi wee free to experiment more and were not being confined by usual studio rules. With production from Earthtone III (consisting OutKast and Mr. DJ) and Organized Noise, Stankonia must rank as one of the finest albums of the twenty-first century. If you are new to Hip-Hop or OutKast and feel like you need to know their history, I would encourage people to dive into Stankonia as it is so alive, varied and accessible. Comprising a series of skits and full-length songs, Stankonia is OutKast creating an experimental musical aesthetic and pushing beyond what they released on 1998’s Aquemini. In the frame of a Dirty South-orientated Hip-Hop context, OutKast fused everything from Rave and Funk to Gospel in a spellbinding album. Not only did I want to mention Stankonia because it is almost twenty years old; I also think it marks one of the best album one-twos in history.
Many can argue but how many artists have released two albums in a row that are as good as Stankonia and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003) – although the latter is a double album, so many it should be a one-two-three?! One can say The Beatles and Bob Dylan have had a greater run, but Stankonia was the start of a hugely inspiring and memorable period from André 3000 and Big Boi. Whilst the music is catchy, fun and full of different flavours, the lyrics address sexuality, misogyny; African-American culture and parenthood. It is a mature, eye-opening and moving album that boosts as much heart and brain as it does sheer vitality and spirit. OutKast’s output pre-2000 was a bit more mellow and laid-back. Stankonia represents a change of the times; the duo feeling things had changed and they had to responds in kind. I guess things had changed around OutKast. New, harder drugs were on the streets and that was hitting the Hip-Hop scene. OutKast were aware and concerned by this. Rather than immerse themselves in older and new Hip-Hop whilst writing Stankonia, the guys, instead, took from Rock legends like Chuck Berry and Prince. Rather than producing something of that time or sound, they used it as a starting point. Stankonia is a very modern-sounding record and one that, to me, does not have a weak moment. I love how challenging and important the album is. A lot of Hip-Hop albums are concerned with excess, success and the author’s ego. Stankonia looks at the status of women in the South of America; it tackles misogyny in Hip-Hop and shows these women have rich and important spirits; they are not merely one-dimensional people.
Songs such as Toilet Tisha are so different to a lot of what Hip-Hop was producing in the 1990s. At the start of a new decade, OutKast wanted to change the game and reassess the way women are seen in Hip-Hop. The aforementioned song concerns a suicidal pregnant teen. The album’s biggest hit, Ms. Jackson, is about the mother of a mother of an out of wedlock child. Apparently, the song is where André 3000 takes from his own experiences. The song was inspired by his relationship with singer Erykah Badu, the mother of his child, Seven, and serves as an apology to her mother for causing her daughter pain. From start to finish, Stankonia is an album that still sounds utterly amazing and relevant. I still think there is a lot of misogyny in Hip-Hop and, with political and racial tensions still evident in the U.S., Stankonia continues to deliver sermons of truth and wisdom. Given the fact this remarkable work is held in such high esteem, it was hardly a shock that critics went nuts when it came out. The reviews are glowing and full of praise for one of the greatest albums of all-time. This is how Pitchfork assessed Stankonia:
“OutKast had always consisted of a politically conscious pimp and a spiritual gangsta, but on Stankonia, those identities came to the fore with a greater distinction that paradoxically allowed them to sound closer together than they had since their inception—even as André sat out songs like “Snappin’ & Trappin’” and “We Luv Deez Hoez.” On Stankonia’s first proper song, “Gasoline Dreams” Big Boi raps about their clout and the limits thereof—“Officer, get off us, sir/Don’t make me call [my label boss] L.A. [Reid], he’ll having you walking, sir/A couple of months ago they gave OutKast the key to city/But I still gotta pay my taxes and they give us no pity”—while André throttles out a brainy hook: “Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?/Well burn, motherfucker, burn American dreams.”
Stankonia is an album about many things and full of epigrams; so ahead of the curve that one of its many double entendres—“I got a stick and want your automatic”—is now a bona fide triple entendre. It’s about sounds as smells and music as sex, but mostly it’s about two black kids from Southwest Atlanta, boogieing with chips on their shoulders, making Molotov cocktails of songs that sound like a revolution’s afterparty. It’s peppered with personal narratives and small slips of autobiography, and it tackles big ideas both directly and obliquely. But, ultimately, it sounds like two artists going pop on their own terms while trying to make sense of, and change, the world around them. Closing in on two decades after its release, Stankonia remains loud as bombs over Baghdad and humble as a mumble in the jungle.
It was not my first experience of OutKast, but Stankonia was the album that really got me into the duo. I wondered where they could go from here and whether it was possible to improve – debatable, they did three years later with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. In another review, AllMusic had this to say about OutKast’s masterpiece:
“Stankonia was OutKast's second straight masterstroke, an album just as ambitious, just as all-over-the-map, and even hookier than its predecessor. With producers Organized Noize playing a diminished role, Stankonia reclaims the duo's futuristic bent. Earthtone III (Andre, Big Boi, Mr. DJ) helms most of the backing tracks, and while the live-performance approach is still present, there's more reliance on programmed percussion, otherworldly synthesizers, and surreal sound effects. Yet the results are surprisingly warm and soulful, a trippy sort of techno-psychedelic funk.
Every repeat listen seems to uncover some new element in the mix, but most of the songs have such memorable hooks that it's easy to stay diverted. The immediate dividends include two of 2000's best singles: "B.O.B." is the fastest of several tracks built on jittery drum'n'bass rhythms, but Andre and Big Boi keep up with awe-inspiring effortlessness. "Ms. Jackson," meanwhile, is an anguished plea directed at the mother of the mother of an out-of-wedlock child, tinged with regret, bitterness, and affection. Its sensitivity and social awareness are echoed in varying proportions elsewhere, from the Public Enemy-style rant "Gasoline Dreams" to the heartbreaking suicide tale "Toilet Tisha." But the group also returns to its roots for some of the most testosterone-drenched material since their debut. Then again, OutKast doesn't take its posturing too seriously, which is why they can portray women holding their own, or make bizarre boasts about being "So Fresh, So Clean." Given the variety of moods, it helps that the album is broken up by brief, usually humorous interludes, which serve as a sort of reset button. It takes a few listens to pull everything together, but given the immense scope, it's striking how few weak tracks there are. It's no wonder Stankonia consolidated OutKast's status as critics' darlings, and began attracting broad new audiences: its across-the-board appeal and ambition overshadowed nearly every other pop album released in 2000.
There is no denying the power and depth of Stankonia. The first decade of this century offered a lot of marvelous albums, yet few can compete with Stankonia. Considering we were only in 2000 when the album arrived, and that shows you how keen OutKast were to reflect a sense of urgency and uncertainty that greeted the end of the 1990s. Whilst other Hip-Hop albums blazed a trail around the same time as Stankonia, the influence of OutKast’s breakthrough cannot be understated. This article from 2015 explains more:
“To put it in perspective, Stankonia was released on the same day as Jay Z’s The Dynasty: Roc La Familia. Both albums clocked in at the top of the Billboard 200. Both sold over 500,000 copies with The Dynasty besting Stankonia by 40,000 copies. One was a straight up East Coast rap record that is remembered for its intro and a few tracks near the back end. The other is OutKast’s answer in small parts to Parliament Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain and in smaller parts to Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On. Both are important for particular reasons; Dynasty for laying the groundwork for what would become The Blueprint and Stankonia for steering a solid two years of Southern rap before crunk came and kicked down the buildings.
The most light-hearted moment on Stankonia? The roller-rink vibe of “Cruisin’ in the ATL.” The hardest? “Gangsta Shit.” It is a huge, huge pendulum swing that tells you there’s still nothing sweet about ’Kast or Atlanta in general. “Gangsta Shit” is nearly five minutes of the Dungeon Family from Goodie Mob to Slimm Calhoun to Dre and Big Boi breaking down what is gangsta to them. Dre offers what could be easily seen as an extension of his “Return of the G” verse and stomps all over the beat. “OutKast with a K, yeah them niggas are hard/Harder than a nigga tryna impress God/We’ll pull your whole deck, fuck pullin’ ya card/And still take my guitar and take a walk in the park….” It’s as if he’s still fighting for that legitimacy he told the world about five years prior at the Source Awards.
Stankonia also set things up for the Dungeon Family, who dropped an album, Even in Darkness, in 2001. Stankonia properly introduced Slimm Calhoun who was the next D.F. member to release a solo album. Backbone, the D.F. rapper who first broke through on 1998’s hustler’s prayer “Slump,” returned for “We Luv Deez Hoez” and released his own debut album, Concrete Law, in 2001 with his trademark single, “5 Deuce 4 Tre.” However, there is no greater debut on Stankonia than that of Killer Mike. He only gets one song, the back and forth of “Snappin’ and Trappin’,” but he declared with one verse that he’d already delivered a classic.
By the time the dust settled, Stankonia stood tall as one of the most revered rap albums of 2000 by critics, eventually landing at 359 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It kicked in the door for Southern rap’s now understood dominance as more albums from Southern artists have gone gold or platinum. What Big Boi and Dre perfected here, they carried over to their 2003, Grammy-winning double album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. That’s what Stankonia laid the groundwork for. Not to mention it confirmed that OutKast was the undisputed greatest duo in hip-hop.
And still cooler than Freddie Jackson sippin’ a milkshake in a snowstorm”.
I wonder, as the 2020s have just begun, whether this revelation will appear; something that rivals Stankonia. It might happen, but I think Stankonia is on a different plain and, as I said, it still sounds so current and unrivaled now. If you have not heard it then go stream or buy it because, as it will soon become apparent, Stankonia is a work of…
PURE genius.