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Welcome to Stankonia: a parallel universe where the mood is cosmic,
the mushrooms are magic and the melodies are Prince in his prime.
Your guiodes? Loon-panted hip hop magicians Outkast.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Orangina, garçon, and make it
a 'stanky' one.
On the balcony of Cannes' swish Carlton hotel, three worlds are
colliding in the off-season afternoon sun. Representing for France,
monsieur Le Barman is serving lurid cocktails to the weird Americans.
Representing for Atlanta, Gee-ohja, meanwhile, is hip hop duo Outkast.
As for the third sphere, 25-year-old Antwan 'Big Boi' Patton and
André 'Dré 3000' Benjamin bid you all welcome to
'Stankonia'.
'See, Stankonia is a place we can get down in,' elucidates Dré 3000,
'where you can get all the funky energy out and get buck-nekkid
in the head. When you go to Stankonia, the music you would make
make would be freeform,' he winks, 'and not conventional.'
'Not conventional' describes the Outkast mindset like 'not chilly'
describes the surface of the sun. While their contemporaries in
US hip hop are content to rock the earthbound mic, Outkast are
cartoon imagineers of a funky cosmos whose topography (save for
occasional visit from Prince and Kool Keith) hasn't been fully
charted since George Clinton freed minds and summoned asses in
its direction way back when.
With their fourth album, ‘Stakonia’, you can practically
hear the Ecstasy tab plink into the glass. Not since The Pharcyde's "Bizarre
Ride II The Pharcyde" touched down in 1992 has hip hop concocted
such effervescent rapadelia, a stir-fry of instinctive pop nous,
breaker's-yard sci-fi and unrefined funk that prompts two principal
responses in terrestrials: get down, and take drugs.
Only these days, Outkast don’t call the currency of their
world ‘funk’ anymore: they call it 'stank', everything
that exists in Stankonia is 'stanky' and its residents are the
cosmically-harmonious 'stanktified'. Cannes you dig it? Er...
'It's place where all the good shit comes from,' Big Boi formulates,
a vanilla cigarillo permanently hanging off his lip, 'where you
put a blindfold on and run through a jungle at a hundred miles
per hour. Basically, it’s that place where we’re trying
to get the listener to go to.'
Along with the complicated lysergic fantasies, with Outkast you
conveniently get the ghetto and the fabulous separated into each
of the duo's personalities. The Ghetto is Big Boi, a man who's
probably isn't called that for being 5'5” tall, and who dresses
in an Eazy E-style denim suit not so much set of by as encrusted
with several kilos of twinkly jewellery.
As for the Fabulous, that's Dré 3000, a vegetarian who
embodies the sublime and the ridiculous of the Afronaut lineage,
recalling both Prince and Cat from 'Red Dwarf' at exactly the same
time. Scrupulously attentive to his personal appearance, he's onto
the fifth outfit-change within an hour of his arrival. Outkast
are here to showcase their skills at this aftrenoon’s record
company conference, so out go the Ali-Baba loon pants in a restrained
royal blue, and here come their stage-tuned cerise counterparts.
It'll take a nation of gap khakis to hold Outkast back.
Dré's favourite rappers are Eminem, Redman and Big Boi,
and his prefered Funkadelic album is all of them. Big Boi’s
heroes are Sly, Prince and Jimi, and he has an enormous Phil Collins
CD collection he describes as “so bad”. But like none
of their heroes, Outkast’s tale is rooted in the 'Dirty South'
of hip hop, the US zone whose other notable amabassadors - Nelly,
Master P and Mannie Fresh - Outkast are following to worldwide
recognition. From the get-go their career has been officiated by
R&B kingpin Antonio 'LA' Reid (honoured at the MOBOs this year
with the Outstanding Achievement gong) who picked them up as 16-year-old
high-schoolers, Dré an only-child dreamer and Boi a dishwasher
in a Steak & Ales franchise, and pointed their raw rap skills
in the direction of a recording studio. Their early albums - 1993's
Organized Noize-produced debut 'Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik'
and its follow-up 'ATLiens' - were at pains to establish Atlanta
and the south's credentials as a seperatist epicentre rather than
a backwater of hip hop just as rap was consolidating its east-west
axis of antagonism.
'We had time to sit back and listen to everyting, East Coast and
West Coast hip hop,' Dre muses, adjusting his sun-lounger to a
suitable horizontal. 'And by the time the south came around, we
had the whole meltdown - that was our own sound.
'Southern rap ain't prominent, but they were feeling it on the
West Coast, because it was more musical; basslines and stuff like
that. Undergound people in New York felt it too. But we never got
our just due. It's like we’re outcast for some reason, like
we’re just not good enough.'
Nonetheless adequately on point to shift units totalling millions,
by the time they arrived at their third album 'Aquemini' (meaning
'the thirteenth sign)', they'd all but abandoned hip hop's materialist
preoccupation with the here and now and achieved lift-off from
the South into an afrodelic realm of the elsewhere and the outta-time.
For then till now, Outkast's hip hop has, Dré resolves,
been 'some revolt-type shit'. Think ‘Maggot Brain’,
think Dr Octagon... but don't think about it for too long.
'We ain't boring the listener with 'I represent for my city' no
more,' he says. 'Okay, people already know were we from. Now let's
take ’em somewhere else: Stankonia.'
'What we do has to do with imagination,' adds Big Boi. 'Hip hop's
at it's most commercial point ever and it's so easy to make a hip
hop record, everybody knows the formula. There's no creativity
going on. Know what? I don't even listen to hip hop records today.'
An hour in the company of the dazzlingly pluralist ‘Stankkonia’ would
convince you that they're in the process of encouraging hip hop
to dream dreams again, and while Outkast don't need drugs to get
creative, they'll take them all the same, stanks very much. As
a Marley-sized spliff circles the balcony, Boi explains how Ecstasy
is Outkast's favoured, though rarely indulged-in, narcotic thrill,
with magic mushrooms coming a close second. ‘They’re
the shit to me,’ he grin. ‘But in Atlanta you can’t
get the that often.’ Dré, meanwhile, in blatant wind-up
mode, is asking the honky journalist, 'know where we can get some
crack?'
No, and quit playing at being 'real' please - it's so much less
fun than the surreal
***
A 4.30pm down in the Carlton lobby, power-lunching executives
adjust ties and shoot sleeves, the crumbling dames poke at the
olives dishes and, hold on, could that... yes, that definitely
appears to be a Funkadelic trooping into the corner of the lobby
and making the premises look decidedly 'stanky'.
Or rather it's the Outkast backing group, a jumble of characters
in shades, flares and afros that are conspicuously more Brand New
Heavies than NWA in aspect. They’re readying for the showcase
with an impromptu singsong, embellishing “Papa Was a Rolling
Stone” and “Mrs Jones” with such penetrating,
quarduple-layer harmony that you'd swear the Berry Gordy had annexed
the hotel's airspace for auditions this afternoon.
Dré, however, is apart and quietly burbling through Moby's
'Natural Blues' all on his lonesome.
'Man, that's some southern shit; it's downhome,' he smiles broadly.
The fuzzy logic of the cultural loop which produced Moby's current
run of success - a white man's sampling of a negro spiritual -
isn't lost on Dré
'Damn near eveything's from the South,' he twangs. 'You trace
it all back, it started in Africa went to New Orleans, spread up
north... and now it's coming back. Hell, I'm proud of being from
the country. I love it.'
'We’re always gonna be south,' Bad Boi decides. 'Every song
is Dirty south. We live there, shoot our movies there, we run our
Stank Wear clothes range there. We even had yeek dancing in the
video, which is old sckool Atlanta b-boy dancing.'
Move over LA, New York and Detroit: 'Stankonia' is a wanton dismissal
of the hip hop album rules that touches all bases and sounds like
nothing else simultaneouly. What's more, it's got girls on it (Dré's
ex-partner Erykah Badu sings on contemplative 'Humble Mumble'),
anti-gangsta shit ('Gangasta Shit'), incisive social commentary
('Toilet Tisha'), backwards guitar ('Slum Beautiful'), toasting
Jamaicans and Parliament-style all-nutters-together choruses all
stitched bewteen PhD-level raps delivered at machine gun tempo.
The album's recasting of the cosmic funk mythology may seem a curiously
anachronistic conceit, but the songs they deliver hardly even need
the conceptual wrapping to stand out. On the the falsetto 'Ms Jackson',
it's Prince at his sex-peacock best they competently pastiche,
while 'BOB' ['Bombs Over Baghdad'] erupts with the kind of hip
hop-meets-drum & bass pummelling rarely heard since ‘New
Forms’. Outkast be bangin' hella next-level rhyme science,
it would appear, but that's just the beginning of it.
'There's just no innovativeness in hip hop drum progmaing,' says
Dré. 'Someone turned me onto Roni Size and DJ Krush; when
I heard the drum programming, the triggering, man, it was killing.
I heard some of the Photek album [makes inaudibly low bass noises]… yeah,
that shit is hard. So we want to take drum & bass and make
it more street, because that tempo is fierce.'
While drum & bass has yet to find it’s feet in the US
market, the brand Outkast deliver is sufficiently dynamic to have
the executive staff of Bertelsmann Music Group on their feet. Wander
into the hotel conference hall at any other point, and you’d
be forgiven for mistaking today’s proceedings for an undertakers
convention. Now, however, with one eye on the stage and the other
on their immediate corporate superiors, the music bizzers are whoopingly “getting
down”, not to mention “giving it up” as Outkast
earthquake their way through 'BOB', detonate 'So Fresh, So Clean'
and hammer out the fiendishly hooky 'Ms Jackson'. All around, fortysomething
men are mouthing the words to its chorus.
Onstage, in front of their DJ Cutmaster Swift and the band, Bad
Boi and Dré freewheel, joust and chatter, respectively wearing
butter-coloured Stank Wear leather jeans and headscarf that's equal
parts Jimi Hendrix and Hilda Ogden. Getting buck-nekkid in more
than just his head, Dré tosses his shirt aside, and a hundred
execs nervously resolve to get to the gym more often. As Outkast
manage to catalyse such a frenzy amongst a bunch of suits, you
wonder what they could achieve in front of a crowd who really cared
about hip hop.
But with that, the 'gig' energetically concludes, someone hands
the duo bottles of champagne and Dré signs off.
'Thanky'all and goodnight: we'll be selling tickets to Stankonia
in the lobby.'
There’s a big cheer, and then the executives glide away,
the cleaners move in and the technicolour Outkast carousel dematerialises
to somwehere else, taking the freakiest-working men in showbiz
with it. Now which way did you say the lobby was again?
© Kevin Braddock 2000
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