FEATURE:
Cracked Emerald and Blossoming Roses
Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below at Twenty
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WHEN it comes to Outkast’s finest album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Outkast (Big Boi (left) and André 3000)/PHOTO CREDIT: Sony
many might argue that it is 2000’s Stankonia. It’s 2003 follow-up, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, is my favourite. It is one that a lot of people agree with. What can’t be argued is the fact that André 3000 and Big Boi were in imperious and unstoppable form at the turn of the century. After the celebrated and flawless Stankonia, they released this ambitious double album that turns twenty on 23rd September. When this came out – and I was twenty at the time -, I had not heard too many modern double albums. Definitely not from Hip-Hop artists. The fifth album from Outkast, it is essentially solo albums from Big Boi and André 3000. Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is a Southern Hip-Hop album influenced by P-Funk. André 3000's The Love Below features Psychedelic, Pop, Funk, Electro, and Jazz styles. What you get with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is too masterful and hugely inventive songwriters given the opportunity to release their own album and then put them together. I think people should judge it as a complete album rather than choose between the two. Even though Speakerboxxx is a Big Boi vision, André 3000 (André Benjamin) co-wrote several of the songs. Even so, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) is the driving force. Classics like Ghetto Musick and The Way You Move are on this album. Flip over to The Love Below and we get Hey Ya! and Roses. Both members of Outkast in sublime form by offering up these timeless songs. If I had to pick a favourite album, I would go for The Love Below – though I admire the strength and consistency through Speakerboxxx. You can pick up the album on vinyl. I am not sure if there are plans for a twentieth anniversary release. I think that Outkast’s greatest achievement should be given some new focus after twenty years. One of the greatest Hip-Hop albums ever, it is one that still sounds incredible today!
I want to bring in a couple of reviews and features for this masterpiece. There is a fascinating feature that explored the album on its tenth anniversary (2013). A double album where both members of a duo do their own thing might suggest a parting of the waves and some personal animosity. I think it was a case of two free thinkers and Hip-Hop masters wanting to do something different and join the results. Before Speakerboxxx/The Love Below came out, André 3000 pursued an acting career (which wasn’t a huge success) and he recorded this solo album. He wanted to do something different to what Outkast had put out in the past. Rather than him being unhappy, it was a chance for him to do something on his own (many band members stay in the group but also do solo stuff). Rather than André 3000 release it as a solo project, it meant that Big Boi could do his own solo album and then they could be fused. I think that more duos/bands should try this, as there is a strange harmony and connection between the two different albums. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is both members, rather than pulling in different directions like The Beatles did on their 1968 eponymous album, working together and wanted to create something cohesive. Before getting to reviews, there is a feature that sheds might light and insight onto Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Consequence, for their Dusting ‘Em Off feature, saw Senior Staff Writer Len Comaratta and Staff Writer Zach Schonfeld discuss the nature of collaboration, the iconic Speakerboxxx/The Love Below singles, and comparison with The Beatles:
“In this week’s edition of Dusting ‘Em Off, Senior Staff Writer Len Comaratta and Staff Writer Zach Schonfeld mark the 10th anniversary of Outkast’s landmark 2003 double album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, where a match made in heaven (okay, Hotlanta) split neatly apart. The two discuss its sprawling eclecticism, its iconic singles, the frequent Beatles analogies, and the ultimate value of collaboration itself.
Zach Schonfeld (ZS): As a Jewish kid from the suburbs, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was one of the first hip-hop albums I ever owned. No surprises there — “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move” were literally inescapable on the B’nai Mitzvah circuit of the time.
More embarrassing, though, was my tendency at the time — blame it on my staunchly rockist upbringing — to match significant hip-hop albums with their classic rock counterparts. Paul’s Boutique, for instance, always felt like the Sgt. Pepper’s of rap’s adolescence. Illmatic could well be Highway 61 Revisited. Madvillainy is the closest thing hip-hop has to its own Trout Mask Replica, a scattershot avant-garde pastiche.
On a literal level, it’s obvious: here is where atoms split, where one of pop’s most remarkably inventive collaborations drifted into distinct molecules, scurried down their own zigzagging rabbit holes. (Forgive me: my chemistry is no good.) And OutKast went one further by giving its dual visionaries — Big Boi, who just wants to be rap’s golden prince, and Dré, who just wants to be, well, Prince — their own discs. Plenty of critics argued they should have just issued them as their own separate solo efforts. I disagree. Separately, both discs have their flaws — the former felled by some turgid collaborations (“Tomb of the Boom”, “Last Call”), the latter betrayed by its sheer length. But joined together, they are divine — matter and antimatter. Lennon and McCarthy. I’ll let you parse out which is which.
The result lands squarely in The White Album tradition: a sprawling double album so overflowing with ideas, so liberated by its sense of eclecticism, as to feel somehow uncontainable. Big Boi’s disc is driven by a mastery of everything that made Southern-fried Goodie Mob-era hip-hop fresh; Dré’s is as horny as space-funk could possibly get in a 2003 fogged by war and terror. Sure, it’s got filler — but so does Stankonia. The highs here are as high as OutKast ever got.
Len Comaratta (LC): Though I love the idea of Madvillain and Beefheart, I think I may have to disagree with the Beatles comparison. I’ve seen references made between the two a couple of times; the first being Dorian Lynskey’s reference in her review of the album comparing Outkast’s effort with The White Album but only in terms of it being “ a career-defining masterpiece of breathtaking ambition.” I think we both can agree with that sentiment.
But when Stephen Erlewine likens the distinct personalities to each half of Speakerboxx/The Love Below to if the Beatles released their epic as a one half being a distinct LP of Lennon songs and one of McCartney songs, I find his “what if” situation a tad misleading. He ends his comparison saying that “the individual records may be more coherent, but the illusion that the group can do anything is tarnished” but fails to understand that that illusion only pertains to the Beatles, not Outkast.
The entire presentation of The White Album is steeped in illusion. The completely blank jacket, calling the album The Beatles (the album’s real title), and purposefully sequencing the album to mix Lennon’s contributions with McCartney’s all was done to maintain the appearance of unity and that everything in the Beatles’ camp was good and happy, though in reality nothing could be further from the truth. At the time of the White Album‘s production, nobody knew of the self-destruction, dissolution, and ever growing chaos that existed behind the scenes. There was no mention of Lennon or Harrison quitting the band on a few occasions before McCartney’s eventual public defection. No one talked of George Martin’s waning influence or how the group lost multiple engineers throughout the album’s genesis. Every effort was taken to maintain the illusion of the Beatles’ infallibility.
Not so with Outkast. Firstly, outside the division of labor on this effort, there was no real tension between the two – in fact, each have multiple contributions on the others’ disc. In spite of every effort of the media to find out if the two were or were not breaking up or if the Outkast banner was used simply as a way of fulfilling a contract, there was never any real sense of animosity. The two go out of their way to to emphasize that there is no beef, parodying in the video for André’s “Roses” or more directly in the lyric’s to Big Boi’s first single, “The Way You Move”, when he says rather matter of factly, “nip it in the bud/ We never relaxin’/ OutKast is everlastin’/ Not clashin’, not at all but see my nigga went to do a little acting.”
I think Big Boi’s line, more than anything, explains best why the difference of the two albums, why the need to express themselves as individuals while at the same time toying with the idea of what Outkast is. Certainly there is truth to Big Boi mentioning his partner’s acting because at the time of this album’s creation, André had begun exploring acting. But if you think about it, André has always been playing a character. Over the course of Outkast’s existence, André has been Dre, André 3000, André 1936, then André and even billed as Johnny Vulture on an Idlewild track, while Big Boi has always been Big Boi. This is somewhat reflective on the two albums, one a solid hip-hop album by somebody who is solidly hip-hop (and always has been) while the other morphs in and out of various styles and methods, multiple personalities, and influences all while hovering under the label “eccentric.”
Though I love Speakerboxx/The Love Below and agree with Dynskey in that it is something of a landmark album for the group, if I may extend the Beatles metaphor, I’ve always been a Revolver guy, so it’s no wonder I prefer Stankonia.
outkastZS: Touché, Len. You’re right that there wasn’t such personal animosity between Big Boi and André (or so we’re told — I wasn’t privy for these sessions, much as I’d like to say otherwise). But what matters more, I think, is that this double-disc set (you have the CDs, right? With the sweet album art?) captures a creative divorcing: it’s 39 tracks just to announce that barring a few odd examples (“Roses”, most notably), Big Boi and Dré were no longer interested in sharing track space. Much of the conflict surrounding The White Album reportedly arose out of track list-related disputes (George Martin famously urged the Fab Four to cut it down to a single LP, but egos got in the way). Seems like it’s easy to avoid such scuffles when you’ve allotted a full compact disc-per-person. (Of course, you could point to the Idlewild soundtrack as evidence the duo tried to reconcile creatively, but I think you’ll agree that effort wasn’t entirely successful.)
I’m reminded of a point Pitchfork‘s Julianne Shepherd made in 2005, calling Stankonia one of the top albums of the first half of the decade:
Aquemini was OutKast’s pressing together and Speakerboxx/The Love Below was their peeling apart; Stankonia was one last missive of unity before their values divided.
Speakerboxxx/TLB’s brilliance, I’ve always thought, is that it dares to question the value of collaboration. It dares to question whether working together is really better — or inherently better — than working apart. And I think critics are too scornful in labeling Speakerboxxx “just” a hip-hop record. Between “Church”, “Bowtie”, and “Ghetto Musick”, it contains some of the funkiest and most progressive-minded hip-hop of Big Boi’s career, and, given “Unhappy” and “Reset”, some of the most soulful. I prefer it over Sir Lucious Leftfoot, which was perhaps more critically embraced”.
There is no denying the fact that, as we look to 23rd September and the twentieth anniversary of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, it remains one of the most important Hip-Hop albums ever. Whereas many double albums are sprawling without purpose and economy of quality and merit, everything seems essential and must-hear on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below! Sadly, Outkast’s final album together, 2006’s Idlewild, would be a slightly underwhelming affairs. Hard to follow such a high benchmark, it seemed that Idlewild was a duo who were ready to call time. Even though there is musical harmony through Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, maybe personal relationships were not as tight as they were years before. The 2003 masterpiece was a case of Outkast maybe looking towards future solo endeavours. That said, André 3000 and Big Boi are friends and have a lot of love for each other. In their review, this is what AllMusic said about the towering Speakerboxxx/The Love Below:
“To call OutKast's follow-up to their 2000 masterpiece Stankonia the most eagerly awaited hip-hop album of the new millennium may be hyperbole, but not by much. In its kaleidoscopic, deep-fried amalgam of Dirty South, dirty funk, techno, and psychedelia, Stankonia was fearlessly exploratory and giddy with possibilities. It was hard to imagine where the duo was going to go next, but one possibility that few entertained was that Big Boi and Andre 3000 would split apart, each recording an album on his own and then releasing the pair as the fifth OutKast album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, in the fall of 2003. Although both albums have their own distinct character, the effect is kind of like if the Beatles issued The White Album as one LP of Lennon tunes, the other of McCartney songs -- the individual records may be more coherent, but the illusion that the group can do anything is tarnished.
By isolating themselves from each other, Big Boi and Andre 3000 diminish the idea of OutKast slightly, since the focus is on the individuals, not the group. Which, of course, is part of the point of releasing solo albums under the group name -- it's to prove that the two can exist under the umbrella of the OutKast aesthetic while standing as individuals. Thing is, while it would have been a wild, bracing listen to hear these 39 songs mixed up, alternating between Boi and Dre cuts, the two albums do prove that the music can be solo in execution but remain OutKast records through and through. Both records are visionary, imaginative listens, providing some of the best music of 2003, regardless of genre. If conventional wisdom, based on their public personas and previous music, held that Big Boi's record, Speakerboxxx, would be the more conventional of the two and Andre 3000's The Love Below the more experimental, that doesn't turn out to be quite true. From the moment Speakerboxxx kicks into gear with "GhettoMusick" and its relentless blend of old-school 808s and breakneck breakbeats, it's clear that Boi is ignoring boundaries, and the rest of his album follows suit. It's grounded firmly within hip-hop, but the beats bend against the grain and the arrangements are overflowing with ideas and thrilling, unpredictable juxtapositions, such as how "Bowtie" swings like big-band jazz filtered through George Clinton, how "The Way You Move" offsets its hard-driving verses with seductive choruses, or how "The Rooster" cheerfully rides a threatening minor-key mariachi groove, salted by slippery horns and loose-limbed wah-wah guitars. It's a hell of a ride, reclaiming the adventurous spirit of the golden age and pushing it into a new era.
By contrast, The Love Below isn't so much visionary as it is unapologetically eccentric. And as the cocktail jazz pianos that sparkle through the first few songs indicate, it's not much of a hip-hop album. Instead, Andre 3000 has created the great lost Prince album -- the platter that the Purple One recorded somewhere between Around the World in a Day and Sign 'o' the Times. It's not just that the music and song titles cheekily recall Prince -- "She Lives in My Lap" is a close relation of the B-side "She's Always in My Hair" -- it's that Dre disregards any rules on a quest to create his own interior world, right down to a dialogue with God. The difference between Andre 3000 and Prince is in that dialogue, too: Prince was tortured; Andre is trying to get laid. That cheerfully randy spirit surges through The Love Below, even on the spooky-serious closer, "A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre," and it gives Andre the freedom to try a little of everything, from mock crooning on "Love Haters" to a breakbeat jazz interpretation of "My Favorite Things" to the strange one-man funk of "Roses" and the incandescent "Hey Ya!," where classic soul and electro-funk coexist happily. So, both records are very different, but the remarkable thing is, they both feel thoroughly like OutKast music. Big Boi and Andre 3000 took off in different directions from the same starting point, yet they wind up sounding unified because they share the same freewheeling aesthetic, where everything is alive and everything is possible within their music. That spirit fuels not just the best hip-hop, but the best pop music, and both Speakerboxxx and The Love Below are among the best hip-hop and best pop music released this decade. Each is a knockout individually, and paired together, their force is undeniable”.
Entertainment Weekly also gave Speakerboxxx/The Love Below a rave review. Reading the reviews through, I did not know that there was perhaps more division between Big Boi and André 3000 than I first assumed. That unity that was always there seemed to have cracked slightly:
“You know we live in freakish times when two of pop’s most outrageous characters, Andre ”3000” Benjamin (a.k.a. Dre) and Antwan ”Big Boi” Patton — the duo called OutKast — can walk on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards and be counted among the more understated participants. Of course, they could afford to be: They’d just finished ”Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” a long-awaited pair of solo CDs (out Sept. 23) that, if released separately, would each be a candidate for Hip-Hop Record of the Year. Packaged together, they make a twofer whose ambition flies so far beyond that of anyone doing rap right now (or pop, or rock, or R&B), awards shows may need to create a special category for it.
Forgive the hyperbole, but it’s been a while since artists adept at the nitrous-oxide head rush of radio hitmaking have also shown talent for the old-fashioned art of the album. Hip-hop’s other reigning visionaries, Missy Elliott and Timbaland, have yet to make a great LP, despite devastating singles; ditto the Neptunes. You need to look back to vintage Prince, Funkadelic, and Sly & the Family Stone for a mix of funky pop and wide-screen aesthetic madness comparable to what you get on ”Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.” In fact, the set winds down with an environmentalist warning that mirrors the opening of Funkadelic’s 1971 mind melter, ”Maggot Brain.” But there’s much more here than recycled influences.
In OutKast’s yin and yang, Big Boi is the Everydude — the neighbor you talk football with, who raises pit bulls and admits a fondness for both corny pop ballads and gangsta rap. So you’d expect ”Speakerboxxx,” his half of the package, to be fairly straightforward. But it’s surprising how far-reaching it is. It kicks off with ”GhettoMusick,” a machine-gun-speed rap reclaiming ’80s electrofunk from hipster ironists while targeting low-aiming rappers: ”You oughta be detained by the hip-hop sheriff/Locked up, no possibility of getting out/Because the s — -you make is killin’ me/And my ears and my peers.” ”Bowtie” and ”The Rooster” are good-time anthems with a brass-band swing; ”The Way You Move” mates a Dirty South synth-drum bounce with a faux Phil Collins hook; and ”War” gets grimly topical with a chorus of ”tick-tick-boom.” Things lose some creative steam on posse cuts like ”Last Call” (with Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz and Slimm Calhoun) and ”Tomb of the Boom” (with Ludacris and others), but even the old-school tracks have a twist, whether it’s Jay-Z rapping the hook of ”Flip Flop Rock,” or ”Reset,” with its dice-roll percussion and sermon by Big Boi’s Georgia neighbor Cee-Lo. The tradition-minded moments also remind you where all this experimentation is rooted: hip-hop.
And that’s important because, judging from the swirling strings and Nat King Cole crooning that begin Dre’s deliriously art-damaged ”The Love Below,” hip-hop tradition is fairly low on the list — at least until the Beatles-referencing finale, ”A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete),” an autobiographical epistolary to an ex that lays deep rap testifying over a laptop-techno-beat blur. Between these poles is as strange and rich a trip as pop offers nowadays, a song cycle about love’s battle against fear and (self-) deception that’s frequently profound, hilarious, and very, very sexy. It’s long — okay, maybe overlong — on skits and stylistic spelunking (see the John Coltrane — meets — Roni Size cover of ”My Favorite Things”). But it’s filled with so many pure ass-moving pleasures, you’re happy to indulge its excesses. ”Hey Ya!” is the no-strings-sex-championing single, and maybe the two discs’ catchiest moment. But ”Happy Valentine’s Day” comes close: a half-spoken, half-rapped soliloquy by Cupid, reimagined here as a pistol-packing gangster of love whose hand-clapping denouement should become as linked to its titular holiday as ”White Christmas.” On ”Dracula’s Wedding,” Dre’s a vampire — or a rap star — who’s met his match (”I’ve cast my spell on millions, but I’m terrified of you”). And on ”Vibrate,” a pitch to uplift the human race through music bobs alongside cool muted trumpets in a whirlpool of backward drumbeats.
Dre sings more than raps here, which could be a problem, as his nasal drawl isn’t the greatest instrument. But hip-hop, like punk, is about making magic with limited means through the sheer force of creative will, and whether he’s cooing baby noises on the Goth-soul cha-cha ”Pink & Blue” or scatting with multiplatinum siren Norah Jones on the interlude ”Take Off Your Cool,” Dre’s limitations read here like strengths. With ”Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” his lonely Day-Glo lothario and Big Boi’s wise-thug MC have made an LP that offers an outsize artistic vision, not focus-group ”perfection,” as the route to a mass audience. They may be wrong, but you’ll be very glad to go along for the ride”.
On 23rd September, we celebrate Speakerboxxx/The Love Below at twenty. Even if Idewild is the final album from Outkast, I feel like their 2003 release is actually their last album. At least that’s how I’d like to remember it. Sort of the same way Abbey Road is The Beatles’ final album as opposed Let It Be. In the sense that it was them at their best. Maybe things were not as great between its two members as it could have been. What we get from Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is two phenomenal songwriters each with their own vision of an album. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below does not sound like two disconnected projects fused together: it is the sound of two brothers who subconsciously were recording albums that were meant to slot together and sound like the same collective mindset. Even if there are different influences and sounds on each, I think that a song like Roses could fit on Speakerboxxx. Ghetto Musick could easily be a cut on The Love Below. What Outkast gave us on 23rd September was a creative peak that inspired so many artists coming through. For that…
WE offer them our thanks!