Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

To call OutKast's follow-up to their 2000 masterpiece Stankonia the most eagerly awaited hip-hop album of the new millennium may be hyperbole, but not by much. In its kaleidoscopic, deep-fried amalgam of Dirty South, dirty funk, techno, and psychedelia, Stankonia was fearlessly exploratory and giddy with possibilities. It was hard to imagine where the duo was going to go next, but one possibility that few entertained was that Big Boi and Andre 3000 would split apart, each recording an album on his own and then releasing the pair as the fifth OutKast album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, in the fall of 2003. Although both albums have their own distinct character, the effect is kind of like if the Beatles issued The White Album as one LP of Lennon tunes, the other of McCartney songs — the individual records may be more coherent, but the illusion that the group can do anything is tarnished. By isolating themselves from each other, Big Boi and Andre 3000 diminish the idea of OutKast slightly, since the focus is on the individuals, not the group. Which, of course, is part of the point of releasing solo albums under the group name — it's to prove that the two can exist under the umbrella of the OutKast aesthetic while standing as individuals. Thing is, while it would have been a wild, bracing listen to hear these 39 songs mixed up, alternating between Boi and Dre cuts, the two albums do prove that the music can be solo in execution but remain OutKast records through and through. Both records are visionary, imaginative listens, providing some of the best music of 2003, regardless of genre. If conventional wisdom, based on their public personas and previous music, held that Big Boi's record, Speakerboxxx, would be the more conventional of the two and Andre 3000's The Love Below the more experimental, that doesn't turn out to be quite true. From the moment Speakerboxxx kicks into gear with "GhettoMusick" and its relentless blend of old-school 808s and breakneck breakbeats, it's clear that Boi is ignoring boundaries, and the rest of his album follows suit. It's grounded firmly within hip-hop, but the beats bend against the grain and the arrangements are overflowing with ideas and thrilling, unpredictable juxtapositions, such as how "Bowtie" swings like big-band jazz filtered through George Clinton, how "The Way You Move" offsets its hard-driving verses with seductive choruses, or how "The Rooster" cheerfully rides a threatening minor-key mariachi groove, salted by slippery horns and loose-limbed wah-wah guitars. It's a hell of a ride, reclaiming the adventurous spirit of the golden age and pushing it into a new era.

By contrast, The Love Below isn't so much visionary as it is unapologetically eccentric. And as the cocktail jazz pianos that sparkle through the first few songs indicate, it's not much of a hip-hop album. Instead, Andre 3000 has created the great lost Prince album — the platter that the Purple One recorded somewhere between Around the World in a Day and Sign 'o' the Times. It's not just that the music and song titles cheekily recall Prince — "She Lives in My Lap" is a close relation of the B-side "She's Always in My Hair" — it's that Dre disregards any rules on a quest to create his own interior world, right down to a dialogue with God. The difference between Andre 3000 and Prince is in that dialogue, too: Prince was tortured; Andre is trying to get laid. That cheerfully randy spirit surges through The Love Below, even on the spooky-serious closer, "A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre," and it gives Andre the freedom to try a little of everything, from mock crooning on "Love Haters" to a breakbeat jazz interpretation of "My Favorite Things" to the strange one-man funk of "Roses" and the incandescent "Hey Ya!," where classic soul and electro-funk coexist happily. So, both records are very different, but the remarkable thing is, they both feel thoroughly like OutKast music. Big Boi and Andre 3000 took off in different directions from the same starting point, yet they wind up sounding unified because they share the same freewheeling aesthetic, where everything is alive and everything is possible within their music. That spirit fuels not just the best hip-hop, but the best pop music, and both Speakerboxxx and The Love Below are among the best hip-hop and best pop music released this decade. Each is a knockout individually, and paired together, their force is undeniable.

Dalton Higgins, Amazon.com

At a time when experimentation is taboo in most overground rap, that’s all Outkast seem intent on executing. Firstly, this double CD has no cohesive link, other than the fact that it sounds like a pair of solo albums stitched together to demo exactly how Andre’s yin works to augment Big Boi’s yang. Andre 3000’s Love Below disc rates as the more eclectic of the two, given that he’s turned in his emcee credentials to become a full-on funk-soul-jazz vocalist who mostly sings about items of love ("Happy Valentine's Day"), carnal lust ("Spread"), and female adoration ("Prototype"). Minus the big band schmaltz of "Love Hater" and cheesy cover jobs ("My Favorite Things"), Andre’s disc is sick (meaning great). As is to be expected, the Big Boi disc is less arty, more gangsta and worldly, and features the less-progressive guest raps of ATL crunk purveyors Lil’ Jon and The Eastside Boyz ("Last Call") and Jay-Z who rhymes the hook on "Flip Flop Rock". Unlike Big Boi, Andre keeps his collabos to a minimum, once crooning alongside Norah Jones on the cool yet sappy "Take Off Your Cool", and once with Kelis. Boi fulfills his Dungeon Family duty with flying colors by flipping some dirty southern up-tempo raps over electro beats on "GhettoMusick". By the time Cee-Lo sermonizes on "Reset", Speakerboxx and Love Below rate mostly as majestic and inspiring, with the remaining 23 per cent being just plain incredible.

Brett Johnson, Barnes & Noble

With this double-disc magnum opus, Outkast prove that as a group they exceed the sum of their parts. Splitting production responsibilities and artistic visions down the middle, Big Boi and Andre 3000 provide one big, genre-bending, futuristic gangsta's paradise but come up short on the cohesive masterpiece fans may have expected after Aquemini and the Grammy-winning Stankonia. Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is a hop, skip, and a jump from the latter's funky synth workouts, machine-gun drum patterns, ball-breaking bass, and rat-a-ta-tat rhyming. Closest to the OutKast of yore, Big Boi's 20-track disc doesn't have the infectious hooks of past releases. Still, tracks such as "Bowtie" with its big-band horns, the velvety croon of "The Way You Move," and the hyper-kinetic bass thumps of "Ghettomusick" show his knack for undeniably progressive hip-hop. On the flip side, Andre 3000's The Love Below largely owes its breezy falsetto vocals, guitar riffs, new wave funk, and love/sex/lust obsessions to Prince and Sly Stone. Dre only occasionally raps: Whether it be over the slow-burn funk of "Prototype," the Beatles-esque love ditty "Hey Ya!", the Middle Eastern–accented melody of "She Lives in My Lap," or the syncopated electro-pings of "Pink and Blue," Dre's not afraid to wail. Things go awry with a self-indulgent drum 'n' bass reworking of "My Favorite Things." Yet, when he returns to his rhyming roots on the finale, "A Life in the Day of Andre Benjamin," it's apparent he still can spit with the best MCs. Dre and OutKast's goals are higher than that, though. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below seems designed to unlock as many musical doors as possible in a creative tour de force. Mission accomplished. For their next trick, let's see Dre and Big Boi put it all back together.

Matt Harvey, BBC

This is Outkast's fifth outing, and the Atlanta duo has split down the middle to make a double album. Speakerboxxx belongs to the apparent player, Big Boi, and The Love Below is the product of the so called (filthy minded) poet, Dre. They help each other out here and there but...you get the general idea.

Of the two Speakerboxxx is most clearly the offspring of 2000's masterpiece, Stankonia. The opening track "Ghetto Musick" jumps from hardcore rave to sauna soul without pausing for breath, a curiously addictive juxtaposition. The frantic pace continues from there on in as we jump from electro, to P-funk to swing, via mariachi, techno and whatever else takes Boi's fancy. It's hip hop, but not as we've known it.

There's humour, including the seeming ode to casual footwear, "Flip-Flop Rock", and the odd bit of sex; but on the whole it's social and political issues which come to the fore. The difficulties of being a single parent, the horror of war with Iraq and the dangers of organised religion are all here; gunshots and gangsters are notable by their absence.

Cutsie, kinky and complex - Dre's half of the deal is an altogether stranger brew. Sex and love are explored from numerous perspectives, varying from what Dracula did on his wedding night to, on the dubiously titled "Age Aint Nothing But A Number", sleeping with an older woman. There's even a conversation with God, who's a woman and seems to be helping Dre find a girlfriend!

The music is a wondrous concoction. Prince, gospel, drum and bass, Frank Sinatra (and Zappa!), they're all in there somewhere...there's even a bit of cocktail jazz in the form of the foot tapping "Love Hater". It's confusing, bemusing and exciting - all at the same time.

What more is there to say about these two magnificent albums? There's guests a plenty, including Jay-Z on Speakerboxxx and Kelis, Norah Jones and R Kelly on The Love Below. It's hilarious and thought provoking, goes on for hours (without ever getting boring) and is the most ambitious piece of pop you'll hear this year. I love it.

Includes an untitled hidden track at the end of THE LOVE BELOW CD. Outkast: Andre "3000" Benjamin, Antwan "Big Boi" Patton. Additional personnel includes: Sleepy Brown, Jazze Pha, Jay-Z, Killer Mike, Big Gipp, Ludacris, Rosario Dawson, Norah Jones, Kelis, Cee-Lo, Lil Jon, Mello, Slim Calhoun, Kuhjo Goodie. Producers include: Andre 3000, Mr. DJ, Big Boi, Carl Mo, DoJo 5. SPEAKERBOXXX/THE LOVE BELOW won the 2004 Grammy Awards for Album Of The Year and for Best Rap Album. "Hey Ya!" won for Best Urban/Alternative Performance. The song was also nominated for Record Of The Year.

Simply put, there is no band that does anything close to what Outkast does. Big Boi & Andre 3000 have consistently managed to maintain mainstream success while obliterating the limits of what is considered to be hip-hop. Frolicking at the outskirts of language, they throw every genre into a blender and make every musical turn sound organic. SPEAKERBOXXX/THE LOVE BELOW is actually two solo records fused together, the former by Big Boi, the latter by Andre 3000, with each mind working at an equally frantic pace to create a gloriously split sonic experience. Big Boi opens with a techno intro that fades into industrial-style grinding on "Ghettomusick," before settling into more traditional, although far from ordinary, rap tracks on "Unhappy" and "The Way You Move." His most salient moment comes on "War," an uncompromising condemnation of American politics that strikes the perfect balance of righteous rage and measured speech. When Dre takes the reins, the concoction gets wonderfully weirder with everything from the piano bar pop of "Love Hater" to the call and response of "She Lives in My Lap" to the mystery mix of the outstanding single "Hey Ya!" Following the remarkable STANKONIA, SPEAKERBOXXX/THE LOVE BELOW cements Outkast's position as rap innovators and keeps them in the lead as the genre's primary visionaries.
2cds.Explicit. All New Studio Album.

Matt Dentler, Austin Chronicle, October 3, 2003

Phases & Stages

Though there's nothing crunk about referring to Southern hip-hop as "dirty," it's Bible Belt gospel that Atlanta's OutKast is here to clean it up. "You oughta be detained by the hip-hop sheriff, locked up, no possibility of getting out," MCs Big Boi on "Ghettomusick," a lock down on the sad state of affairs that hip-hop's most flammable duo has found the rap game in since returning from their three-year hiatus. With the tag-team combo of Big Boi and Andre 3000 combining distinct solo albums -- Speakerboxxx and The Love Below respectively -- under one umbrella, OutKast's new material takes the bombs of 2000's Stankonia and splits the difference. The difference turns out to be a trippy, Philly soul throwback by Dre and a lush, hip-hop epic by Big Boi, both discs demonstrating that the partnership works best together (i.e., "Last Call"). There's phenomenal work (Dre's brilliant "Prototype" and "She Lives in My Lap," Big Boi's Jay-Z and Killer Mike joint "Flip Flop Rock"), yet not the instant classics expected from the combined resources. It's like Lennon and McCartney solo albums: plenty of solid tunes, but the pen held together is mightier than a solo sword. OutKast had no intention of starting any revolution with Southern rap, but they're pioneers nonetheless. Who knows if this formula spells the end of OutKast, and while we may not always look to the South for the future of hip-hop, we'll always be looking to OutKast.

Take two bottles into the shower? Sure, why not? I’m an old-fashioned guy. After all, that two-in-one nonsense makes my head all itchy. It burns, it burns…
Yet the two-in-one approach is exactly what Atlanta’s finest sons Outkast have gone for on their fantastical double-album, ‘Speakerboxxx/The Love Below’. Whilst most double-albums render the listener comatose halfway through the first side (see: 'Sign O’ The Times', 'Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'), this one is more likely to have you bopping up against whatever female crosses your path (should you be a hot-blooded male that is, as rappers Big Boi and André 3000 clearly are). It’s just too damn funky for its own good, and the stupendous ‘Hey Ya!’ is just the tip of the cool-as-iceberg. Example one: Big Boi’s positively dirrty ‘Bowtie’, as crisp as the finest wine. Example two: André’s sleazy ‘Spread’ (“Don’t want to move too fast but can’t resist your sexy ass”). Example three: the ‘Stankonia’-style party anthem, and album opener, ‘Ghetto Musick’. Basically, there’s too much hot shit here for you NOT to own this.

Yes, it’s essentially two solo records, but if you can name me just one rapper that made a more complete record in 2003 than either of these two Southern boys' efforts, I’ll call you a liar. Big Boi wants to make you party and André wants to take you to bed – what better combination could there ever be? Break up in the future they may, but even individually they’ll forever be cooler than cool.

Once again, OutKast outdoes the competition. Following the brilliant Stankonia, the exquisitely dressed duo splits their skills into a pair of solo CDs, on which they boldly mix influences like Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield and Sly & the Family Stone. While Big Boi shows his allegiance to old-school hip-hop with brassy cuts like "Bowtie" and "Flip Flop Rock," Andre 3000 counters with the soulful and experimental "Vibrate" and a truly insane cover of "My Favorite Things." Oh, yeah, and his "She Lives in My Lap" is the best Prince song Prince forgot to make. Double the pleasure, double the fun? Definitely, definitely.

Christopher Hickman, Flak Magazine

"OutKast, cell therapy, to cell division/ We just split it down the middle so you see both the visions," promises rapper Antwan "Big Boi" Patton, one-half of the best hip-hop act on the planet. He's referring to the widely publicized design of OutKast's fifth album, a two-disc set entitled Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The first disc, Speakerboxxx, features Big Boi performances of Big Boi songs; the second, The Love Below, belongs to OutKast's other half, Andre "3000" Benjamin. There is overlap — Andre 3000 shows up on a couple of Big Boi's songs, and produces three of them, and Big Boi does a rap on one of Andre 3000's tracks.

It's another bold idea for a group that loves to thwart expectations, and it is thought to be OutKast's final bow. Reports of OutKast's impending split are relentless, and the reasons are detailed and persuasive. Andre 3000 may be the instigator — he's not interested in rapping anymore, he will not be touring in support of the new discs and he wants to pursue an acting career. Big Boi comes off as the more pragmatic of the two, managing the OutKast brand and patiently waiting out Andre's vacillations. He intends to tour solo, though what he'll do to compensate for Andre's absence is undecided.

If Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is OutKast's final go-round, it's fitting. The discs are dense, musically diverse, sometimes phenomenal, sometimes foolish and long-winded, elegiac and uneven. It's a singularly interesting failure — a noble miss along the lines of Radiohead's last three albums and Steve Earle's Jerusalem. The albums are like an amicable divorce between two progressive and well-intentioned people — you see the talent, the vision, the greatness, and are saddened that the two couldn't make it work as a couple.

Atlanta-based OutKast hit the ground running in 1994 with their first single, "Player's Ball," hit No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Rap Singles chart, and it helped establish Dirty South rap as a force in popular music. Since that time, they've released four albums, each one better than the last, culminating in 2000's Stankonia, which is simply one of the finest hip-hop albums ever recorded, and a multi-platinum hit. Stankonia, and its breakout hit "Ms. Jackson," shone a light on a duo that achieved success without compromise and created music steeped in a devout knowledge of musical history.

Speakerboxxx is no different. Big Boi loads his 19 tracks with everything from thick Bootsy Collins bass lines (on the rollicking "Bowtie") and stark, rattling piano figures (the moody, cautionary funk of "Knowing"), to some of the sweetest hip-hop choruses in recent memory, including buoyant Earth, Wind & Fire-style harmonies on "The Way You Move," and Muscle Shoals gospel rave on the gleeful and bizarre musical antidote to existential blues, "Church." Big Boi's raps are, as always, inventive, the words tumbling out with speed and bite. On "War," he assesses the results of the 2000 presidential election debacle by rapping, "Basically, America, you got fucked/ the media shucked and jived and now we stuck!!!" At its peak, Speakerboxxx is the best hip-hop album since Stankonia.

Andre 3000, by contrast, abandons rap almost entirely on The Love Below, opting instead to croon his way through most of his song cycle about the pitfalls and promises in relationships. Andre asks God (who he discovers to be a woman) for a "sweet bitch, you know somebody not too fast but not too slow, 'cause I don't have it all my damn self." The rest of the album follows Andre as he meets a woman who threatens to break down his macho façade and force him to confront the "love below." The synth and piano work on this disc is fantastic throughout, from loping organ on "Spread" to the bluesy lick that opens "Roses," a rant against a former love outfitted with a grinding bass line and such great P-Funk lyrics as, "You'd need a golden calculator to divide/ the time it took to look inside and realize that/ real guys go for real down-to-Mars girls." While "Hey Ya!" romps with Beatle-y abandon, and Andre asks his listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," the smoky jazz of "She's Alive" adds real poignancy and depth to a tale of a single mother struggling to raise her child. At its peak, The Love Below is the best Prince album since Graffiti Bridge.

What's missing is what makes OutKast important: conflict. Recording two separate albums cops to the essential differences between Big Boi, a strip-club-visiting, bong-hitting, Caddy-driving, Dirty South rapper, and Andre 3000, a space cadet and funk impresario who favors astrology and fantasy while his partner keeps it real. But it doesn't play them off each other.

Andre 3000 and Big Boi are endlessly creative musicians — if they record as solo acts from here on out, much of the music will be great, but it won't match what they accomplished as a duo on Aquemini and Stankonia, where Andre's kinder, gentler rap tempered Big Boi's boasting playa language, and Big Boi's pragmatic assessments of hip-hop culture brought Andre's airier musings down to earth. While other rappers try to generate conflict by lashing out at anyone and anything they can in their verses, OutKast use the contradictions in its two personas to keep the music fresh and interesting.

Without Andre's left-of-center musings, Big Boi falls too often into rote hip-hop boasting and self-referencing. His collaborations with Ludacris and Jay-Z are completely pointless, and even fine tracks like "Bust" and "War" cry out for an Andre 3000 lyrical interlude. Without Big Boi's tough raps, Andre's disc dissolves into art-pop meandering. His opening tune, "Love Hater," is, with its Hendrix guitar licks and Lovesexy horns, too cute by half, and his jazz rendering of "My Favorite Things" is five minutes of music none of us asked for. He crafts some supple grooves on songs like "Take Off Your Cool" and "Love in War," but without a Big Boi screed on dope pushers or tennis shoes in the song's bridge, they dissolve into dust.

The dead weight on both albums frustrates, and as you listen to one, you feel compelled to put it down and pick up the other for contrast. (It would be no big surprise to find OutKast fans the world over taking their favorite tracks from the two albums and burning them onto one CD, an Andre track followed by a Big Boi track followed by an Andre track, etc.) Still, there's enough great material on both albums to make Speakerboxxx/The Love Below essential for fans and necessary for everyone else. This set may have brought OutKast down to earth a little, but there's still no one in rap who can touch them.

Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian, September 26, 2003

With the flavour of mainstream hip-hop currently epitomised by 50 Cent's bread-and-butter gangsta rhymes, there are few artists, aside from the tireless Neptunes, able to satisfy more exotic palates. The freewheeling fifth album from Atlanta, Georgia duo OutKast, however, constitutes a full-blown banquet, with not a minute of its two-and-a-half-hour running time wasted.
The Love Below began as a solo album for Andre "3000" Benjamin until Antwan "Big Boi" Patton decided to match it. His Speakerboxxx picks up where OutKast's last album, Stankonia, left off. Opening track Ghetto Musick sets the eclectic tone, flipping between hooligan, rave-style electronics and deep-pile soul, while Patton's lyrical agenda takes in single parents (The Rooster), Iraq (War) and comfortable footwear (Flip Flop Rock).

The Love Below, meanwhile, barely qualifies as rap at all. Hopping boundaries like Prince in his prime, Benjamin alights upon absurd innuendo ("Lend me some sugar! I am your neighbour!"), Norah Jones, a drum'n'bass version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favourite Things and a song called Dracula's Wedding, which really is about Nosferatu's nuptials.
Both albums are sublime. Taken together they're hip-hop's Sign o' the Times or The White Album: a career-defining masterpiece of breathtaking ambition.

Lori Latimer, Ink Blot Magazine

A double album. Split visions united under the name of Outkast. Is this definite foreboding of a break-up or a logical compromise? Scary, or just smart? Actually, who cares? Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is too explosive, too exhilarating, too affecting and boisterous to worry much about where the duo are headed.

It's clear from the titles that Speakerboxxx is going to be Big Boi's baby and that The Love Below belongs to Dre. Big Boi has always been the image of the hard player into booty and nice clothes, and while André 3000 also likes booty and nice clothes, he plays the idealistic free spirit in love with love. Each persona verges on caricature, especially now that there is very little direct interaction between them. But the split format also allows each member's unbridled individual talents to thrill. And thrill they do.

We expect materialism and the objectification of women from Big Boi, and Speakerboxxx delivers on that front, too. It can be tough to listen to. Admittedly, "The Way You Move" is hot - Sleepy Brown's smooth '70s Motown vocal styling is unquestionably cool and the throw-back early-'80s R&B is all-consuming. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to hear boasting about what Big Boi can do with skinny girls in bed. He redeems himself though, making a clear effort to be the person and not just the pimp. On "The Rooster", a bumpin', larger-than-life Parliament joint, we find him in personal crisis, his neglected girl having taken their children and left him. The resulting plea is both frustrated and apologetic, but honest.

Big Boi has actually always been the more politicized one, and he looks beyond himself to the state of the nation and humanity on "War" and "Knowing,"' and delves into faith and perseverance with Goody Mob's Cee-Lo and Khujo on "Reset." Perhaps Big Boi will never completely shake off rap's gratuitous male bravado, but on Speakerboxx he doesn't allow it to define him.

Musically, his use of the 808 is impeccable. Really -- "Ghettomusick" alone is worth the price of both albums album. Frenetic and funny with a buttery hook - this song is on fire. Big Boi is not perfect, but we'll take him.

As for The Love Below, it is mainly two things: 1) André 3000's search to find "the one" and 2): his departure from hip-hop. Dre croons away in a spirited falsetto, bellows enthusiastically, and purrs seductively, often accompanying himself on guitar or piano. What he doesn't do much of is rap. The intro nods toward Sinatra, but once "Happy Valentine's Day" kicks in with the hearty declaration that "Every day's the 14th!", it's straight-up funk, '70s R&B, and '60s psychedelia all the way through, with occasional intervals of sexy electro-soul.

There are places where André's imagination runs wild, like "Dracula's Wedding," his collaboration with the equally eccentric Kelis. Other moments are expressive and touching, like his tribute to single mothers, "She's Alive." Still other times he's an even bigger jerk than Big Boi. "Roses" could have been untouchable, but sinks to the level of the materialistic, shallow women it attacks, devoting the final moments of the song to repetitions of, "crazy bitch ... stupid-ass bitch ... old dumb-ass bitch." In one interlude he portrays God as a woman, but such praise feels empty after the misogyny of "Roses." You can't help but wonder if he thinks he'll find "the one" talking like that.

The Love Below has its own "Ghettomusick" moments, though. Have you heard "Hey Ya!?" André 3000 takes the '60's acoustic pop template and adds an amazing electronic Motown beat. Three minutes of foot-stomping, hand-clapping pop, and then when the bridge comes around, the fellas have to be "ice cold" and the ladies have to "shake it like a Polaroid picture." It's probably more fun than most people can handle. And his electrifying tribute to John Coltrane's cover of "My Favourite Things" will give you goose bumps of delight.

Double albums can sometimes be too much to digest, but Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is not an over-indulgence. Each disc has a different purpose, yet has the stamp of Outkast all over it. Maybe it's a glimpse of what's to come from two extremely talented artists as they embark on solo ventures. Maybe it's a work-in-progress report from a duo finding a new way to make great music together. We'll just have to wait and see, but in the meantime, get on the floor and turn the volume up.

Darryl Sterdan, JAM! Music

Some see the glass as half full. Others as half empty. Either way, it seems many OutKast fans view their fifth release Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as half an OutKast album.

Or, to be more precise, two incomplete halves, since this double-disc set essentially consists of back-to-back solo albums from the duo of Antwan (Big Boi) Patton and Andre (Andre 3000) Benjamin.

Maybe the naysayers have a point, at least in a commercial sense. The simple fact is that neither of these somewhat self-indulgent sides contains a single with the instantly addictive hooks of Stankonia tracks like B.O.B. or Ms. Jackson. But anybody who only digs OutKast for their hits is missing out on all the fun of their freakadelic funk -- an element that neither disc here is lacking.

On his Speakerboxxx, Big Boi gets down with an inventive 56-minute set of kinetic, free-flowing hip-hop and soul clearly inspired by George Clinton, from its Uncle Jam cover pic to its layered harmonies and synth-tweaked vocals. Even his wildest moments, though, seem tame next to the mind-bending trip that is Andre 3000's The Love Below, a 78-minute musical mish-mash of Princely lechery, Sly Stone grooves, bizarre skits, Zappaesque eccentricity and twisted romance.

In other words, each disc gives you a full, undiluted blast of its creator, doing what he does best. Any way you slice it, that doesn't sound half bad to us.

John Mulvey, NME

137 minutes of synapse-popping, gut-reorganising, breathtakingly adventurous music. OK, let's take this slowly. 'Speakerboxxx/The Love Below' is OutKast's fifth album. Two CDs. 39 songs. 137 minutes of synapse-popping, gut-reorganising, breathtakingly adventurous music. As you've probably heard by now, OutKast's two members - Big Boi and Andre 3000 - take a CD apiece. It's a neat way to assert their differences, especially since Big Boi remains a major player in Atlanta's rap scene, while Dre is given to announcing "hip-hop is dead". But those nagging rumours of a complete split may be a little premature.

For a start, Dre produces a handful of tracks on Big Boi's half, 'Speakerboxxx' and, as the Boi repeatedly stresses, "Ain't no uno, we're a duo". It's easy to portray the two as opposing stereotypes: Big Boi the geezerish poledancing aficionado who calls his company "Boom Boom Room Productions", a rap traditionalist; Dre the effete hippy who styles himself as "Cupid Valentino", a psychedelic free spirit.

But as 'Speakerboxxx' proves, nothing is quite so straightforward. Take 'GhettoMusick', a dizzying varispeed trip through old-school rave, lascivious soul and Lord knows what else, or the uproarious Cotton Club swing of 'Bowtie', or the intricate, twanging electro of 'Flip Flop Rock' (featuring, delightfully, the sage Jay-Z's thoughts on footwear). By hip-hop standards - even those of The Neptunes and Timbaland - Big Boi is anything but conservative.

He's also a lot more thoughtful than his image might suggest. It's Big Boi who packs the political conscience in OutKast, so 'War' sees his lucid hyperbabble turned on the Bush Junta and its misadventures, neatly summarised as, "Basically, America you got fucked". The outstanding 'The Rooster', meanwhile, sets his problems as a single parent to supercharged P-funk, and is almost certainly the first rap song to touch on Princess Diana and nappy-changing.

Andre 3000 is not averse to filth, either. "Roses really smell like poo-poo," he coos on 'Roses', a singalong duet with Big Boi and one of the saner moments of 'The Love Below'. For here's the gilded and ludicrous album that Prince never got round to making, full of sex, schmaltz, idealism, self-indulgence, and the requisite guest spot from God ("Damn. . . you're a girl," approves Dre). Norah Jones and Kelis also turn up to this bizarre love-in, along with Aaliyah samples, Aphex Twin beats, jangly guitar pop and a jazz'n'drill'n'bass version of 'My Favourite Things' from The Sound Of Music. Honestly, it's amazing.
Big Boi, we may conclude, is something of a realist, while Andre 3000 is away with the fairies. Together and apart, though, it's clear they drive each other to new extremes. "We never relaxin', OutKast is everlastin'," claims Big Boi during 'The Way You Move'. And whatever their future, a place in posterity for 'Speakerboxxx'/'The Love Below' is assured: two Technicolor explosions of creativity that people will be exploring, analysing and partying to for years.

Ethan Brown, New York Magazine

Dynamic Duo

OutKast releases a double album in which the pair seem bent on out-weirding each other—while producing work of emotional depth.

Poet and Player: OutKast's Andre Benjamin, left, and Antwan Patton. (Photo credit: Ben Clark)

Since founding OutKast in the early nineties, Atlantans Antwan Patton and André Benjamin have referred to themselves as the player and the poet: Patton, known as Big Boi, is the player; Benjamin, a.k.a. André 3000, is the poet. In their music, these opposites exist side-by-side, with the duo making connections between disparate traditions like the church and hip-hop. The chorus of their 1999 hit “Rosa Parks” featured Sunday-service-style hand-claps over percussive beats. This duality stands out in a genre that has become single-mindedly gangsta. But OutKast has made its split personality work commercially because André and Big Boi possess such a strong sense of hook and groove (there isn’t a soul around who can resist singing along to OutKast’s Stylistics-esque 2001 hit “Ms. Jackson”).

It’s always thrilling when the subtext that has been running through a great musician’s work suddenly bursts into the light. OutKast’s new two-CD set, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, is such an event, with Big Boi and André each taking a CD for himself. The schizophrenia of OutKast has at last come unbound. But anyone expecting Speakerboxxx (Big Boi’s half) or The Love Below (André’s) to be split cleanly between pimp posturing and futuristic funk is in for a shock: Speakerboxxx, with its heavy doses of electro, New Orleans jazz, Funkadelic-style black rock, and gangsta rap, proves that neither André nor Big Boi fits our preconceived notions of them. Try as André might—and he tries hard on The Love Below—the usually more conservative Big Boi out-weirds him by a country mile.

The genius of Speakerboxxx, however, is how far out Big Boi goes without ever losing the listener. Speakerboxx is all rollicking party music, full of bursting horns, huge choruses, and the sparse beats of the 808 drum machine, a classic piece of electronic-music equipment favored by techno producers. But Speakerboxxx is just as moving as it is accomplished in its beat-making. “The Rooster” is a day-in-the-life of single fatherhood, and in “War,” Big Boi reflects on the murder of Daniel Pearl, the 2000 election, and the Iraq war. And on “Knowing,” he offers a summation of our deficited-to-death, brink-of-apocalypse moment worthy of Paul Krugman: “From this point on,” he raps, “it only gets rougher.” Speakerboxxx—by itself the album of the year—makes the failings of The Love Below all the more evident. It isn’t that The Love Below isn’t risky; it is. It’s just that the gambles don’t pay off as often as they should. Worse, a lot of André’s experimentation is self-indulgent. As unfair as it is to say in a music business that’s bred risk out of its DNA, The Love Below could have used taming of its wilder impulses. At the very least, the experiments should have been in less-predictable genres: retro-seventies funk (“Happy Valentine’s Day”) and jazz fusion (“The Love Below”) are the last refuge of the creatively challenged superstar (ask Prince). But when AndréÂ’s left-turns work—and they occasionally do—the rewards are huge. “Spread” is one of the most unusual love songs IÂ’ve ever heard, a valentine set to rough breakbeats. And “Hey Ya!” is one of the best singles of the year: With its amped-up, acoustic-guitar-driven pop and vintage synths, it sounds like the Beatles playing with Stereolab.

Mostly, though, André is unconcerned with his audience on The Love Below; he just wants to get freaky in the studio. Big BoiÂ’s Speakerboxxx is bolder—he wants to go where most hip-hoppers fear to tread and take the MTV audience along with him. It strikes at the essence of what has made OutKast so important to pop: the accessible, democratic nature of its strangeness. Audiences always believed that André was the genius behind this rare balance; Speakerboxxx/The Love Below proves that the player, not the poet, is its true author.

Troy Carpenter, Nude As The News

So is it one album or two albums? Is it good? Whose is better? Are they gonna break up? Are they gonna wake up? What's up with Andre -- is he in a cult, is he on drugs, is he gay?

The new OutKast album raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is: will it be their last? But here's what we do know: as of now, OutKast is still a functioning entity, one which has earned the status as one of the all-time great rap groups over the course of four stellar records. The duo's fifth, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, is a double-album, with a separate effort conceived and constructed by each member: Big Boi and Andre 3000, respectively.

And my, are they different.

OutKast's foundation has always been the dichotomy of its two members -- Big Boi and Andre, the player and the poet. The group's breakthrough third album Aquemini was a celebration of the pair's zodiac signs Aquarius and Gemini. But they always existed side by side, and in any given song, the two were able to express different viewpoints to enlighten and entertain the listener.

This approach reached a fever pitch on the group's 2000 multiflavored hip-hop stew of an album, Stankonia. But for its follow-up, they chose a different path -- each was to individually create an entire album, with little help from the other, splitting the OutKast personality down the middle and giving the public a clear view of the rawest expression each member was capable of.

Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is the album you knew he could make -- bangin' beats, top-draw guest appearances, addictive horn breaks, and of course, the unimitable rapid-fire rhyming style of Mr. Antwan Patterson. His strongest moment is the lead-off track, "Ghettomusick," an inferno of skittery beats, machine-gun choruses, tempo shifts, well-placed samples and memorable raps. Other highlights include the steady-pumping first single "The Way You Move," the laid-back social commentary "Unhappy" and the ramshackle, horn-drenched "The Rooster," which chronicles Big Boi's home life, juggling single fathership and his addiction to the "wax, tapes, and CDs" that are his livelihood.

Speakerboxxx is almost a great OutKast album by itself. Its flow gets a bit choppy, but the sheer amount of innovation and memorable hooks make up for that. The one thing it really lacks is a healthy dose of Andre, and Big Boi seems to concede as much, peppering his lyrics with references to the fact that the two are on good terms and OutKast is not finished. Still, flaws aside, Speakerboxxx more than lives up to its billing.

Andre 3000's The Love Below, however, is a revelation. As he told the New York Times, he didn't so much make a hip-hop album as an album made by a hip-hop person. The record contains charged electro-funk, sex romps a la mid-'80s Prince, breezy acoustic ballads, haunted-house themes and cabaret experiments. Lyrically, the whole album is predictably love-themed, but the precocious Andre stretches within his boundaries, from the explicitly erotic "Spread" to the sentimental "Take Off Your Cool" (with Norah Jones) to the biting send-off "Roses." He also gets cartoonish on the electro-vamp "Dracula's Wedding" and the funked-up "Happy Valentine's Day," on which he plays the part of a modern-day gangsta Cupid, aiming his pink gun to blast playas off the street and onto the altar.

He waxes personal on the album-closing freestyle "A Day In The Life Of Benjamin Andre," but the most advanced tracks on The Love Below are its two centerpieces: bubbly first single "Hey Ya!," on which Andre plays acoustic guitar and keyboards and programs the beat, and the flawlessly constructed "Roses," which has a little bit of just about everything that makes OutKast great -- it's the only song on either album to feature rap verses by both Andre and Big Boi.

So really, we get two great OutKast albums for the price of one: one that reminds us of what makes the old OutKast so good, and the other which hints at future possibilities. The only disappointing thing about Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the splitting of the band members. Is Andre really, as rumors have suggested, planning a move to Los Angeles to work on an acting career? Will that disband the group? Again, the questions arise. I guess the best way to deal with it is to listen to both albums and revel in their excellence. If this is the last OutKast record, the world will have lost one of rap's shining stars. But whatever the future holds, the fifth chapter in the book of OutKast adds admirably to the group's legacy.

Brent DiCrescenzo, Pitchfork Media, September 23rd, 2003

The twelve-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the city's attractions. Turner buildings, blossoming with neon network logos, lure Yellowjacket grads from the adjacent campus cluster with the sweet nectar of Powerpuff Girls money. Across the way, The Varsity serves grease between buns, communicating with an enigmatic fast food lexicon that rivals rhyming Cockneys. Tourists walk the overpass to the ghostly Olympic park, built on the graveyard of Techwood projects, in the shadows of Vick's pastel dome. Hipsters and reluctant yuppies settle in the gentrified Five Points and Cabbagetown, giving their quaint subdivisions more verdant "___________ Park" monikers. And finally, there's Turner Field, reverberating collective October sighs, before the highway splits back into its tributaries in East Point, the cultural fountainhead. The hip-hop id to New York's ego: the home of Outkast.

Lauded retroactively in 2000, upon the release of Stankonia, for a formula that had been perfected by teenagers on 1994's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Outkast charged up the public with silly amounts of reserved anticipation for this double-disc marathon. Since dropping that debut nearly ten years ago, Outkast's singles have charted a steady incline of genre-defiance and pop virtuosity. But now, in the wake of the commercial and critical smash that yielded such classic tracks as "Ms. Jackson", "B.O.B.", and "So Fresh, So Clean", Big Boi and Andre 3000 have, for the first time, chosen to work in separate corners, like Beatles after India. Here, on the resulting Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the two wander down the blacktop from East Point, each plotting their own distinct course: Andre, like I-85, shoots off to the airport and sky-high trips before dipping into the Mardi Gras marshes of New Orleans, while Big Boi rolls deep down I-75 into south Florida, home of booty bass and baby blue.

The consensus in rock circles had unfairly anticipated that The Love Below would reign supreme over Big Boi's Speakerboxxx, since Andre was the one with the guitar in the fuzzy boots. As it turns out, his Prince-mimicking fusion looks a lot better on paper than it sounds in your ears. On too many songs, Andre repeats space-playboy choruses over repetitious, unfinished digifunk. As the brief orchestrated outro to "Pink and Blue" suggests, each track feels like it's missing something-- strings, guitars, harmonies, organic instruments, and, oh right: Big Boi. Andre does have his moment, though: "Hey Ya!" glitters and towers like the silver Westin hotel over an 80s Atlanta skyline, blending Flaming Lips-like synth-bass and ebullient acoustic guitar with the rebellious joy of "Little Red Corvette"-- and like all classic songs, it introduces new vernacular with a genius that transcends product placement. Even indymedia.org feeders will shout "Polaroid!" while miming spanking at this fall's Not-Dog cookouts.

Of the few other tracks on The Love Below that come close to reaching "Hey Ya!"'s apex, the one that most succeeds is "Spread", which showcases trumpets and piano weaving through a rubber bassline and scattering rimshots. Its chorus has Andre putting on his Camille voice, while the verses contain some of the only moments on the album in which he actually flows. When he does, he's tight enough to pose the question of why he decided to cut back on rapping at all-- particularly since, frankly, he ranks just above Pharrell Williams on the "brilliant but mosquito-throated crooner" list. Elsewhere, the quite literal "Dracula's Wedding" boasts guest vocalist Kelis over whistling squelches, while Norah Jones' lovely turn on the acoustic "Take Off Your Cool" hints at the true stylistic breadth Andre is capable of achieving. "Baby, take off your cool/ I want to get to know you," they both sing over plucks and strums. Heed your lyrics, Andre. (Except for that "become the master of your own bastion" nonsense.)

Big Boi's Speakerboxxx coolly upstages its counterpart: Although it, too, provides the world with one earthshaking single, it differs from The Love Below in that it also manages to maintain a consistent level of brilliance and emotional complexity. Here, Big Boi effectively asserts himself as man who wants both a stripper pole in his home and his nostalgic place saved on the pew-- "Unhappy" conveys that in its beat alone! Comparing the selection of Speakerboxxx to Andre's limper Love Below, it's clear who won this bet: Machine-heavy, horn-driven funk stomps behind "Bowtie" and "The Rooster"; reverberating woodblocks (a trademark Outkast signifier since "Elevators") starkly soundtrack pondering rhymes on "Knowing"; "Church" takes gospel into the 21st Century, accelerating aluminum Stevie Wonder disco-pop into Teutonic techno; propulsive kickdrums pump under drunken guitars, scratches, and a Jay-Z hook on the standout "Flip Flop Rock"; and "Ghettomusick", the aforementioned earthshaking single, is, emotionally, a celebration and a lament, braggadocio and beatitudes. Musically, the record shifts from punk-cadenced, cellulite-quivering woofer booms to three-wheeled slow-jams and back before snake-charming with George Clinton keyboards.

Of course, there's one department in which neither disc succeeds: Despite how forward-looking these albums can be, both members have failed to envision a future without skits and intros, which make up no less than ten of the 39 tracks here. It's one reason why Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, like no albums before, beg to be ripped, sieved and re-sequenced. Cutting out the dialog, along with The Love Below's silicon-smooth, Rainbow Children-esque jazz and lulling middle-section, and Big Boi's guest-laden, been-there street tracks, leaves one genius full-length that fits on a single disc.

Sam Smallman, Playlouder, October 5th, 2003

These are two albums, not one, but you know that. The most celebrated Southern American hip-hop group of all time have gone solo, together. 'Speakerboxxx' and 'The Love Below' will finally, one thought, oust the true nature of hip-hop's odd couple. Andre 3000, legend had it, wuz the weirdo, the right on leftie artist, and, whispered they with the flat brims in certain circles, the possible homo. Big Boi, now he wuz the P.I.M.P., son, the man with the "fat sacks" and "all them Cadillacs". He pissed off straight thinking females on Outkast's breakthrough 'Stankonia' by singing about "hoes". Dre, they said, brought the craziness to Boi's traditional hip-hop mindset.

NOT TRUE! ANY OF IT!

Well, Boi's album is more "hip-hop". But that's where it stops.

Hear Dre holler, sweetly: "I don’t wanna move too fast/but I can't resist/your sexy ass/just sprea-eh-ead! Spread for me!"

And hear Big Boi teaching his one year old son to rap.

On Dre's side cop brilliant male R'n'B. Male R'n'B is a pretty lame and ugly place - plasticated, over produced bland balladry, following that straight down R Kelly route. So it is good that Dre is holding off on the raps here - because it gives him space to get his croon on proper… the silky, fonky voice you recognise from all those platinum hooks gets to run wild here, and mostly the results are wicked. It might take a few listens to fully appreciate the joys on offer here - from the rude boy playerisms evident on 'Spread' to 'Prototype' (far too lush soul that comes on like Air Supply jamming with Marvin, and the immortal lines, "I think I'm in love/again/stank you! Smelly much")... the intro alone is better than most cat's albums. His skits are on some otherness also. Hear Andre waking up after a one might stand and debating protocol in his mind - "act cool, act cool... but what if... she's the one?" Catch a conversation between the man and God about women. And cop the return of Andre's British Accent on the humorous and sweet 'Good Sir'.

And musically? It is everywhere that fink and beauty can exist. Hs version of 'Favourite Things' shows UK rap - hell, rap - the fuck up... where Big Brovaz bragged about Bentleys over bullshit Irv Gotti-styled beats, Dre turns it into a free jazz drum and bass orgy. And when we say free jazz drum and bass we mean drum and bass-styled beats over which pianos and horns frolic like lambs in a field on a hot day. And it is totally future.

And don't think just because he's not rapping too much it's all some soft ladies' shit. 'She Lives In My Lap' rides coolly over a clanking tuff beat and some jagged guitars. The aforementioned 'Spread' matches clackety beats with rude rapping, sweet pianos, and a prohibition party time vibe... And 'Hey Ma' pops the party like stackers.

The best bits, however come towards the end - 'Dracula' is brilliant. The vocal performances of Dre and Kelis are both fucking beautiful. It is the lushest noise...

So Big Boi, unexpectedly, is the pure pop element. 'Unhappy' oozes genius. It's like Cube's 'It Was A Good Day' now with a sense of regret and hope that few artists ever convey effectively... 'Bowtie' hits all the barbershop buttons that make a man scream in delight "Cadillacs! Yeah!", and the horns parp and the ladies sing the chorus and shit, the rap busts in and a great big grin erupts over the face of the listener. And you heard 'The Way You Move' already, yeah? So you know... You throw bows without thinking.

Kiler Mike brings the rap Andrew WK shit on 'Bust', the Outkast heavy metal number, and 'War' is like Howard Jones and George Clinton got it on with Plastikman, Lee Perry and The Human League.

See, sonically, it's both of them, but Boi tops it on innovation and variety, albeit just. Techno mashes into funk and boogie and pomp rock and gabba and breaks and Ferris doing that shit on the float and Batman and electro and marching band stomps... and the flavouriest raps! So flavoury!

So flavoury. Outkast always were. And they continue to blossom, and bear intoxicating and bounteous fruit. No one musical entity, or group in the world comes close to the sum of their parts. Truly, they are on the Next. When we come to write the big book of 21st century noise, the greatest creations will all trace back to the attitude, and spirit, of these two Good Ole Southern Boys - nothing is out of bounds, and all that matters is that one executes the song (or even the essence in the spirit and style that best suits, regardless of genre or technological constraints.

Cynthia Fuchs, Pop Matters, October 17th, 2003

Reinventing hip-hop is hard work. And yet it must be done, if for no other reason than to repromote the idea that it's been reinvented. Again. Once more attended by prodigious hype, OutKast's latest release, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, right here, right now, would do well to be even half as good as everyone apparently needs it to be. And what a relief: with an eye toward the constant shifting of hip-hop's relations to funk and pop, history and politics, the duo rejiggers the whole business one more time, with a two CD set that is imperfect and ambitious, sometimes startling and always smart.

Picture this: Eight André 3000s, performing on an Ed Sullivan throwback stage, dressed in coordinated Kelly green costumes, smiling for screaming girls with Polaroid cameras. He's a pop star, he's a drummer, he's a set of three back-up singers dressed like lawn jockeys, the crowd is mad for them. And picture this too: One Antwan (Big Boi) Patton, binoculars in hand, scoping a prototypical African savannah, surrounded by long-legged girls stepping through the grass like giraffes. Southern Player appreciates the scenery as Sleepy Brown croons, "I love the way you move."

Provocative (and plain weird), these images introduce essential themes in the double CD (two solo albums packaged for single sale) explores two essential concepts: looking and being looked at. André, like his many models -- from Prince to Sly Stone to Fred Astaire -- is all spectacular spectacle, loving your look as he works out what it means to love. Antwan, while hardly opposite (he's got the great plaid suit going on), positions himself as shrewd spectator: as he told one CNN interviewer, he sees his work on Speakerboxxx as similar to her own: observing and reporting. Intertwining and interrelated, each brings a new perspective on the other.

Dropping at number one on the charts (selling some 510,000 units in the first week, half that again the second), the CDs lean back and push forward at the same time. Like other OutKast records, they are about movement, over time and through space. Speed and simultaneity: honestly, sometimes it's just hard to keep up. That's not to say that Speakerboxxx/The Love Below moves in one direction, or even wholly smoothly. Instead, it lurches and leaps, with mad respect paid to all manner of evolution. In "Behold a Lady", André sings, "Today I might snow, tomorrow I'll rain, / 3000's always changing, but you stay the same. / And I need that, hey I need that (in my life)." Grateful to perceive the very constancy that eludes him, he can extol his own motion while lamenting that, as time persists, "Sad, but one day our kids will have to visit museums / To see what a lady looks like."

In the face of loss, change fuels desire and encourages recovery. "Ready for action, nip it in the bud, / We never relaxin, OutKast is everlastin' / Not clashin', not at all, / But see my nigga went to do a little actin'." Antwan's familiar Southern-speed rap in the first single off Speakerboxx, the thrilling "The Way You Move". Get it: there's no trouble at home, just brotherly love and mutual appreciation. Lush and swank, the track features trumpets (as does much of the album), alongside a sweet, swaying guitar and sturdy bass. The video illustrates the shifting moods, beginning in an auto garage, where big bootied girls change tires, check under hoods, strut in hotpants for low angled cameras: "I don't have much time," announces the boss lady, cars are in need of service. Antwan appears in his loudest plaid jacket, and the song commences: "We tappin' right into your memory banks, thanks! / So click-it-or-ticket, let's see your seat belt fastened. / Trunk rattlin', like two midgets in the backseat rasslin' / Speakerboxxx vibrate the tag."

The scene cuts among displays: the well-populated garage, a coliseum-looking dance hall, that savannah where near-naked, "wild" girls amble for Big Boi's point-of-view binocular vision. "You light me, and excite me," offers hookmaster Sleepy Brown: time may be short, but desire is long, and more than willing. The album's first track, "GhettoMusick", written by Dre and bumping with get-up noise, challenges hip-hop's current norming of ghetto roots (claim realness by getting out of the projects and back into trouble): "He from the dirt, now here come the paranoia, / Although you couldn't have jacked the disrespect." Sampling from Patti LaBelle ("I just want you to know how I feel"), the song reflects on the meanings of surfaces and the values of communication. Or again, on "Church", against a rousing gospel chorus, Antwan urges care and repentance: "Talk to the coach or break out the huddle, / Whatever. Should you fumble, your rebuttal should be subtle, / Cause he who lives in the upper room is never gullible."

Produced by Antwan, Mr. DJ, Carl Mo, and André, much of Speakerboxxx resembles other hip-hop records, down to the big-deal guests (Ludacris, a lazy Jay-Z, Killer Mike, Cee-Lo and Khujo Goodie, as well as Antwan's three-year-old son, Bamboo, who appears in an "Interlude", ready, he says, "to do rap", that is, a baby-cover of "The Whole World" (when Bamboo says he wants to do Michael Jackson next, daddy schools him: "Not on my record, you ain't doing no Michael Jackson"). Luda's contribution, on "Tomb of the Boom", is cleverest of the guests ("Y'all driving Subarus, stuck in your cubicles, / I'm stuck in the air with weed crumbs under my cuticles"), but Antwan just has ideas for days (and still more ruminations on football): "Should I take the three point field goal for the score? / Or should I roll around and take / The ball up the middle, up the gut, the what? / The hole, cranium overload, overthrowed. / Now we got seven more points on the board, fa sho."

On "War", Antwan lays out his version of CNN: "I refuse to sit in the backseat and get handled / Like I do nothin' all day but sit around, watch the Cartoon Channel. / I rap about the Presidential election and the scandal that followed, / And we all watched the nation, as it swallowed and chalked it up. / Basically, America you got fucked, / The media shucked and jived, now we stuck: damn!" Though he's looking hard at the world around him, Antwan isn't offering a means to get unstuck; still, the critique is welcome, as OutKast and hip-hop activists get down to the business of engaging change.

Also about change, but in a more intimate sense, The Love Below is the roundabout result of a movie soundtrack that lost its movie. (In "Love in War", for instance, he muses, "These ain't the times to be alone, cliché, the end is near / Cliché, the end is near, / Cliché, the end is / Quickly approaching while we carry on.") Initiated as André's solo project, the CD turned into constructive inspiration for Antwan's own CD. The first track, "Love Hater", swings into action, with lush coordination of piano-guitar-high-hat and lyrics as cautionary as they are celebratory: "Everybody needs a glass of water today / To chase the hate away." By way of jumpstarting the festivities to come, he imagines preparations ("You know you've got company comin' over. / You scrub extra-hard" before he cuts loose with the point: "And everybody needs somebody to love, / Before it's too late, / It's too laaaaate, oh. / Don't nobody wanna grow old alone!" Love is about the fear of being alone, the rush headlong. You must love love.

"Cupid Valentine", as André calls himself on "Happy Valentine's Day", urges loving love at least for the moment, when fluids flourish and eyes burn, as they say, bright. (For "Pink & Blue", he sings -- following a scratch sample of "Age ain't nothin' but a number" -- "You could have been born a little later, but I don't care. / So what if your head sports a couple of gray hairs? / Same here, and actually I think that's funky / [In a Claire Huxtable type way].") For André (as you know), love forever, for ever ever, that's a test, and disquieting. Rosario Dawson (recalling her scariest, He Got Game-iest incarnation) introduces "She Lives in My Lap", threatening and soliciting: "What's wrong? What are you afraid of? / The Love Below." And above and all around. "She lives in my lap," sings Andre, "Forever my fiancée" (that is, never the wife, always the adoring, anticipating wife to be -- sorry, Ms. Jackson).

The CD includes a drum'n'bass cover of "My Favorite Things", by way of transition between "Dracula's Wedding" (with Kelis, who sings, so pleasingly, "Give me the chance to dance romance. / Don't run, I'm not the sun. / So much at stake . . . oh!") and "Baby Take Off Your Cool" (with Norah Jones: "Baby, take off your cool, / I want to get to know you" -- she's never sounded so cool, frankly).

Even the interludes do work on this album (this from someone with little patience for filler-skits). "Good Day, Good Sir" features a two-character exchange of the "Who's on first?" variety, with each trying to decipher the other's identity. Mr. Bentley Farnsworth, a fiddler ("on the fuckin' roof") is questioned by a passer-by, who observes that he looks "fine." Fantastically well I am, certainly not Fine by far, but you could say I'm close to spectacular." When asked what he means, Farnsworth exclaims, "Open your eyes: spectacular's right in front of you." Fine, it turns out, is on her way over. And beauty -- fineness, fantastic wellness, or even spectacularity -- is in the eye of the beholder.

Like Prince (to whom he has often been compared, and who has conjured his own grand concept-soundtrack albums [Batman and Girl 6]), André understands lust and appreciates the humor of sex, he embraces bodies and beats, comprehending their continuity, welcoming their comedy. The back of the CD features a photo of André with a bracelet of pearls and smoking pink gun (recalling, yet again, Prince in his "Sexy MF" phase), the front has him posed in brilliant red plaid under the Eiffel Tower. "Hey Ya!", The Love Below's brilliantly rousing first single, is a rush about romance at its poppiest, sweetest, and most enthralling: "My baby don't mess around / Because she loves me so," it begins. "And this I know fo shooo . . . / Uh, But does she really wanna? / But can't stand to see me / Walk out the dooo . . ." Laced through with contradictions and fantasies, hopes and losses, the track pulses with pleasure and doubt reconsideration (and the pleasure of doubt).

Here as elsewhere, André (the persona, the mirror image) swaggers and swoons at once, spazzy with electrifying multiplicity. Indeed, the Bryan Barber video for "Hey Ya!" evokes but also changes up the Beatles when they first appeared on U.S. TV. Introduced by "manager" Antwan ("This is hope money," he warns, "I hope you get out there and do your thing. Don't mess it up for everybody"), the video features an eight-man act, all individuals played by André: acoustic guitarist Johnny Vulture; a backup trio called the Love Haters; bassist Possum Jenkins, with white go-go hat; striped-tied keyboardist Benjamin Andre; shirtless drummer Dookie Blasingame; and vivacious lead singer Ice Cold 3000. Girls shriek and snap Polaroids, vintage TV monitors reproduce and refract the show, all the layers suggesting the complications of pop cultured music -- by creators and consumers alike. The song is unstoppable ("Lend me some sugar," he cries, "I am your neighbor!" just before name-checking Beyoncé and Lucy Liu), the love self-perpetuating. "Now what's cooler than bein' cool?"

While André doesn't protest so much as his partner concerning the group's long-rumored, ever-imminent breakup, he also spends so much time looking at himself, and imagining others looking at him, that the CDs speak to one another as if from slightly skewed angles. Their differences are telling and energizing; like motivating mirrors for one another, they provide frames through which the artists can see and be seen. Incorrigible rummagers and rearrangers, OutKast comes together and apart in ways that are, as yet, relentlessly inventive. You can't hardly look away. "Shake it like a Polaroid picture," sings André/Ice Cold 3000 at the end of "Hey Ya!" It -- whatever you want it to be -- comes into focus as you look, simultaneously rewarding your gaze and making you want more.

Jon Caramanica, Rolling Stone, Issue 933, October 16, 2003

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 (Antwan "Big Boi" Patton) and a poet on a perpetual mission of self-discovery (Andre "Andre 3000" Benjamin). The tag-team rhyming and easy-Sunday soul of their 1994 debut, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, showed that Southern hip-hop could be more than booty talk and rote gangsterism. In time, though, the seams that held them together began to fray. 1998's aquatic-funk attack Aquemini was their first masterpiece, but it was also the first time Big Boi and Andre felt palpably out of step, with flamboyant risk-taker Dre sitting out a couple of his partner's rougher numbers. By the time of 2000's whip-smart Stankonia, the most expansive and promising black pop record of the last decade, Big Boi had taken a big artistic leap forward, only to find that Dre was practically off the map. There they are on the album's back cover: Big Boi defiant in a Cubs throwback jersey and a mild blowout Afro, Andre in Hendrix head wrap and bandleader uniform, laughing at a joke it's likely no one else in the room -- or the world, for that matter -- hears.

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, their fifth album, is as divided as its title: two separate discs -- the former by Big Boi, the latter by Dre -- packaged together. On Speakerboxxx, Big Boi continues exploring the future-crunk OutKast perfected on Stankonia -- bubbling psych-soul on the politically minded "War," minimalist 808 electro on the outstanding "The Way You Move." Perhaps not surprisingly, many of Speakerboxxx's best beats are Andre's: "Ghetto Musick" resembles the fight song of an Afro-psychedelic superhero, and "Last Call" is punctuated with maniacally stabbing horns and what sounds like a theremin gone wild. But Speakerboxxx doesn't quite achieve the transcendence of Stankonia -- the hooks aren't there, and neither is their earlier albums' sense of risk and possibility.

Andre's The Love Below, on the other hand, is all about disorder. Below wants to be Prince's Lovesexy, but even more unhinged. He almost exclusively sings, often in falsetto ("Love Hater"), occasionally like an eight-year-old at a family holiday party ("She's Alive"). On the beguiling "Hey Ya!" he yaps like an indie-rock Little Richard over a breezy Abbey Road arrangement. Sometimes Andre's sonic guesswork is genius -- he holds his own alongside Norah Jones on the lithe duet "Take Off Your Cool" (and plays guitar to boot) -- but not all the accidents on The Love Below are happy. Often Andre sounds like he's trying to make an album that's more eccentric than he actually is -- and that's saying a lot.

Each of these albums is as noteworthy for what's missing as for what's there. Big Boi is trying to shoulder the burden of OutKast on Speakerboxxx -- to essentially re-create the group on his own. With The Love Below, Andre 3000 has packed up what he wanted to keep from the group (the right to be peculiar in a hip-hop context), slung it over his shoulder and headed out toward parts unknown. "Today I might snow/Tomorrow I'll rain," Andre croons on "Behold a Lady." "3000 is always changing/But you stay the same."

Laurence Station & Kevin Forest Moreau, Shaking Through. net

The Great Divide

Speakerboxxx, by Laurence Station

Where The Love Below finds Andre 3000 going it primarily alone, following his Prince/George Clinton/Beatlesesque-psychedelic love-jones to its logically illogical conclusion, Speakerboxxx finds Big Boi, the more earthbound of the OutKast braintrust, sticking with tried-and-true hip-hop formula: The all-star cast of rappers overwhelming whatever deficiencies one single rapper might possess. Big Boi certainly doesn't lack the skills or confidence to go it solo, but one can't overlook the talented heavyweights bolstering his rapid, rough-hewn rhymes. From household names Jay-Z and Ludacris to up-and-coming rhyme-slingers Killer Mike and Mello, Speakerboxxx overflows with a wildly diverse cast of vocal stylists (and sharp, imaginatively inventive beats).
When this smorgasbord of flavors works (and it certainly hits more often than it misses), Speakerboxxx is as exciting and expressive as any album released this year. The hyperactive, wildly schizophrenic "GhettoMusick" sets the tone early, from the volatile torrent of Big Boi's machine-gun delivery to the tension-balancing sample of Patti LaBelle's "Love, Need & Want You." It's to Speakerboxxx what "Gasoline Dreams" was to Stankonia -- a potent, infectiously hook-laden opening shot. Equally impressive is the Gangsta Mack tribute "Bowtie," utilizing an appropriately big-noise brass section and Sleepy Brown's smooth flow. "War" allows Big Boi to get off his dance floor platforms and onto a soapbox as he criticizes everything from the post-9/11 loss of freedoms to the contested 2000 Presidential election. In the midst of so many songs about getting one's groove on and the importance of looking good in the 'hood, Big Boi promises to "always bring food for thought to the table." And instead of coming off as preachy or self-important, his stab at politically charged commentary blends into the overall mix refreshingly well.

Speakerboxxx flounders when it overplays the trite macho posturing angle ("Tomb of the Boom") or indulges in pointless nepotism ("Bamboo (Interlude)" -- wherein Big Boi's young son gets his shot at hamming it up for the mic). But the overall freshness and consistency of the heavy bass and horn-backed sound ties the nineteen selections together nicely, and at just under an hour, it never feels top heavy or padded with filler, as so many rap albums regrettably do.

Big Boi cranks his Speakerboxxx up in the same East Point neighborhoods that inspired back-to-back masterpieces Aquemini and Stankonia. And while it may lack the unpredictable P-funk edge Andre 3000 brought to the table on those efforts, in keeping it real and paying its debt to hip hop culture, Speakerboxxx stacks up as a worthy addition to the impressive OutKast catalogue.


The Love Below, by Kevin Forest Moreau

There's a school of thought that attributes the success of the Beatles solely to the contributions of John Lennon. Paul McCartney, adherents of this school insist, was the sappy, "boring" (read: traditional) Beatle; only Lennon's more flamboyant and gritty edges, they say, saved the duo's collaborations from well-executed mediocrity. It's instructive to bear this argument in mind when digesting The Love Below, unquestionably the more aggressive and adventurous half of OutKast's double-solo-album tandem. Because like much of Lennon's solo work, The Love Below finds Andre in sore need of an editor to exert some discipline over his rampant, attention-starved Id, and makes a strong case for just why the revered Atlanta pair is much stronger than the sum of its individual parts.
It's tempting to compare Andre's work here (as many critics have done) to Prince, whose yin-yang duality of sexual aggression and emotional yearning is indeed strongly echoed here. Prince, however, built a legacy not just on cult of personality but on songwriting, a skill set in which Andre proves sorely lacking. The Love Below's liquid, freeform vibe takes its structural cues from past OutKast records, where the loose grooves that permeate hip-hop held more sway. But the rambling sprawl of "Happy Valentine's Day," "Prototype" and "Behold a Lady" suggest a performer perhaps a bit too caught up in his creative urges, unable or unwilling to apply the elbow grease to expand the tracks beyond repetitive showcases for his inventive freakout aesthetic. The 1% inspiration is definitely present: the 99% perspiration... well, that's not so evident.

Not that there aren't moments where Andre's hyperactive muse scores big. Lead-off single "Hey Ya!" is a tight, insistent blast of summertime radio frolic; the lounge-ballad pastiche "Take Off Your Cool" (a debut with Norah Jones) is an effective exercise in genre immersion; and a spirited instrumental version of "My Favorite Things" is an impressive burst of jazzy proficiency. "She's Alive," meanwhile, starts off strong, but its stab at relevant lyricism (addressing the toils of single motherhood) loses steam about halfway through. It's as if being serious proves so taxing for Andre that he can't harness his talent for freshness to breathe life into the song.

At least, it's certainly clear that being less than focused, musically and lyrically, comes easier to Andre here. From belabored skits like "Where Are My Panties" and "God (Interlude)" to the inane "She Lives in My Lap," the eye-rolling "Spread" and the faintly intriguing "Dracula's Wedding" (which uses vampirism as a clunky metaphor for male fear of commitment), it's clear that Andre (apparently feeling his oats after a split from Erykah Badu) confuses sexual candor (and immaturity) with insight. (Let us quickly forget the regrettable "poo-poo" references of the utterly-without-merit "Roses.")

While these moments might prove fascinating to Andre's analyst, for the rest of us, they show an artist still struggling with the confines of his art. The Love Below doesn't break or ignore genre rules so much as it loses interest in them, enthralled as it is with its own "daring" in laying bare Andre's inner sexual pathos. Unfortunately, Attention Deficit Disorder just isn't a workable substitute for craft, nor is a preoccupation with sex (and the scary concept of commitment) quite the same as art. Who knew that Big Boi, the rapper with a stripper's pole in his den, would prove OutKast's stabilizing influence?

Nick Southall, Stylus Magazine, September 23, 2003

Dre, a.k.a. Andre 3000, a.k.a. Andre Lauren Benjamin, says he’s run out of ways to express himself via hip hop. Big Boi, a.k.a. Antwan Andre Patton, says he hasn’t.

It’s difficult to comprehend just how much Outkast have done in the last ten years, and not just what they’ve done for hip hop. Because it’s no longer about just hip-hop, make no mistake. People think it was Stankonia that broadened horizons, that broke them into new creative ground, but all that (stupendous) album is, really, is a continuation of what they’d already started on their previous three records. If anything Aquemini is better than Stankonia, a more complete realisation of an aesthetic (and what an aesthetic!), more consistent, less indulgent, and just as loaded with wild hooks and genius rhymes. But anyway, I digress. This is all talk of the past. Outkast in 2003 are about the future.

Not that it looks very bright, because Speakerboxxx/The Love Below isn’t a double album according to any normal understanding of the concept. Rather Big Boi and Dre have delivered two distinct solo albums under the Outkast moniker, their union perhaps a cynical marketing push to increase sales, as post-split solo ventures by either half of the duo would be bound to flounder commercially. Seen together they remind me of two other bloated, career-crumbling epics; The Beatles’ eponymous white album and The Clash’s Sandinista!. The former is the work of four discontented individuals pulling a band apart at the seams as they pursue their own visions, while the latter is the sound of a supremely talented group believing their own hype, the end product resultantly distended and foolishly ambitious. Despite Big Boi’s protestation that Outkast “ain’t no uno / we a duo” Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, at 39 tracks and 140 minutes, could be said to suffer from the ills of both.

Seen separately, Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx is an album of progressive, p-funk influenced southern hip hop, a continuation of the Atliens, Aquemini, Stankonia sequence, perhaps lacking the unpredictable synergistic spark of previous albums but still classy, funky and hook-laden. The Love Below, unsurprisingly, is a different beast altogether, Dre’s frustration with the limitations of hip hop driving him into wide new sonic territories, a semi-concept album in debt to Prince, Coltrane, D’Angelo and Frank Black. So far, so (un)predictable. It will come as no surprise either to learn that Big Boi’s disc is the more consistent of the two, or that Dre’s is the most inspired.

Taken together, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is a series of spectacular moments and memorable events. In an album of this size and breadth the highlights become all the more important, emerging like beacons of quality in a fog of filler. And what highlights they are! Big Boi begins his proceedings with the outrageous acid-funk of “Ghettomusick,” 1000 mile per hour breaks crashing into laconic Patti LaBelle samples, Dre’s helium-soaked voice popping up in the bridge/chorus/slow bit, one of the few collaborations on the album(s). It makes “B.O.B” sound sane. Speakerboxx also excels with the sweet, existential “Unhappy” (“might as well have fun cos your happiness is done and your goose is cooked”), the irresistible horn-led funkiness of “Bowtie” and the low key groove of “Reset”. Jay-Z drops by for “Flip Flop Rock”, a slice of exquisite hip-hop built on a springy guitar loop, some hyper-scratching and a beatific piano roll, while “The Way You Move” is Spanish-inflected r’n’b dancefloor-fodder of the highest quality. The rest of Speakerboxxx is consistent and unremarkable, even the skits lacking that certain something to mark them out.

The Love Below, on the other hand, is a sonnet cycle about falling in love. No, really. A modern day, hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic psychedelic-pop-funk-electro-jazz sonnet cycle with no regard for iambic pentameters or 14-line rhyme schemes put together by an estranged vegan hip-hop superhero, certainly, but you get what I mean. Loosely the binding concept is about the romantic imperative at the heart of hedonism; or, finding love amongst the madness, where you least expected it. Discovering that the one-night-stand you never expected to lead to anything is actually your introduction to the one. Or something. (The “Where Are My Panties?” skit expresses it much better than I ever could.) So we wade through exquisite, commercialism-masquerading-as-love-baiting Prince workouts (“Happy Valentine’s Day”), lurid and lucid future-funk r’n’b psyche (“She Lives In My Lap”), lounge-jazz noise-rock easy listening (“Love Hater”), catchy pseudo-drum’n’bass odes to anal sex (“Spread”), duets with Norah Jones, songs about vampires falling in love (featuring Kelis), risible drum’n’bass covers (“My Favourite Things” – wisely unlisted), moody, sparse-jazz-tinged ruminations on onanism (“Vibrate”), skittish, falsetto-laden electro-minimalism (“She’s Alive”) and two of the best things Outkast have ever recorded (the blissful Prince slink of “Prototype” and the Frank Black-goes-psyche-funk-power-pop of “Hey Ya”) and come to some kind of conclusion with “A Life In The Day Of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete)”, in which Dre tells the story of how he got here, almost.

You could of course, if you like, rip the best tracks from each album and burn them together into some kind of RIAA-baiting SuperLoveBoxxx CDR that creams all opposition with its x-ray vision, amazing strength and ability to leap multiple genres in a single bound, but that would be missing the point. Life, like hip-hop, is a messy, ever-evolving process, with peaks, troughs, and long passages where you’re not really sure what happened. From comic-book heroes to guardians of black America, Outkast have come a long way in the last decade. Whether they’ll go much further together is a matter for debate, but where they are now is a frustratingly sublime and astonishing place.

Greg Tate, The Village Voice, October 1-7, 2003

Love and Crunk

Rowdy Big Boi and fly Andre 3000 divide and conquer the Dirty South book of hiphop rules.


Six hot jawns into the game, the release of any OutKast album is an Event. They've given us the most scrumptious moments counter-nihilistic hiphop has offered in recent memory. But none has loomed as more Event-ful than Speakerboxx/The Love Below, because it may also be the group's last. This time the OutKast banner flies over two solo albums:

The first in jewel-box order by the rowdy and irrepressible Big Boi, the second by the belovedly fly eccentric Andre 3000, latest link in a lengthy chain of supersoulful African American eccentrics stretching from Charley Patton and Jelly Roll Morton to Andre's guiding light in eclectic negritude, Prince. All folk who wielded weirdness like a scalpel, albeit one that carves order out of the cosmic slop of their free-associative funky imaginations.

Since hiphop is now the Kmart of the American id, where our dark and unconscious shit turns into shinola, we need its democratic ideals to be messy. The Roots' Ahmir Thompson credits crack for the genius of '80s hiphop music, and faults Bill Clinton for the generally agreed suckitude of the music's '90s genus. Fair enough, but Bill Clinton also presided over the rise of hiphop's Dirty South oligarchies, an apt legacy for the country prez who whipped his dick out in the Oval Office. Just as dirty Bill kept the White House close to the outhouse, Southern hiphop's progressive wing was sustaining the tradition of brain-teasing verbal panache and shock-of-the-new funk we once snootily considered the sole province of us uppity upsouth cosmopolite muhfuhs. They also proved you could keep it thoughtful and pimpstrollful, goofball and gangsta, conspiracy-theoried and crunk. Being Dirty Southern means never having to say you're sorry for Master P or The Matrix Reloaded.

No, we ain't about to get it twisted. We know that in the rhyme-soloist MC gladiator arena New York, home of J-hova, Nas, L.L., and DMX, 50 Cent still rules the roost. But if you the kind that needs that good old P-Funk freaknigga headcharge in your modern-day life, OutKast has been your hiphop band for more than a minute. I'm talking about BASS. And Brides of Funkenstein girlchorus moments. And those Blackbyrd McKnight-style guitar fusillades tearing through "Bombs Over Baghdad." And all those insouciantly inscrutable bootysnatching lyrics to go. Not to mention hiphop's only rockstar, our best-dressed clown prince of phools, Andre 3000, as much a vision to behold as a voice to be heard. Role play becomes him. Inside the new album you'll find flicks of him seminude, Dionysian centaur dude surrounded by a bevy of browngirl space angels in an astrological space-time continuum. Worth the price of the ticket if you already think Andre's a god.

If you worship at other altars, know that Mr. 3000 talks more than he rhymes on The Love Below
and sings profusely about Love. About Cupid and Valentine's Day and "Dracula's Wedding Day" and "Love Hater" and "Love in War" and our romantic hero's love for ladies, lap dancers, unicorns, and prototypes. There's lotsa love and nostalgia in the music too: a drunken Art Ensemble of Chicago swing thing here, an Earth Wind and Fire torchsong there, a punk rockabilly stomp, the ever Princely combo of swooping symphony and gooseneck woodblock beats, and an instrumental jungle variation on Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" up in here. One sexy, smart, stylish, tuneful, and above all silly record for starters—Andre Benjamin 3000 in a nutshell, in excelsis, in spades. Cutting to the chase: If the very thought of Andre or Gilbert and Sullivan doesn't make you smile, The Love Below might not be your cup of topsy-turvy ambrosia, bojangles, and laughing gas. It's a concept album and there's supposed to be a movie version next year. Yay.

In any other group Speakerboxx would be the box Andre decided to start thinking outside of. But there's plenty room in Big Boi's house for the Andre Benjamins of this world as well as Ludicris, Jay-Z, Big Gipp, Killer Mike, Cee-Lo, Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz, and Slimm Calhouns. You could hear the Big Boi disc as providing coverage for Dre the ATLien's spacecase act of fey bravery in the unfrilly world of Southern rap. But Mr. Boi more than expoobidently holds it down for all those OutKast fanatics not quite ready to join Mr. 3000 in the elysian fields of romance in psychedelic Tin Pan Alley, and proves himself no slouch with the freakness either. And Dre, still by his brother's side contrary to band-breaking-up-yo theory, produces and rhymes on the 120-bpm Eurodisco-turns-swooning-Patti Labelle sampling track that is Speakerboxx's first cut and graces three more before album's end.

Where Dre twists Prince remnants to his own astroboyish amorous ends, Big Boi holds up OutKast's P-Funk revival tent. "Bowtie" is very Gloryhallastoopid, "The Rooster" could find a home on Motor-Booty Affair, the crunkadelic Killer Mike cameo "Bust" is some Standing on the Verge for your shelf ass while Trombipulation could have used the fetching "Church." No copycatting here, though. George Clinton and company's best ideas, especially the harmonic ones, have been needing a change of venue. They've been barely touched let alone exhausted by G-funk. And never fear: Big Boi also maintains Uncle Jam and the OutKast of yesteryear's ghettocentric take on world politrix. Suckas will bounce.

Dan Leroy, Yahoo! Music, September 18, 2003

Even for OutKast, who've given hip-hop a new language of flamboyance and ambition, packaging two solo albums as a nearly 40-track double seems excessive. In practice, though, it was the only avenue left for a restless duo committed to upping the ante with each release, even if this one won't satisfy fans knocked out by the genre-bending perfection of 2000's Stankonia.

The short, superficial take is that dividing Big Boi and Dre provides the former a chance to explore his Southern rap roots, and the latter an opportunity to go buck wild. That's especially true on The Love Below, which finds Dre unleashing his every Princely impulse; the result has the manic brilliance and maddening digressions--from Beatles jangle to continental jazz--of many a Purple platter. Abandoning rhymes for a substandard croon, Dre compensates with guitar-based experiments ("Hey Ya!" and "Roses") with charm and catchiness that can't be denied.

Yet while not as exhilarating (except on the techno-crunk monster "Ghettomusick"), Speakerboxxx mirrors its less-flashy creator and emerges as the more substantial listen. A refinement of OutKast's deep-fried but futuristic funk, its hooks, horns, and bounce make it seem a respectable successor to Stankonia, even though Big Boi's everythug tales sometimes miss Dre's off-the-wall spark. Combining the two discs might have insured an unbeatable follow-up; however, the flawed, fascinating separation reveals what makes this partnership so special.

Angus Batey, Yahoo UK & Irel., September 30, 2003

In the decade since beginning their singular journey to beyond the boundaries of what hip hop could deliver, Antwan 'Big Boi' Patton and Andre 'Dre 3000' Benjamin have seemed inseparable, counterbalancing parts of the same unified whole. But here they are, a double CD set essentially splitting the duo down the middle, delivering a disc-length missive apiece from the musical worlds each now seem to separately inhabit.

You have to deal in over-simplifications if you want to discuss this amazing record in less than a book-length format. So think of 'Speakerboxxx' as 'Stankonia' Part 2, and 'The Love Below' as Dre does Prince. But there's much more to 'The Love Below' than Dre's ambitions beyond hip hop, and much more to 'Speakerboxxx' than Big's attempts to make hip hop encompass more than it already does.

The sticker that appeared on the cover of their third album, 'Aquemini', hailed "the poet" and "the playa". Conventional wisdom has always had it that bohemian, loud-dressing Dre is the former, and Big Boi, with his penchant for pole dance clubs and pit bull breeding is the latter. 'Speakerboxxx / The Love Below' turns this theory on its head. Dre deals in relationships, sex and emotions, while Big Boi gets political and personal. The poet pens lines like: "I don't want to move too fast / but can't resist your sexy ass / Just spread, spread for me," while the playa blasts: "I refuse to sit in the backseat and get handled / Like I do nothing all day but sit around and watch the Cartoon Channel."

You can put these discs on random select and, while you'll often be able to tell whose disc a track comes from, they're still inseparable when it comes to quality. Some highlights: 'The Way You Move', from 'Speakerboxxx', is hilarious, a rap salsa with lascivious verses and syrupy choruses. 'Hey Ya', from 'The Love Below', is an almost Beatlesesque strumalong, framing a lyric of unapologetic lust. 'Ghettomusick', one of four tracks where the pair worked together, is a riot of steel-hard disco and mental sampled soul drop-outs. 'Love Hater' (Dre) is a cocktail lounge jazz excursion, 'Church' (Big) a gospel-laden affirmation of faith in a higher power.

Splitting their creativity apart has, in fact, revealed Dre and Big to have their own internal, self-contained checks and balances. They are both men capable, it would appear, of doing anything in the world of music they could possibly think of trying. Their records sound very different, but they're both astounding. And they're both still out there, on that journey to the limits of what you, me, or they think could happen next. Praise be.

© Frank Steven Groen