Every Outkast Album, Ranked – SPIN

André Lauren Benjamin and Antwan André Patton, better known to the world as André 3000 and Big Boi, were both born in Atlanta in 1975. After meeting at Lenox Square mall as teenagers, the two aspiring rappers started a group, first known as 2 Shades Deep. Taken under the wing of the Organized Noize production team, the duo became Outkast and developed their unique flows and conversational lyrics in basement studio sessions, forging the core of the legendary Dungeon Family collective. By the time André and Big Boi graduated high school, Outkast was the first hip-hop group signed to LaFace Records.

At a time when New York and L.A. reigned as hip-hop’s coastal epicenters, Outkast’s 1994 debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik helped shine a light on Atlanta as a hotbed of talent. In 1995 the album went platinum and Outkast won Best New Rap Group at the Source Awards, where André famously declared “The South got somethin’ to say” in front of a hostile New York audience. Over the next few years, Atlanta became a major industry hub, with Outkast as one of its most famous exports, and for a decade every album the group released sold more and attracted more critical acclaim. 

By the time the sixth Outkast album Idlewild was released 2006, the duo had won six Grammys and sold over 20 million records. Since then, the duo have mostly worked separately, occasionally linking back up for momentous collaborations like UGK’s 2007 classic “International Players Anthem.” Big Boi has released three solo albums and a few collaborative projects full of the kind of funky, trunk-rattling Southern rap excellence he helped pioneer. Meanwhile, the more mercurial André 3000 has acted in several films, recorded instrumental albums playing flute and piano, and occasionally drops a virtuosic guest verse on a blockbuster rap album just to remind the world that he’s one of the world’s greatest emcees. 

Outkast reunited onstage in 2014, playing over 40 dates at festivals including Coachella and Lollapalooza for their only significant tour since 2002. Last year, Outkast became the first Southern rap group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and both members of the group gave heartfelt acceptance speeches, with Big Boi performing a medley of the group’s hits with several famous friends and musical descendants. Every Outkast fan probably daydreams about getting a seventh album from the dynamic duo someday, but whether or not that ever happens, the group already has one of the most celebrated catalogs in hip-hop. Which album is their best? 

6. Idlewild (2006)

Director Bryan Barber’s Idlewild was a lavish old-school movie musical with a hip-hop twist, starring both members of Outkast performing songs from the album of the same name, as well as its megaselling predecessor Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. After that release’s dual solo album concept, Idlewild was ostensibly the return of Outkast as a functioning group, but it just intensified the public perception that André and Big Boi were drifting apart. Only three songs on Idlewild feature vocals from both, though “Mighty O” and “Hollywood Divorce” still have a spark of that old easygoing chemistry. The latter, by far the album’s best song, is a thoughtful yet catchy meditation on the pitfalls of show business, with guest verses from Snoop Dogg and an ascendant, impassioned Lil Wayne.

After a decade of one triumph after another, Idlewild was both creatively and commercially underwhelming. The André 3000 solo songs that are tailored to the film’s Great Depression-era setting, like “Idlewild Blue” and “Life Is Like A Musical,” can be cloying and obnoxious, if not dull. Big Boi fares a little better on thumping tracks like “Morris Brown,” and introduces a protégé who’d eventually become a major star in her own right, Janelle Monae, on “Call the Law” and “In Your Dreams.” When Outkast toured in 2014, nobody seemed to mind that they didn’t perform a single Idlewild song. “At 79 minutes, exhaustion sets in by the midway mark, and the whole of the album takes on the feeling of someone trying to cap a broken water main,” Jess Harvell wrote in the Pitchfork review of Idlewild.

5. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003)

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was a runaway pop culture phenomenon, the second hip-hop release to ever win the Grammy for Album of the Year and one of only about a dozen rap albums certified diamond. For Outkast fans, though, it can be a bittersweet listen, the beginning of the end. There are some electrifying songs like “She Lives in My Lap” and “Bowtie,” and even a couple that feature both members like “GhettoMusick,” but the conceit of two solo albums packaged as a double CD results in a long, uneven listen that lacks the group’s signature yin-and-yang chemistry.  

Big Boi carries the torch for the classic Outkast sound on Speakerboxxx with lots of booming 808s and smooth R&B hooks, and trades rhymes with other superstars like Jay-Z and Ludacris. André 3000, who only raps on two songs, is all over the map on The Love Below, from the infectious pop and rock hooks of the chart-topping smash “Hey Ya!” to the lovelorn balladry of “Prototype.” Some of the second disc’s genre exercises, like a drum and bass rendition of “My Favorite Things,” are just too self-consciously eclectic for their own good, though, and André’s singer-songwriter efforts come off a little half-baked beyond the singles. “Big Boi, we may conclude, is something of a realist, while André 3000 is away with the fairies. Together and apart, though, it’s clear they drive each other to new extremes,” John Mulvey wrote in the NME review of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. 

4. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik (1994)

Arrested Development and Kris Kross were the first Atlanta rap groups to go platinum in 1992, but Outkast’s debut two years later was really the landmark that helped turn A-Town into the center of the Southern rap universe. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik isn’t just a coming-out party for Outkast but also Goodie Mob, who guest on two songs, and Organized Noize producers Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and the late great Rico Wade. Sleepy Brown would eventually get feature credits on some of Outkast’s biggest hits and co-star in their videos, but his silky voice was a staple of their songs from the very beginning, on the hooks of classics like “Player’s Ball” and “Crumblin’ Erb,” and taking center stage on the six-minute R&B vamp “Funky Ride.”  

Given how much more omnivorous and eclectic the group’s music would become over the next few years, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik is sometimes looked down on as the most conventional and earthbound Outkast album. But it’s one of the most impressive and self-assured hip-hop albums ever made by teenage emcees, and the pure songwriting skills on display on “Git Up, Git Out” and “Myintrotoletuknow” are the foundation that the rest of the Outkast catalog would be built upon. “Dre, Big Boi and crew deal strictly with those pre-adult crossroads that are at once timely and timeless,” Rob Marriott wrote in The Source’s review of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. 

3. ATLiens (1996)

If the group name Outkast didn’t make it clear enough, the title ATLiens reiterated the estrangement that André 3000 and Big Boi felt from their peers, and their determination to do things their own way. And yet the introduction of a more Funkadelic-inspired Afrofuturist aesthetic on the group’s sophomore album, and a skepticism towards chasing crossover success on “Mainstream,” seemed to resonate and make Outkast even more popular. The duo also still had their ear to the streets enough that “Wheelz of Steel” contained the first reference on a major label record to “the trap,” Atlanta’s slang term for places where drug deals go down, which would eventually become the namesake of an entire Southern rap subgenre. 

Organized Noize worked on every Outkast album, but André and Big Boi began making beats themselves on their sophomore album, and would become more confident and self-sufficient as producers with each subsequent release. The rappers self-produced some of the most impressive tracks on ATLiens, including the title track and the spacey, echoing drums of “Elevators (Me & You).” “OutKast weave elements of Southern black folklore, ghetto gamesmanship and biblical teaching into a potent manifesto,” Kevin Powell wrote in the Rolling Stone review of ATLiens.

2. Stankonia (2000)

Outkast’s success was a product of the MTV era in the sense that the group made great videos, and knew how to use the video channels as a promotional platform for songs that were a tough sell for radio. Stankonia’s lead single “B.O.B (Bombs Over Baghdad)” was a blur of Miami bass and drum and bass with guitar solos and a church choir, and it was too fast and too weird for rap radio, peaking at 69 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The song’s outrageously entertaining video, however, was irresistible to MTV and BET. That set the stage perfectly for the crossover success of the follow-up “Ms. Jackson,” an emotionally complex pop rap masterpiece about co-parenting after a breakup. By the time “So Fresh, So Clean” was released as the third single, Stankonia had become Outkast’s first triple platinum album, and André and Big Boi were the coolest motherfunkers on the planet.  

Earthtone III, the production team comprising both members of Outkast and Mr. DJ, pushed the group’s sound further in a psychedelic direction. With the black-and-white version of the American flag on the cover and the provocative lyrics of “?” and “Gasoline Dreams,” Stankonia is Outkast’s most overtly political album. It might also be their most overtly sexual album, with playfully ribald songs like “I’ll Call Before I Come” and “We Luv Deez Hoez” occasionally lightening the mood. “On this album their realism and high spirits drive each other higher. There’s more bounce-to-the-ounce and less molasses in the jams, more delight and less braggadocio in the raps,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of Stankonia.

1. Aquemini (1998)

By 1998, André 3000 the Gemini had gone vegan and stopped smoking weed, and his personal fashion sense had become increasingly flamboyant and eccentric. Big Boi the Aquarius remained the more relatable ATL everyman in a throwback jersey, a contrast they played up on Aquemini. In the first verse on the album on “Return of the ‘G’,” André directly addressed the chatter around the group and his changing image: “Then the question is, ‘Big Boi, what’s up with André? / Is he in a cult, is he on drugs, is he gay? / When y’all gon’ break up?’” The group’s experimental streak became more pronounced on Aquemini, and the seven-minute spoken word funk odyssey “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” is by far the most popular Outkast song that was never a radio single. But the album also features André and Big Boi at their best as emcees, with razor-sharp verses on “Skew It on the Bar-B” and the two-part masterpiece “Da Art of Storytellin’.” 

September 29, 1998 has gone down in history as one of the most exciting release dates in the history of hip-hop: A Tribe Called Quest’s final album and future classics by Jay-Z, Outkast, and Black Star all hit stores on that momentous Tuesday. And I’ll admit that at the time, my taste in hip-hop was centered around New York artists, and I had three of those albums in heavy rotation, but not Outkast. It wasn’t until I caught a ride home one night that fall from my co-worker Jesse, who loved Aquemini and couldn’t wait to show off his car stereo’s subwoofers, that I started to realize I’d been sleeping on the duo from Atlanta. “Outkast understand the power of sound the way, say, Sly understood it on There’s a Riot Goin’ On or P-Funk did on The Motor-Booty Affair, and so they’ve crafted the most seductive and dreamadelic textures this side of, well, the last Outkast album,” Tony Green wrote in the SPIN review of Aquemini.