OutKast's last hey ya

Aug. 25, 2006 | Ever since OutKast came out of Atlanta 12 years ago, hip-hop's beloved duo has been riding one long wave of critical adulation and popular acclaim, each album outselling the last, each album taking a legitimate artistic step forward, and each album confounding expectations. But now, with the tepid and unadventurous "Idlewild," Antwan "Big Boi" Patton and Andre 3000 (né Benjamin) have done the last thing anyone expected: delivered their first dud.

Released alongside the film of the same name, the '30s-era jazz-tinged record finds the two unable -- or in Andre's case, seemingly unwilling -- to come up with anything near the across-the-board unstoppability of "Hey Ya," soulful depth of "Ms. Jackson" or breezy charm of "The Way You Move." And if the nagging breakup rumors indeed come true, "Idlewild" would end up as more than just a misstep -- it would stand as the feeble goodbye of an act that, at its best, made music at a level on par with such as maverick geniuses as George Clinton and Prince.

With the release of its debut back in 1994 -- when Southern hip-hop was still seen as a mere country cousin to the East and West Coast scenes -- OutKast scored right off the bat. "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik" reached No. 20 on the Billboard charts on the back of the hit single "Player's Ball" -- a lolling, infectious track that tied Big Boi's quicksilver, gangsta-influenced delivery to Andre's boho-rap sensitivity and slathered it all with greasy Southern funk. Not even out of their teens, OutKast effectively kick-started Southern rap's rise to preeminence.

Maybe they'd gotten hold of some stronger herb, but whatever the cause, 1996's "ATLiens" was an eerie, cosmic, quantum leap forward. Recorded mainly with live instruments, the spacey, hypnotic album charted at No. 2 and, as they rapped on "Extraterrestrial," positioned BB and A3K as forces of nature, "like hailstorms and blizzards in the middle of spring." With a hypersyllabic vocabulary, outer-space imagery and disregard for boundaries, the band placed itself as heirs to the tradition of George Clinton's space-obsessed Parliament-Funkadelic and the genre-defying Prince, artists with enough talent and vision to make the mainstream come to them.

Which is what began to happen with 1998's 2-million-selling "Aquemini." That album, which combined the gritty funk of the first record with the smoky haze of the second, both confirmed OutKast's awareness of its place in a musical tradition and demonstrated its willingness to plunder that tradition for all it was worth. That simultaneous reverence and irreverence helped separate OutKast from the rest of the millennial rap royalty. Yes, Jay-Z sampled old soul tunes, Dr. Dre was equally indebted to P-Funk, and Kanye West rhymed over richly orchestrated rap symphonies, but nobody pulled disparate elements together as successfully as Andre and Big Boi. Their first unequivocal masterpiece, "Aquemini" (a melding of the duo's astrological signs) showcased the new stars pulling off back-porch funk ("Rosa Parks"), rapid-fire psychedelic riffing ("Chonkyfire"), reggae-inflected nightclub anthropology ("SpottieOttieDopalicious"), electronic madness (the George Clinton-guesting "Synthesizer") and awe-inspiring mic skills ("Da Art of Storytellin' Parts I and II") with an unmatched sense of cultural certainty and virtuoso creativity.

If "Aquemini" marked the arrival of a major talent, "Stankonia" (2000) was the sound of that talent in full bloom. "Ms. Jackson," an empathetic, regretful and impossibly catchy song about a child born out of wedlock, gave the band its first No. 1 single and won a Grammy for best rap song, but it was just one part of a larger, even more impressive whole. "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)" was a vicious, electro-fueled Middle Eastern scorcher; "Gasoline Dreams" exploded with righteous indignation of the kind Public Enemy used to wield; and as if it were necessary, "So Fresh, So Clean" claimed that the two longtime friends were "cooler than Freddie Jackson sippin' a milkshake in a snowstorm." Four times platinum and a Grammy winner for rap album of the year, "Stankonia" established OutKast as pop music's most forward-thinking superstars and the hip-hop act everyone could love.

Next page: "Idlewild" mostly just sits there, neither good enough to inspire nor bad enough to offend