Inside OutKast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
What makes the hip-hop duo’s debut LP an important listen
It’s often said that you can get more of a sense of the importance of a work of art years after it intially went public.
However, with OutKast’s debut album it is the exact opposite. Thirty years later, it’s almost impossible to see what was so controversial about this album that would make even an iconoclast like Russell Simmons (who helped change the game by producing rap’s first complete album, Run-D.M.C.) recoil at filing it under hip-hop, and even its groundbreaking nature is a bit obscured by time’s sands.
André 3000 and Big Boi changed the game, no doubt, and it’s an audacious debut, but Southernplayalisti-cadillacmusik is not 2000’s Stankonia with its Broadway-meets-gospel-revival three part suite “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” or even 2003’s double concept album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, home of the most genre-smashing Billboard pop #1, “Hey Ya!.” In a way, you could call it OutKast’s version of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey: that is, a record featuring a decent-sized hit single (both “Creep” and “Player’s Ball” peaked in the 30s on the pop charts, as it happens).
Personally, when I heard opening single “Player’s Ball” for about the third time, despite its being about the 10th single that year using the hip-hop word du jour “player,” it ginned up a spark of wonder that they could be something special, but for the life of me could not put my finger on what that could be. Are those sleigh bells? Wait, is this… is this a Christmas song? Metaphor into a tale of pimps and hustlers? With subtlety, but hitting all the notes from “hallelujahs” to “hamhocks” to a vague sense of yearly rebirth and resolution? And dropped to radio in July? They caught my eye, and the album was dope, but I did not see them as gamechangers until I heard “B.O.B.” and Stankonia.
What did some of those rap in-the-knowers see that made them question their hip-hop status? It might be just as simple as that locale (and Andre’s pronounced drawl). In 1994, for the most part, hip-hop was bi-coastal, binary even (Atlanta is not exactly far removed from a coast), with most of rap’s mover-shakers coming from the vicinity of NYC or Los Angeles. OutKast opened up the not-particularly-revolutionary, but definitely entrenched, idea that hip-hop was national (even rap had a flyover country issue). To go all cliche, you can even say they put Atlanta hip-hop on the map — and at least one time, even literally put it on the map when The New York Times would years later create a map showing all the different parts of the South that rappers were coming from, with OutKast repping Georgia’s center square.
OutKast, with its pimped-out car obsession, its repping of the College Point section of ATL, collection of a family of like minds around them (the Dungeon Family), created its own universe with its own complex worldview, similar to other semi-intentional musical subversives like De La Soul before them and Wu-Tang concurrently. As with De La and the D.A.I.S.Y. Age, they would quickly slice-and-dice the limitations of their own early philosophy’s name, but they would do it even before the end of the record, on the “True Dat” interlude reminding that despite the album’s title.
Even if it’s just to debunk it, OutKast sets that philosophy bar high from the beginning with the unmistakably titled (if difficult at first to unravel) “Myintrotoletyouknow,” and let you know, they do (or do they? We’ll get to that!). On that and the following, brilliantly tongue-twisting “Ain’t No Thang” the then-still teenage duo paints a picture of Mary Jane parties and streets over which they and their crew rule, rolling up and down in Cadillacs. However, it’s the concept (gimmick?) outro that kind of gives the game away, as a “pilot” points out Atlanta’s glory below, cementing the act’s connection of its hometown and paving the way for its — but also does not fail to mention that the Confederate flag is still flown proudly in Georgia.
VIDEO: OutKast “Player’s Ball”
The title track returns to building the image — with “Southern,” “player” and “Cadillac” all embedded in one of the longest one-word titles to ever hit the Billboard chart. And the lyrics are of course incredible (even a high point) as it’s OutKast after all, but the track is more important as a first showcase for the producing glory that is Organized Noize. Rico Wade, Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown would go on to produce some classic tracks beyond the OutKast catalogue — including TLC’s sublimely beautiful “Waterfalls” — but their vitality in the success of Atlanta’s finest cannot be understated. “Southernplayalisti-cadillacmuzik” takes a hazy 1970s funk-soul groove somewhere between the O’Jays and Teddy Pendergrass and infuses it with weird haunting effects and so, so many bells, whistles and whirrs that it has no right being so seamless; this backdrop should be busy as hell, but yet it works, and so well… and that’s Organized Noize, so no need to say more about them as they are a given.
The demented “Call of Da Wild” serves as a reminder of the no-filler policy, introducing us to Goodie Mob (and by extension, Cee-Lo), while showing their handle on hip-hop history with the slick, ‘80s cinema-repping line “I breaks ’em off like I was Beat Street, see I be breaking.” We’re then into the showcase single mentioned above. That their first hit single could ostensibly be described as a Christmas song (arguably the only one to hit Billboard’s Top 40 in the 1990s) should surprise exactly no one who knows later OutKast (or, well, remembers that song), but to this day it amuses me. To be precise “Player’s Ball,” was about a gathering of fine-dressed, fancy automobile sporting gentlemen who might recoil at being called players — at least by 1996 — but that’s not important right now.
VIDEO: OutKast “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik”
The album continues on with an odd stroll, a meander even, somehow warm and inviting at the same time it unleashes a brutal fury, but hits a definite high point on the other enduring single “Git Up, Git Out.” Once more, they reveal a reverence for the Old School essence of “The Breaks” and “The Message” from the early days by not being afraid to let a message track go on as long as it needs to; it closes up halfway to the eight minute marker. In a sense, it’s an updating of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ 1975 track “Wake Up Everybody” for the next generation up, with a caveat that it’s ok to not be too awake (not the same as woke). “Git Up” provides a set up for the aforementioned interlude “True Dat” in embracing a somewhat blissed-out lifestyle but reminding that there’s more to existence than that.
You can, and should, get high, but not too high, not so high that you waste your life or ignore what’s happening in the world. That’s just OutKast. They pimping, never slip, and that’s just how it is.
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