What follows are FACT’s Top 50 favourite OutKast tracks, including solo cuts, guest spots and assorted oddities. We’ve spent the last week canvassing our writers to build a picture of OutKast’s finest work. Their solo efforts have been patchier and more sporadic, but not without riches: Big Boi’s hit some high pinnacles on his own, and Andre 3000 is a well-seasoned master of the guest spot. After that, Stankonia was a commercial high watermark buzzing with ideas – and wherever you stand on Speakerboxxx / The Love Below, you simply can’t argue with its imaginative chutzpah. Their 1990s run is straight-up impeccable: 1994’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, a key release in the rise of the Dirty South 1996’s freaky, funky ATLiens and 1998’s head-spinning Aquemini, one of our top five albums of the decade. For all the supposed differences between Andre 3000 (flamboyant, adventurous, gentle) and Big Boi (doughy, purist, hard-edged), they shared a distinctive cadence – a rapidfire, urgent stream-of-consciousness flow, only loosely tethered to the beat – that no-one’s quite matched since.Īt once the strangest and the most gifted of Atlanta’s early 1990s crop, OutKast have spent the last two decades ploughing their own wayward furrow. None of Nas’ flunking or Jay-Z’s up-down output here – pretty much all of the OutKast albums ( Idlewild excluded, obviously) fall into the classic category. Like the Nineties’ other great rap team, The Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast were a perfect storm in action – an unlikely combination of top-level technical chops, proper imaginative vision and double-act charisma. OutKast are that extremely rare package – a hip-hop outfit with mainstream traction and an album career that’s only the odd bum note away from flawless.
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