The commercial and creative crux of not just this album but the duo’s entire glittering career is Hey Ya! The ninth track on The Love Below, it thus by rights belongs to Benjamin. Nary a single solo record by any ex-Beatle or member of the Stones comes without the casual appearance of a fellow ex-Beatle or member of the Stones, or both.
Both feature guest stars (Big Boi ropes in Killer Mike, Ludacris, Jay-Z and Cee-Lo Benjamin has Norah Jones and Kelis) and – so much for the trial separation – each appears on the other’s disc. Speakerboxx is Big Boi, whose modus operandi is to jam at home in LA for just under an hour The Love Below is Benjamin and runs for 78 minutes. Three years later, they returned with a double album, and not just a double album but two solo albums, one each. Shame about the blunts and the loose women (“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha we love deez hoez”), but enlightenment does not descend overnight.Īnd the pair hadn’t peaked. They claim to have deliberately stopped listening to hip hop in lieu of listening to rock’n’roll, soul and funk. Having invested in their own studio after album #3, the heat was off and they’d allowed themselves a year to make Stankonia.
Having left Q magazine, I may well have paid good money for the parent LP and I was sold on all 73 minutes of its contents: melodic, meaningful, not always languid, packed with diversity, hard to tear your ears from, and quadruple-platinum, Grammy-trousering successful. I heard the backmasked, social-realist, Wagner’s Wedding March-sampling Ms Jackson in October 2000 when it lolloped to number one in the US and two in the UK.
Full marks if you were already following their origins story and could see it coming. Stankonia was neither OutKast’s debut album, nor their second, nor their third, but their fourth. I got them in the year 2000, like most people did. They went platinum before I’d ever heard of them, and I make no apology for that. As the industry craned for new sounds, new colours, new stars, the belated emergence of Southern hip-hop was inevitable, and two teens named André Benjamin (“Andre 3000”) and Antwan Patton (“Big Boi”) emerged from a nascent scene in Atlanta, Georgia, funkier and more free-wheeling than the West Coast shoot-’em-up style and with an attractive drawl. The centre of gravity initially bounced from East coast to West, ricocheting between the South Bronx and South Central fairly constantly throughout the 80s, with gangsta rap eventually eclipsing New York and forging a new orthodoxy for the 90s based on questionable male sexual politics, the entrepreneurial and criminal accumulation of money, and fame and fortune for their own sake. The subculture that grew exponentially into a culture, or arguably the culture, was founded on the art of rapping, the overhaul of the traditional modus of the vinyl turntable, pre-digital sampling and a deep base of African-American heritage that would drive what started at local block parties into the mainstream, international arena. It is not with disdain or regret that David reports the death of rock, nor the ascension of hip hop, merely acknowledgement of fact. In his knockout book Uncommon People, the sage-like David Hepworth notes that “the age of the rock star” – his chosen subject – “was coterminous with rock and roll, which in spite of all the promises made in some memorable songs proved to be as finite as the era of ragtime or big bands.” His introduction concludes, “The rock era is over.
Description: single track, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below