Looking back, it seems obvious that the most forward-thinking rap group of all time would’ve been focused on the future since their inception. Instead, they were already wary, eager to get to the next stage. They should’ve been excited, perhaps a little boastful. They were just 19 years old, fresh out of high school and just beginning their recording career. And what jumps out immediately is their paranoia about the present: “Time and time again see I be thinking about that future,” Big Boi opens the first verse “Time is slipping, slowly but surely,” Dre opens his. “ Myintrotoletuknow” ( Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, 1994)Īs the first real song off the first Outkast album-and one with the word intro in the title-“Myintrotoletuknow” is worth dissecting to see what Big Boi and André were trying to tell us. “Gangsta Shit,” buried 20 songs into the album, isn’t as flashy or iconic, but is just as adventurous, managing to do that Stankonia thing where it’s incredibly busy with diverse sound-guitars, drums, synths, whinier synths, layered vocals-but not claustrophobic. Jackson”-I wasn’t 10 years old when the album came out, but can clearly recall football pads paired with vaquero chaps, Sleepy Brown in a fur coat, and nodding house pets. There were bigger songs like that on Stankonia, like “So Fresh, So Clean,” “B.O.B.,” and “Ms. The best Outkast songs sound like how I imagine their weekends look. True to their name, they were outcasts, even if they gave the world no choice but to embrace them. (And in one extraordinary case, it includes a Dre and Big Boi guest spot that’s too iconic not to account for.) Through it all, a theme emerges: André and Big Boi may have been one of the most popular and respected hip-hop groups of all time, but they achieved those things their own way. It includes all the hits and classics you’ve come to love, plus the deep album cuts and B-sides that show off their versatility. Here, we want to celebrate the best songs in the Outkast discography (yes, we even accounted for the solo songs recorded for Speakerboxxx/The Love Below). You can read about the album’s legacy-and how it planted the seeds for the group’s dissolution-elsewhere on The Ringer today. It’s not their best album (that’s Aquemini) and it’s not the one that made them household names your mom would recognize (that’s the one with “Hey Ya!”), but it is their most daring, influential effort. On Saturday, Outkast’s seminal fourth, Stankonia, turns 20. And together they changed the sound of popular music in the process. They went to the underground, and then to outer space, and then back to Atlanta. They gave Southern hip-hop a battle cry, and they gave East Coast purists a Southern group to latch onto. They won over critics, both white and Black alike, and won a handful of Grammys. A lot has changed since then: They recorded four classic albums-each more adventurous than the last-and sold 10 million copies of their fifth. That moment came nearly 30 years ago, when the artists who would become André 3000 and Big Boi were just a pair of wide-eyed Atlanta teenagers in love with the music of De La Soul and Das EFX, hoping to impress producers Organized Noize and Laface Records label head L.A. Movie lovers are, after all, treasure hunters at heart.How ‘Stankonia’ Changed Outkast-and Popular Music-Forever Ever At the very least, taken collectively these movies are an invitation to dig deeper into your queue in search of lost wonders. And one is a largely overlooked gem, made in 2020 and released in the United States in 2021, a picture that has earned a great deal of praise from critics but still hasn’t benefited from any groundswell of popular support. Others are pictures that received largely negative reviews upon their release but deserve a second look. Some of these films were at least moderately popular when they were released in theaters but have somehow been forgotten in the year-in, year-out waves of new releases. For this list of films that are possibly underappreciated by viewers, I propose the more tempered adjective underloved. Yet they are convenient, at least as an expression of support for works that have a spark of something yet have somehow become forgotten, if they were ever appreciated at all. The term and the concept are both faulty. What makes a movie underrated? The word raises so many unanswerable questions: Underrated by whom? Assessed by what scale? A film considered underrated in one country can be a huge hit in another.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |