Speakerboxxx / The Love Below

<i>Speakerboxxx/The Love Below</i> put Outkast in the company of Prince and The Beatles in making pop music that appealed to tens of millions of people, while still feeling as unusual and specific as art. Trust the elders on this: There was not a single wedding/house party/sporting event/graduation/Bar-or-Bat Mitzvah in 2003 or ’04 at which you didn’t hear “Hey Ya!” or “The Way You Move” or probably both, not to mention see everyone from toddlers to the very elderly dancing to them. This was as universal as pop culture got, and if it hadn’t happened already, the moment where it felt like hip-hop became the dominant sound in popular music. On a more granular level, the songs pointed the way to where certain aspects of the culture were going: “The Way You Move“ anticipating the hybrid of rap and R&B that led to Beyoncé and Drake, “Hey Ya!” bringing an “indie” feel into mainstream pop in ways you can still hear in Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey. And that’s only two of the album’s songs. <i>Speakerboxxx/The Love Below</i> wasn’t hip-hop’s first double album—Biggie’s posthumous <i>Life After Death</i> felt like an epic; 2Pac’s <i>All Eyez on Me</i> was more than two hours long—but it was arguably the first time a hip-hop group had explored how rangy and weird a double album could be—and we don’t just mean the André stuff, either. “GhettoMusick”, “Tomb of the Boom”, the big-band feel of “Bowtie” and “The Rooster”: This stuff sounded <i>nothing</i> like anything else in hip-hop at the time, whether mainstream, underground or otherwise, and like, yes, Prince circa <i>Sign O’ The Times</i>, drew curling, swirling connections through the history of Black pop in ways that felt both visionary and effortless. Of course, for pure eccentricity, you can’t do better than “Spread” or “Roses” or “Dracula’s Wedding”, all of which bubble along with the unstable brilliance of a bright mind with a lot of resources chasing their weird ideas to the limits of their imagination—because that’s what they are. Outkast outdid themselves. And bittersweet as it is to say, they didn’t do it again.