Outkast

OutKast's Big Boi sees the sharks circling, sniffing for blood. On "Tomb of the Boom," from
his half of the duo's new album, he raps, "They say, 'Big Boi, can you pull it off without
your nigga Dre?'/I say, 'People, stop the madness, 'cause me and Dre be OK.' " When
OutKast first hit in the early Nineties, they were like-minded neighborhood intellectuals,
and the most creative, if often unlikely, pairing in rap -- a street-savvy hustler (A... More >

Statistical analysis yields but one conclusion. Better for Andre 3000 to have donated "Roses" ("really smell like poo-poo"), "Spread" (Prince should be so horny), "Hey Ya!" of course ("a-right a-right a-right a-right"), and an oddity of his choosing (say the single-mom "She's Alive") to Speakerboxx, thus rendering it the classic P-Funk rip it ain't quite, and released the rest of The Love Below under a one-off pseudonym that fooled no one, where it would go gold as an avant-funk cult legend long about 2010 (assuming the RIAA exists at that time). But in the absence of compelling economic motivation, this just didn't happen. No "Ms. Jackson," no "Rosa Parks," no "Bombs Over Baghdad," no "The Whole World" either. Just commercial ebullience, creative confidence, and wretched excess, blessed excess, impressive excess. (Grade: A-)