(In an unrelated article in the paper I learned that Erykah lives in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. Maybe I'll see her on the A train. )

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October 5, 2003
When Weird Works: Outkast and Erykah Badu
By KELEFA SANNEH

FEW weeks ago, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo Outkast did something that seemed suicidal. On Sept. 23, the duo released "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" — two solo albums, side by side. "Speakerboxxx" is propelled by Big Boi's precise, sticky rhymes, and "The Love Below" floats along on André 3000's not-quite-angelic falsetto singing. Listeners have to make sense of almost two and a half hours of music, figuring out for themselves how it all fits together.

This could have been a recipe for disaster, but "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" (Arista/BMG) has earned an enthusiastic reception so far. Entertainment Weekly graded the album an "A," and the double-album's twin videos — "Hey Ya!," by André 3000, and "The Way You Move," by Big Boi — have been playing on MTV and BET. Having released the riskiest album of their decade-long career, the members of Outkast are more visible than ever.

Weirdness sells. Or does it? A week before Outkast, a different Southern-bred, hip-hop-influenced star released an equally daring new album. The star is the soul singer Erykah Badu, who has collaborated with Outkast in the past: the fruits of their labor include a couple great songs and a baby. On "The Love Below," André 3000, long separated from Ms. Badu, explains what happened: "We young in love — in short, we had fun/ No regrets, no abortion, had a son/ By the name of Seven, and he's 5, by the time I do this mix/ He'll probably be 6.")

Ms. Badu's new album, "Worldwide Underground" (Motown/Universal), sneaked into stores on Sept. 16. The high-profile guest list includes Queen Latifah and Lenny Kravitz, and the disc is full of the sort of sleepy-eyed funk that made D'Angelo's "Voodoo" so popular.

And yet "Worldwide Underground" has hardly made an impact. Reviews have been lukewarm (Rolling Stone awarded it two stars out of five), and it seems likely that some of Ms. Badu's fans aren't even aware that she has a new album in stores. Like Outkast, Ms. Badu is taking an idiosyncratic path, but the results are different. She's out in space, too, but she seems less like a star than ever.

Big Boi (Antwan Patton, 28) and André 3000 (André Benjamin, 28) made their debut in 1994 with "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik," which combined slow-rolling beats with smooth refrains and astonishingly eloquent rhymes. Over the next few years, the group got better and bolder.

By 1998, when the group released its third album, "Aquemini," there were more musical surprises (the single "Rosa Parks" included a harmonica solo) and more ambitious narratives. In one song, André 3000 tenderly evoked a childhood memory: "I remember her number like the summer/ When her and Suzie, yeah, they threw a slumber/ Party — but you cannot call it that 'cause it was slummer/ Well, it was more like spend-the-night/ Three in the morning, yawning, dancing under street lights." It was starting to seem clear that Outkast was the greatest hip-hop group of all time — more versatile than Run-DMC, more unpredictable than Public Enemy, more resilient than N.W.A., more consistent than the Wu-Tang Clan.

In 2000, Outkast released "Stankonia," the group's least consistent album so far, but also the wildest and funniest. It was a crossover hit, thanks to "Ms. Jackson," a conflicted ode to baby-mamas, and "So Fresh, So Clean," a silky celebration of Southern style. The same things that set the group apart from other hip-hop acts — moaning vocals, wailing guitars, synthesizers fit for a Prince — helped attract listeners who wouldn't otherwise have been interested in a couple of rappers from Atlanta.

The new double-album follows this trend to two different logical conclusions. Big Boi is often described as the regular guy of the group, but he is also the group's resident virtuoso, sometimes slowing down his delivery to emphasize an internal rhyme and sometimes speeding it up so that the syllables rush past. "Speakerboxxx" covers a lot of ground, from the murder of Daniel Pearl to the scandalous goings-on at a local strip club, and he seems particularly interested in the sometimes contradictory demands of lust and life. In his own pithy words, "from T&A to DNA, feelings turn to chilluns," and he doesn't pick sides: he realizes that far from being incompatible, the two impulses are inseparable.

"Speakerboxxx" doesn't stray far from the hip-hop mainstream: many of the songs stick to beats-and-rhymes basics, and there are typically entertaining appearances from Ludacris and Jay-Z. But Big Boi knows that a club-friendly hit can be just as innovative as an album-only obscurity, so he packs his disc full of unusual arrangements. "The Way You Move" struts along on a fast track and a slow trumpet line, "Flip Flop Rock" lays glimmering guitar notes over melancholy piano and "Ghetto Musick" (produced by André 3000) switches back and forth between frantic electro beats and hazy slow-jam atmospherics.

"The Love Below" goes in a different direction: André 3000 seems to have given up on the possibilities of hip-hop, at least for the time being; instead, he croons and makes beats and goofs off. Not surprisingly, there are more lowpoints here than on "Speakerboxxx," including a tedious drum-n-bass version of John Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things," and "She Lives in My Lap," a tuneless duet with the actress Rosario Dawson.

But André 3000 also has a knack for turning self-indulgent digressions into hummable pop songs. His current single, "Hey Ya!," is a punky soul anthem that sounds like nothing you've ever heard; the video, starring a rock band made up of grinning André 3000's, is even better. There's also a deliriously smutty song called "Spread," which joins a skittering beat to a tinkling piano. (Suffice it to say that any description of the chorus would render the title unfit to print.) One skit, "Where Are My Panties?," chronicles morning-after befuddlement; here, as elsewhere, André 3000 is irresistible, every bit as lascivious as you expect him to be, but twice as generous. As the title suggests, "The Love Below" is both a high-minded romantic treatise and one long dirty joke.

Outkast's divided album has some fans scared that the two halves will never reunite, but these two discs offer plenty of proof that the partnership makes sense. André 3000's flightier compositions could use a bit of Big Boi's earthy patter, and some of Big Boi's dense raps would benefit from André 3000's gleeful singing. In any case, the discs succeed because of the duo's shared sensibility, at once playful and thoughtful; they deflate their own pretensions by insisting that they are just having fun.

You'd never use a word like fun to describe the eccentric approach of Ms. Badu, who was raised in Dallas. When she released "Baduizm," in 1997, she was celebrated as the first lady of neo-soul, although her voice, as sharp and light as a pocketknife, made even the most languorous grooves seem somehow menacing. From the start, her reputation for new-age tranquility didn't quite fit with her feisty hits: "Next Lifetime" was sung by a woman contemplating infidelity; "On & On" borrowed the language of the 5 Percent Nation of Islam; "Tyrone" told a good-for-nothing lover to get lost.

In 2000 she released "Mama's Gun," a quiet, jazzy album that spawned one hit (the sublime "Bag Lady," based on a clever Dr. Dre sample) but failed to match the success of "Baduizm." Then, nothing: Ms. Badu has acknowledged that, after "Mama's Gun," she was "frustrated" by a case of writer's block. So she went on tour, spent time with her production group Freakquency — consisting of Ms. Badu, James Poyser, Rashad (Ringo) Smith and RC Williams — and returned from hibernation with "Worldwide Underground," which her record company is marketing, rather apologetically, as a 50-minute EP.

Ms. Badu prints her new manifesto on the cover. "Freakquency is born and neo-soul is dead," it reads."Are you afraid of change? Well, change makes dollars. Follow the leader." That's precisely the kind of defensive attitude that Outkast has spent a decade avoiding, but it seems to fit Ms. Badu's current mood.

Her new album uses subtle funk grooves to conjure up a murky, paranoid feeling; if André 3000 and Big Boi have figured out that love can be fun, Ms. Badu seems just as convinced that love can be terrifying, and her album suggests that desire is a form of spirit possession.

The disc's centerpiece is "I Want You," nine minutes of tension followed by two minutes of glorious release. It starts off with a one-chord keyboard riff in the pattern of a heartbeat — it could almost be a minimal techno track — and Ms. Badu describes her attempts at exorcism: "Tried to turn the sauna up to hotter/ Drank a whole glass of holy water

/ But it won't let go." The band stretches out the groove, adding and improvising until the shuddering heartbeat returns, slows and stops, replaced by a synthesizer solo that sounds a bit like an electrified harp. It ends with Ms. Badu's voice, almost inaudible: "Just 'cause I tell you I love you, don't mean that I do."

She finds a different way to explore the same theme on the single "Danger," which mimics the trebly, synthetic sound of Southern hip-hop. The lyrics tells the story of a drug dealer's girlfriend, at once desperate and defiantly proud, as she waits for her man to come home. The chorus is a mesmerizing collision of similar-sounding syllables: "I got the block on lock, the trunk stay locked/ Glock on cock, the block stay hot." Ms. Badu turns a familiar hip-hop crime narrative into a lovesick fugue of fear and loyalty.

It's not hard to understand why some Erykah Badu fans are disappointed by "Worldwide Underground." The album is essentially one long groove, with plenty of ambience but not a lot of songwriting. And the spooky mood never dissipates. Even on the good-natured posse cut "Love of My Life Worldwide," Ms. Badu suggests that love is sorcery: when she intones, "I got the hazel eyes/ To make your nature rise," she seems to be casting a spell.

It's clear that Ms. Badu doesn't share Outkast's knack for popularization, for making the strange seem familiar. In fact, she seems to be blessed — or maybe cursed — with the opposite skill. She's a first-rate depopularizer, able to make even the familiar sounds of 1970's jazz and funk seem strange.

This is a perverse sort of talent — in fact, most singers would probably see it as a liability. But there's a lot to be said for Ms. Badu's mysterious approach. It may never inspire the kind of contagious excitement generated by "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," but "Worldwide Underground" has its own charms — the album evokes an unsettling feeling that's hard to figure out and even harder to shake. While Outkast delights in unearthing new sounds, Ms. Badu does something just as valuable. She turns every song into a burial rite, gathering up her favorite grooves and putting them back underground.



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Interesting review - it's cool to see a critic giving the Big Boi disc more love for a change. Not that I necessarily agree, but I think Speakerboxxx at least deserves more credit than it's been getting...

GAH! Sorry about the double post. Blame Ah-nold.






Rise Of The Machines Edit
[This message was edited Mon Oct 6 11:17:27 PDT 2003 by Anxiety]

we've got Badu's album on at work right now!