Big Boi, Andre 3000
Personal Information
Born Antwan "Big Boi" Patton, c. 1975; born Andre "Andre 3000" Benjamin, c. 1975.
Career
Worked with producer Rico Wade of Organized Noize production team, early 1990s; released debut single, "Player's Ball," 1993; signed with LaFace label; released debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, 1994; ATLiens, 1996; Aquemini, 1998; Stankonia, 2000; launched OutKast Clothing line, 2001.
Life's Work
From the beginning, hip-hop music has had its nonconformists--free spirits who diverge from the music's dominant trends and take to heart the creativity, playfulness, and stylistic mixture inherent in the hip-hop genre. Following in the tradition of such groups as the Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest is the Atlanta duo OutKast, whose 2000 album, Stankonia, propelled them to mainstream success. The album capped a nine-year career marked by increasingly bold experimentation. While many entrants in the hip-hop arena have faded after one or two creative outings that exhaust their new ideas, OutKast has continued to hold the attention of musically aware hip-hop audiences.
OutKast consists of Atlantans Antwan "Big Boi" Patton and Andre "Dre" Benjamin, also known as Andre 3000. Both were native Georgians, born around 1975. They met in an Atlanta mall and discovered that they were both new tenth-grade students at Atlanta's Tri-Cities High School, as well as admirers of the line of funk running from Sly & the Family Stone to Prince, a line that was one of hip-hop's direct ancestors. Soon they were holding rhyming competitions in the school's cafeteria and wondering why Atlanta, with its wealth of local musical talent--their own high school had spawned the R&B groups TLC and Xscape--had not yet spawned a distinctive hip-hop tradition comparable in importance to the competing East Coast and West Coast schools.
Met Producer at Shopping Center
The duo met TLC producer Rico Wade in the parking lot of a plaza where he owned two stores, and was impressed with his ability to play several musical instruments live--a contrast with other hip-hop studio wizards whose expertise was exclusively digital. The favorable impression went both ways; Wade was so riveted by their version of A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario" that he closed both his shops and drove Patton and Benjamin to the Dungeon production studio. Wade's Organized Noize production team would remain with OutKast and become heavily involved in shaping the duo's first several albums.
OutKast's debut single, "Player's Ball," was released in 1993. Extolling both pimps and marijuana smoking, it gave evidence of the duo's innovative ways only in its intricate rhymes. When a complete album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, was released the following year, it contained a wide range of songs, including one that advised "Don't spend all your time tryin' to get high." Entertainment Weekly praised the album, pointing to its "casual funk" sound and delightful rhymes such as "ain't no thang but a chicken wing." Nevertheless, Patton told the Los Angeles Times, "A lot of people got the message of our first album mixed up. They just heard 'Player's Ball' and thought it was all about the pimps, the cars, and all that mess."
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik sold more than 850,000 copies in its first five months of release, giving OutKast considerable creative latitude for their second release, ATLiens. The title is a thoroughly characteristic pun combining the word "aliens" with the conventional three-letter abbreviation for Atlanta. That album diverged from the hip-hop trend of sampling earlier songs wholesale. "While everyone else is content to steal an old hit song and add a new rap verse over it, we always start from scratch," Patton told the Los AngelesTimes. "Picasso had plenty of influences, but you'd never catch him trying to remake another artist's work in the exact same way. We feel the same." The comment pointed toward the artistic ambitions of OutKast's music, but, like funk master George Clinton, the duo had a knack for experimenting without losing a connection with ordinary music fans. USA Today later detected a useful creative tension between Patton's streetwise perspective and Benjamin's socially conscious texts. ATLiens sold more than 1.5 million copies.
Adopted Unique Visual Style
In concert and on video, Benjamin began to cultivate an outrageous visual style that reminded industry observers of another member of the 1970s funk scene, "Bootsy" Collins. Encountering Benjamin in an Atlanta airport concourse, Atlanta Journal and Constitution writer Sonia Murray described "royal blue pants--fringed at midcalf--with some kind of flowery silver pattern. Then a black-and-orange football jersey. And finally, a floppy red-and-black crocheted hat, tilted to one side, over his meticulously Farrah Fawcett-flipped hair." The more conservative Patton expressed himself in another way: he took up breeding pit bull dogs. "People discriminate against them before they even get to know them," he pointed out to the Toronto Sun. "It's like how white women clutch their purse when they see a black man walking toward them." He added, "She don't even know you but she's scared of you."
Both sales totals and creative achievement continued to rise with OutKast's third album, 1998's Aquemini. OutKast began to show up on newspaper music critics' year-end best album lists, and the group's fame began to spread beyond the hip-hop community. Some of the publicity, however, was negative. One of the album's singles, "Rosa Parks," was intended as an oblique honor to the civil rights pioneer, still alive and well in Detroit (the lyrics do not mention her specifically, but refer to "the back of the bus" and evoke Parks's time with a sharp harmonica solo). Parks, perhaps incensed by the profanity used in some of OutKast's music, charged the duo with unauthorized exploitation of her name for commercial purposes. An initial court decision came down in OutKast's favor in 1999, but appeals continued.
In March of 1998 Patton and Benjamin purchased an Atlanta studio formerly owned by R&B star Bobby Brown. They renamed it Stankonia, combining a slang term meaning "funky" ("stank") with "Plutonia," the name of a futuristic city depicted on a poster in Benjamin's bedroom. For the duo, the name had overtones of a place with untrammeled creative freedom, and Stankonia became the name of their fourth album, recorded over about a year beginning in the spring of 1999 and released the following year.
Won Two Grammy Awards
A true creative tour de force, Stankonia garnered five Grammy nominations and won two, for best rap album and best rap single. The latter award was for "Ms. Jackson," a song inspired by the breakup of Benjamin's relationship with the innovative neo-soul vocalist Erykah Badu. The lyrics address Badu's mother, promising to remain involved with the upbringing of Benjamin and Badu's son, Seven. OutKast's label LaFace/Arista marketed the album heavily among white college music fans, and "Ms. Jackson," especially, became a huge success across the board, rising to the top of Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. The rest of the album was a splendidly varied lot, with the leadoff single "B.O.B." featuring organs and a college choir on vocals, a rap piece in the mold of Public Enemy ("Gasoline Dreams"), the keyboard-drenched soul piece "Slum Beautiful," and many other songs that ranged from humorous to deadly serious. Stankonia contained 24 tracks in all, and many buyers found that it took repeated hearings to fully grasp the music.
OutKast released a greatest hits compilation at the end of 2000 in advance of the 2001 Grammy awards. Their energies in 2001 were partly consumed with the launching of a men's clothing line, OutKast Clothing, intended to put their own imprint on the close symbiosis between hip-hop music and the fashion world.
With Stankonia having sold nearly four million copies, observers wondered what the next level of OutKast's success might be. Perhaps it would involve the increased incorporation of live instruments into hip-hop--the duo was known for bringing musical instrument instructors along with them on their tour bus. Even before they released Stankonia, Benjamin had predicted a creative renaissance for hip-hop. "I think you're about to hear some different rhythms, you're about to hear some different styles," he told the Houston Chronicle. "I think it's about to get to live, wild."
Awards
Selected: Five Grammy award nominations and two awards for Stankonia, 2001.
Works
Selected discography
- Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, LaFace, 1994.
- ATLiens, LaFace, 1996.
- Aquemini, LaFace, 1998.
- Stankonia, LaFace, 2000.
Further Reading
Books
- Contemporary Musicians, Volume 33, Gale, 2002.
Periodicals- Atlanta Journal and Constitution, October 30, 2000, p. D1; April 4, 2001, p. D1; February 26, 2002, p. E1.
- Daily News (New York), November 4, 2000, p. Pulse-23.
- Entertainment Weekly, May 27, 1994, p. 88; November 3, 2000, p. 81.
- Houston Chronicle, March 7, 1999, p. Zest-9.
- Jet, March 26, 2001, p. 54.
- Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1996, p. Calendar-78.
- Newsweek, October 30, 2000, p. 88.
- New York Times, November 19, 1999, p. A28.
- St. Petersburg Times, January 27, 1999, p. B2.
- Toronto Sun, October 11, 1996, p. 65.
- USA Today, November 3, 2000, p. E13.
On-line- All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com
— James M. Manheim
