outkast southernplayalisticadillacmuzik review

Andre and Big Boi had clearly picked up some ideas about flow from creative young West Coast groups like the Pharcyde and Souls Of Mischief, but they used those flows to talk about Southern scenarios, with Southern slang, in Southern accents. 'Player's Ball' had the hazy, humid atmosphere of West Coast G-funk, but it had something else, too. Organized Noize member Sleepy Brown sang a Curtis Mayfield-style falsetto hook, possibly inventing Pharrell Williams' whole vocal style in the process. Organized Noize built a slow groove out of live instrumentation-bass, piano, wah-wah guitar. Big Boi and Andre rapped deliriously about a traditional pimps' gathering. 'Player's Ball' was deep and warm and sticky. If Arrested Development had flopped, rap might look very different today.) (The success of Arrested Development was short-lived, but it's part of the reason why the Atlanta-based label LaFace signed OutKast, making the duo the first rap group on the label.

Rappers had come out of Atlanta and found commercial success, but those rappers were all outliers: Kiddie-rap duo Kriss Kross, novelty party hitmakers Tag Team, warm-hearted and critically beloved bohemian humanists Arrested Development. Before OutKast, Atlanta was a rap backwater. Things were different for Andre and Big Boi. They were New Yorkers, and New York was still the genre's epicenter. They could point to artists whom they'd seen rise up out of nothingness. OutKast's Big Boi and Andre Benjamin were the youngest both were still teenagers when Southernplayalistic entered the world.īiggie and Nas had to struggle hard to break their way into the industry, proving themselves again and again, but they had precedents. Nas, Biggie, and OutKast were born around the same time Biggie, 22 at the release of his debut album, was the oldest of the three. Rap music had been the soundtrack of those artists' lives, and it had given focus to their creativity. Nas, Biggie, and OutKast were among the first generation of artists who had truly grown up with rap, who had barely known a world where it hadn't shaped the culture around them. The timing of all three of those albums was auspicious. But neither one of them shifted the poles in quite the same way as OutKast's debut did.

These are monumental achievements, and both albums still sound great. With Ready To Die, Biggie Smalls made a bright and vivid blockbuster, replete with silky hooks and lurid stories and astonishing turns of phrase he invented the sort of assured widescreen bluster that none of his peers would ever quite match.

With Illmatic, Nas locked into the boom-bap sound of his moment and came up with a dense, personal, reflective work, establishing a personal legend that would last for decades. When you're deciding the most important rap album of 1994-for that matter, the most important album of 1994 in any genre-it's got to come down to one of those three.

Outkast southernplayalisticadillacmuzik review