60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Outkast—“Rosa Parks”

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

Rob explores legendary hip-hop duo Outkast’s hit “Rosa Parks” by discussing their deep roots in Atlanta and the change they brought to the then-bicoastal rap landscape. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Jewel Wicker Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the most prestigious fraternity, the stankiest aristocracy, the eliteists of the elite, the goat, farm, the apex mountain of hip-hop. They're the best of the best. They're the Nobel Peace Prize winners of rap. They're the albums that got four and a half mic reviews in the source. Not five mics, four and a half mics, four and a half mics is cooler. Don't tell me if you don't know what the source is. The source, one of the first, one of the most respected and or feared rap music magazines ever born. Born in 1988. In Harvard, it was the CNN TMZ, Pitchfork, Reddit, N Plus One, and watch what happens live of 90s hip-hop.

In particular, the source review section quite famously utilizes the fabled five-mic scale, not five stars. We're dealing with MCs here. Five mics. down the five mic scale for you as printed, as elucidated in the pages of the source. One mic, totally whack. Two mics. Needs work. Two point five mics.

Average. That's true. Three mics. Good. Comma. Worth checking out. Three point five mics. Dope.

Four mics. Slamin. M. Dash. Definite satisfaction. Four point five mics. Superior. Five mics. A hip hop classic.

Fifteen albums. Received a perfect five mic rating in the source. Upon original release, the pitch for 10 of its time. The first five-mic album was People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by a tribe called Quest in 1990. The last was My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West, which feels like it came out 200 years ago. This is a famous list.

What do we got? We got Nas twice. We got Illmatic and Stillmatic. We got Tribe twice, actually. The low-end theory as well. Jay-Z's The Blueprint, Biggie's Life After Death, Brand Nubians one for all. De La Sol is dead.

We got a few relative surprises from Bun B, Lill Kim, and Scarface, etc. This is the canon. This is the fodder for endless debate and recrimination, but I prefer the four and a half mic club. A four and a half mic review suggests to me that the source

brain trust really wanted to give it five mics, but there was some internal political turmoil, or some preemptive backlash to the backlash action, or your standard issue East Coast bias, or maybe they were just too scared. You remember how A-minus was secretly the coolest grade to get on anything in high school, so you could feel like you hadn't yet reached your full potential.

Similar vibe, death certificate by Ice Cube from 1991. Four and a half mics. That's the record divided into a death side and a life side, and the Apocal NWA discrack, no Vaseline, is on the life side. Cube's first solo album, 1990s America's Most Wanted, got five mics. Death certificate is precisely half a mic worse. I was an RA in college for two years, but I was a cool RA. You're supposed to write people up for drinking and such every week,

but I wrote up exactly one person in two years, and even him only because he almost peed on me. He was urinating out the third floor window of his dorm room, and I'm sitting in the lobby, right? and I hear the unmistakable sound of a gentleman relieving himself, and there's two girls studying nearby, and they both look at me like, you're getting paid to address this issue,

and I'm like, fine. And so I boldly walked toward the sound, and I throw open the main lobby doors leading out to the college green, and I barely avoid just this cascade of urine from the sky, just a squall of... And so that fucking guy I wrote up. But otherwise, I just mostly sat around, playing euchre and whatnot with my fellow cool RAs, one of whom this guy, Steve, was bigging to NWA,

an Ice Cube. And Steve, who was on the third floor, actually, Steve had what struck me at the time as an unhealthy fixation on the Ice Cube song, Giving Up the Nappy Dugout. Four and a half mics, sex and violence by Boogie Down Productions from 1992, KRS One, and so forth. The last sentence of the first paragraph of this review reads, leave your Jerry Curls at the door. I don't think that's how Jerry Curls work, but okay, four and a half mics, Dr. Dre's The Chronic. Also in 1992, don't leave your Jerry Curls at the door. Four and a half mics, the first two sentences of the last paragraph of this review, read as follows. One cut,

Lil Ghetto Boy could go, but that's about it. Even the skits are dope. Excuse me, sir. I'm sorry, but that is a balker's critical opinion. Yeah, Lil Ghetto Boy is much worse than the $20 sack pyramid. Just preposterous. Will Ghetto Boy ain't going nowhere. Four and a half mics, ready to die by the notorious BIG.

This review credited to Shorty, the pen name of Minnie. A.k.a.a. Ms. Info. You can trust Miss Info. This review says, Some of the beats get a little repetitive. See me and my bitch and what you want. And the two sex skits are annoying. The sex skits are, indeed, not dope. I'll allow it. Four and a half mics. De La Sol's balloon mind state from 1993. It might blow up, but it won't go pop. Doct half a mic for not being De La Sol is dead. That's fine. We're going to get the full De La Sol catalog up on streaming soon.

I am manifesting this. You're welcome. Four and a half mics. How's this for a trifecta? Enter the Wu-Tang, 36 chambers from 1993. Rayquan's only built for Cuban links in 1995 and Ghostface Killers' Supreme Clientel from February 2000. Four and a half mics apiece.

That is 13 and a half mics worth of Staten Island almost perfection. will I use this blatant attempt to fuck with the Wu-Tang Clan as an excuse to play. Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with. Thanks for asking. And the survey said you did. Baby flying guillotine chops off the fucking head. Which brings us to the single greatest four and a half mic album of all time. And the four and a half mic album that I suspect caused the most internal turmoil and triggered some especially severe East

coast bias. The question, the debate, I imagine, reverberating through the halls of the source in 1994 was, what does the South have to say? This is Antoine Andre Patton, Andre Patton, Sr., better known as Big Boy, B-O-I, a.k.a. Daddy Fat Sacks, a.k. Lucius Left Foot, aka Billy Ocean, a.k. Francis the Savannah Chitlin Pimp. Dug and Family First Generation, here to keep the D&D boy and still cooler than a polar bear's toenails.

Big Boy was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1975 as a kid he moved to Atlanta where he attended the Performing Arts-focused Tri-Cities High School, class of 1993 in the suburb of East Point, located in the Swats, SWATS, which is short for Southwest Atlanta, too strong. Take a guess who popularized

that anagram. Anywhere, that's where he met this guy. Tag backwards is gaiters. Tag backwards is gait. This is Andre Lauren Benjamin, born in Atlanta in 1975, eventually better known as Andre 3000, aka Possum Aloysius Jenkins, aka Duky Blossom Gain the Third.

Funk Crusader, Lovebusher, Dungeon Family, first generation, here to drop the turd. That's all the quasi-wrapping I'm going to do, I promise. Okay dokey at first contact these two guys. Their voices, their sensibilities, their invulnerabilities, their swaggers, meshed together so perfectly that okey-dokey could sound like the coolest thing anybody ever said. Andre and Antoine knew each other a little bit from school, but they really connected for the very first time when they bumped into each other at the Ritzie Lennox Square Mall.

in Buckhead, an upscale suburb in northwest Atlanta. Specifically, they bumped into each other while window shopping in front of the Ralph Lauren store. This is my favorite scene in Roneyserick's Southern Hip Hop Book, Third Coast. This is around 1991. They're 16, maybe. They can't afford to buy anything at this point. What do you suppose was on the mannequin in the window of a Ralph Lauren store in 1991? Looks like Ralph was big into Tartan at the time.

I'm out of my element. I want you to imagine that you are that tartan-clad mannequin, that you are reverse window shopping, that a simple pane of glass separates you from Antoine Andre Patton Sr. and Andre Lauren Benjamin at the moment when they truly bond. When they realized they were both big fans of five mic giants like Brand Nubian and De La Sol in a tribe called Quest,

but also local bass music stars the source had less time for, guys like Keilo and Shai D and Rahine the dream. They talked about music and school and girls on the Marta Bus Ride back to East Point. Andre called his dad and asked if he could spend the night at Antoine's house. And just like that, they're inseparable. They start a rap group of their own called Two Shades Deep, but there's already a local group called Four Shades Deep. They rename themselves Misfits, but Misfits is taken. Shout out Danzig. So they need another word that means misfit. They settle on Outcast. They spell it with a K. They fall in with a production trio called Organized.

noise and a larger crew called the Dungeon family. Outcast put out their first album in 1994, just to make absolutely sure that nobody beat them to their album title already. They call it Southern Playlistic Cadillac Music. Four and a half mics. Here's how the sources review of Southern Playlists at Cadillac Music starts. The South has always posed a problem for most hip hoppers. No matter what they accomplish, we're hard pressed to give the South, it's due. Maybe it's because the all-out ass fest that has become Southern hip-hop's defining image is as repelling as it is compelling. End quote, I submit to you that Southern playlist at Cadillac music did not receive five mics because of that perceived all-out

ass-fest. The East Coast was not yet ready to truly embrace the South. Our challenge here today is to reacquire a true 1994 mindset to harken back to a time before Southern hip-hop was the most dominant form of hip hop. In 1994, rap music, for most rap music fans, was New York in L.A. And the rest of the country was that 70s New Yorker cover where everything between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean is flyover country. Basically, the challenge today is to remember a time before Rosa Parks. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. And this week, we're talking about Rosa Parks by Outcast from their third album, 1998's AQUAL. AQUAL. I'm and I. Big boys in Aquarius. Andre is a Gemini. Nothing is for sure. Nothing is for certain.

Nothing lasts forever. But until they close the curtain, it's him and I. Equamini. That was sort of rapping. Sorry. Equamini was the first Southern rap album to get five mics. It was a long road to Aquaminei for outcast, for Atlanta, for Southern rap as a whole, a long dirt road. If you're a fan of condescending northern stereotypes about the South. So here's what M.C. Shy D. sounded like. Shy-D. That song's called Shake It from an album called Come and Correct in 88.

M.C. Shidey was born in the Bronx as a kid he moved to Ellenwood, Georgia, a little southeast of Atlanta. And eventually he fell in with a Miami bass scene. He signed a Luke record as in Uncle Luke, as in Luther Campbell from the two live crew. That Third Coast book, highly recommended.

The full title is Third Coast, Outcast, Timberland, and how hip-hop became a southern thing. The book says that starting in the late 80s, Atlanta became a sort of colonial outpost of Miami hip-hop. Take, for example, Shidey's friend and fellow Luke Records recording artist, Tony MF. Rock. This song from 1990 is called She Put Me in a Trance. We can't get to everybody or everything, of course, but we should also briefly mention Kilo, soon to be known as Kilo Ali. He was from Bang.

He was one of the first guys to use the term trap. Here's his 1990 regional hit, America has a problem with cocaine. Usually you see it styled as America has a problem, parentheses, cocaine. Though occasionally you see cocaine, parentheses, America has a problem. Choose your own adventure. Just maybe don't try cocaine. Starting in the early 90s, you get these huge brash, pop crossover bursts of energy from Atlanta. Future star and mogul Germain do pretty deep.

its town and brings the world criss-cross. Future super producer Dallas Austin starts working with another bad creation and boys to men and future superstars TLC. One of the first big Atlanta rappers was Left Eye. TLC are signed to their great regret, eventually, to Atlanta's own La Face Records, co-owned by the Super Mughal L.A. Reed and singer-songwriter slash regular mogul baby face,

all of which to say there's a lot of action, a lot of hits, a lot of colorful characters, a lot of Motown of the South type enthusiasm swirling around the place known semi-officially since the 60s as the city too busy to hate. It's an excellent slogan. But Atlanta in this moment does not yet have a definitive rap group on the order of, say, the ghetto boys in Houston. In Port Arthur, Texas, you got UGK starting up. In Memphis, you got eight ball and MJG starting up. You know who took a legitimate shot at taking over first Atlanta and then the world arrested development? had a huge at 92 called Tennessee, won a couple of Grammys, topped a critics poll or two.

The full big Arrested Development album, three years, five months, and two days in the life of is a lot to deal with. Honestly, it's a little corny, a little didactic. It's so conscious you might fall asleep. But then again, in terms of pure hardness, this line is worthy of the ghetto boys. roads, my forefathers walked, climb the trees my forefathers hung from. Write a line like that, you can be as corny as you want. I would tell you that if you set foot on a college campus in the early to mid-90s, then you've definitely heard the song, Tennessee.

But it's more accurate to say that if you heard the song, Tennessee in the early to mid-90s, a college campus would spontaneously erupt around you. Their second album didn't do so hot. early Outcast absorbed all of this. And The Chronic out in Compton and DOS Effects out in Brooklyn. DOS Effects, their first album, Dead Serious in 1992 is a big deal.

We want effects and so forth. Those guys can also be a lot to deal with in my experience. It's hard for me now to totally separate them from the Chappelle Show references to them. It's a lot of diggedy-wiggity, higgity, ziggity, piggy-pigy, but yeah, shout out DOS effects.

It's fun to pretend that Outcast came out of nowhere, that they really were misfits, rejects, deviance, exiles, pariahs, whatever other names they considered. Aliens, sure. But what's truly miraculous to me about Outcasts is that they so obviously came from somewhere, somewhere tangible and recognizable. They came from somewhere a lot of other people came from. They heard and loved music that a lot of other people heard and loved. But then, miraculously, Andre and Big Boy built out of that familiarity another universe, something exactly. extraordinary, something extraterrestrial, identifiable origins, supernatural destinations.

Even other people's bad ideas could generate spectacular results. Like the Timeless Face Records tried to get outcast to write a Christmas song. You got to love Big Boy just for the way he says chimneys. So organize noise, the production crew. with a Z. Rico Wade, Ray Murray, and Sleepy Brown. Sleepy Brown's the R&B guy. Ray Murray's the rap guy, and Rico Wade's the big picture guy. At first, organized noise worked out of a storage closet in a skating rink called jelly beans. Then Rico's family got a new house in Lakewood in South Atlanta, and they set up a studio in the basement, a crawl space under the kitchen. Dirt floor, red clay walls,

pipes over your head, the moisture in the air fucked with the drum machines. It was rough. It perfect. You go down there, you make music all night, you never come out. So they called it the dungeon. So they called the larger crew soon assembling there, the dungeon family. In the morning, Rico's mom would kick everybody out, make sure everybody got off to school, whatever. Organized noise takes on Outcast. Through Organized Noise, Outcast gets the attention of LaFace Records, by now the biggest label in town. LeFace Records in 1993 was putting out a Christmas album. Outcast did not want to write a Christmas song. So they wrote, in essence, a song about not wanting

to write a Christmas song. They called it Players Ball. I made it through to another year, Andre Raps. Can't ask for nothing much more. Players ball hits the rap charts. LaFace finally lets Outcast record a full album. They'd move to a real studio in Atlanta by then, but you can hear, you can smell, you can taste the dirt

floor and the drum machine scrambling moisture of the dungeon in every second of southern playlists at Cadillac music. In 2001, when outcast her on the cover of Spin and their fourth album, Stankonia is one of the first masterpieces of the 21st century and bombs over Baghdad is one of the best songs ever made, Andre 3000, as he is now known, will still be talking about the dungeon. He says, when I went to that basement the first time, I heard some of the best music of my life. I'm writing. They're digging the stuff that I'm writing. They're showing me how to project, telling me I don't have to scream. Sometimes you'd write a rap, say it, and don't nobody say nothing. And that's when you know it's whack. The spin writer asks, Sondre, do you miss those days? And he says,

there was a certain feeling there. And I don't have that feeling no more. I want to have that nostalgic feeling of how the dungeon smelled the way certain beats made you feel. It smelled like dirt, like a mildewy basement when it rains. Crickets. I can hear the crickets on players ball too. That's Sleepy Brown singing the hook. This is a pro Sleepy Brown shop. I agree with the source that the best song on Southern playlist at Cadillac music is Crumblin Herb. Sleepy Brown sings the hook on Crumblin also in my version of reality sleepy brown has already won an Oscar for starring in a Curtis Mayfield biopic anyway the player's ball video directed by Puff Daddy is worth watching even for 10 seconds to remind yourself how disconcertingly young Andre and big boy are in

1994 when their debut album comes out they're 19 they look like kids they basically are kids and suddenly they're stars suddenly their Atlanta's definitive rap group suddenly there in New York City for the 1995 Source Awards, where Shug Knight dises players ball video director, Puff Daddy, where the death row bad boy feud escalates into an all-consuming

homicidal catastrophe. Questlove from the Roots was at the 95 Source Awards and later called it hip-hop's funeral. Also, Outcast wins the award for Best New Artist Group. They beat out Smith & Wesson, the rap duo from Brooklyn. Here's what

Smith & Wesson sound like. I feel like those guys in Outkats would get along just fine, actually. But Outkats went and get booed, loudly, boisterously. Andre and Big Boy take the stage. They're flustered. They're still kids. Big Boy speaks first and is gracious and polite. Andre speaks next and is less polite and says maybe the single most important thing

any Southern rapper ever said. But it's like this, though. I'm tired of folks, you know what saying? close mind the folks you know what I'm saying it's like we got a demo tape and I don't nobody want to hear but it's like this the South got something to say that's all I got to say possibly you've heard this story 10,000 times already but still you got to hear him say it to get the full impact you got to hear the booze he says it over you got to reacquire a true 1995 mindset back before outcast are immortal or canonized you got to hear the way he says

the South the whole point of what the South has to say is that I can't say the South, the way he says the South. So that's outcast in 1995 at the top of their game and poised to stay at the top of their game for pretty much the rest of their career. But in this moment, they're still separate, still alienated from the rest of the game. They might as well be in outer space. Their next album comes out in 1996. They call it AT aliens. They are determined not to float face down in the mainstream. So they leave the planets. They leave the planets in style. Every detail in the song, Elevators, Me and You Matters. The little heh right at the beginning there, the echoing rim shots, the eerie little organ, the dub bass, the dial tones or elevator beeps or whatever reverberating out into deep space.

You got to put on a full astronaut suit if you want to leave the Cadillac. Organized noise produced two-thirds of AT aliens, but Andre and Big Boy produced elevators themselves. They are evolving, mutating, expanding. Andre, in particular, is in a constant state of metamorphosis, lyrical, sartorial, and chemical. Seelow from the Atlanta rap group Goody Mob, another major component of the dungeon family. Seelow once explained the outcast dynamic this way. Big is a solid, and Dre is a fluid. Here's Andre on A.T. Elians, the song with a little big boy as the lead in.

The less space, the less time between a big boy verse. and in an Andre verse, the better. You heard the A.G. Allie and so back the hell up off. Softly as if I play piano in the dark. Found a way to channel my anger not to involve. The world's a stage and everybody got to play they part. I love softly as if I play piano in the dark. I can picture Andre there, the faint outline of Andre at the piano.

Or maybe it's that I can't picture him. And he's beyond even my imagining that he's become unknowable to me, unknowable to pretty much everyone. And from here on out, the bigger he gets, the bigger hits he and Big Boy put out, he still only gets farther away, the closer the rest of the world tries to get to him. Guard works in mysterious race and when he starts the job of speaking through us, we'd be so sincere with this here. No drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day. But yeah, he gave up drugs and alcohol. Andre told Spin later, I went straight just to see if I could do it to find out if it was me making the music.

music or if I just was relying on the weed and it worked, you know. We made a good album without being high. A.T. Aliens only got four mics in the source. That rating is also a minor travesty, but not a shocking one. This record was a little too spacey, a little too weird, a little too quiet. Quiet isn't the right word, but the best songs, like 13th floor growing old, which is a piano ballad, essentially, in which two 21-year-olds agonize about how old they feel, which is not something I generally have a lot of time for, but in this case it rules. The best songs feel like they're evaporating as you listen to them. Not everybody fully gets it yet.

But in 1998 came a Quimini, and that's where everyone got it. Sometimes a Quimini sounds like it's evaporating too, but not always. This is Big Boy in a song called Skew It on the Barbie. You gotta love him for the way he rhymes, Plummers, ass with summer's grass. Also, Big Boy mentions the whole four and a half mics thing. This song also features Ray Kwan from the Wu-Tang Clan. It's a four-and-a-half mic summit.

Ray and Big Boy bumped into each other at the Lenox Square Mall in Buckhead. Is there a plaque in this mall near the Ralph Lauren store? What was Ralph Lauren getting into around 1995? I'm out of my depth. But during the show for his spring collection in 95, his models walked the runway to urge overkill's cover of Girl, you'll be a woman soon. Make a note of it, but much later, talking about Scoot on the Barbie, Rayquan said, When that record came to New York City, it opened up the floodgates for the South to emerge and do their thing. The South was not being played up in New York at all at that time.

For Big Boys' part, what he remembers about this song is how much fun he and Ray had making it. Ray, while he was recording his verse, invited Big Boy into the booth with him to share the energy. Big Boy had never been right there in the booth while another rapper was recording before. They passed a bottle of Hennessy back and forth. They spilled a bunch of Hennessy on the ground. This is all from an oral history. The Atlanta Alt Weekly Creative Loafing did in 2010, and I have to tell you that this anecdote made me sad for half a second because it implies that Andre and Big Boy do not work that way, are not in the booth together.

are not clumsily passing a bottle back and forth. Outcast albums from McCleman and I forward are in large part about the working relationship between Andre and Big Boy. How solid, how liquid, how fractured it is. Reviewers, interviewers, even casual listeners. You can almost picture them holding up a tape measure trying to measure the distance between Andre and Big Boy. Because maybe that's expanding too. The niggots who get the wrong impression of expressions and the question is Big Bo, what's up? with Andre. Is he in the coat?

Is he on drugs, is he gay? When y'all gonna break up, when y'all gonna wake up, nigga, I'm feeling better than ever. What's wrong with you? You get down. That's Andre on Return of the G.

The ugly truth is that in the mid to late 90s, a rapper did not have to act or dress or wrap all that flamboyantly for people to start asking those questions. Maybe Andrea would wear a turban or a long blonde wig or giant sunglasses. That's it. This is not cult behavior. This is not yet the Andreas' fashion icon era. He's not even calling himself Andre 3000 yet. That came with Stankonia. No,

Andre is just getting mildly adventurous, lyrically and otherwise. And he's having a kid with his girlfriend Erica Badu, and he is hearing the signal more clearly all the time, you could say. But both Drey and Big Boy know what people think of them. Aquaminai is one of those albums that has a skit where people talk shit about the record the skit is on. De LaSoul is dead as a running skit like that, too, actually, it's a trend among five mic albums. But yeah, return of the G ends with a bunch of dudes in a record store refusing to buy the new Outcast record. Man, first there was some pimps, man.

Then there was some aliens or some genies. Chill out of something. Then they'd be talking about that black righteous space, man. Whatever, man. I ain't fucking with them no more, man. Andre wrote the skits on a quem and I. So look, it's tempting to take the Bigza Solid, Dre's a fluid idea too far.

to think of Big Boy as the pimp and Andre as the genie, the tough guy and the space cadet. But Andre, the Space Cadet, talks about his guns quite a bit on Southern Playlists at Cadillac music. And Big Boy, the Tough Guy, an avid pit bull breeder, will also rave about how much he loves Kate Bush to anybody who will listen. Andre and Big Boy will, to be fair, eventually pursue musical visions so distinct

that in 2003 they put out a double album that is fun. functionally two solo albums, speakerbox, The Love Below. The best song on either album is spread, by the way. And I guess it's notable that Outcast peaked commercially. They sold more than 5 million copies of a double album in the United States alone, and won the album of the year Grammy with that project, was basically flaunted how divided they were. But a huge part of what makes a Quem and I such a bulletproof classic

is how different and yet how complimentary they can sound together. Maybe they didn't need to physically pass a Hennessee bottle back and forth in the booth because they were connected at a higher level by a higher power. So a song like The Art of Storytelling Part One, they can each tell a story. And Big Boy Story can be about having sex with a lady named Susie Screw because she screwed a lot. And it can include the line, let's hit the parking lot so I can sick your duck. And Dre can tell a story about his teenage crush Sasha Thumper, who says that when she grows up, she wants to be. alive and who winds up dead with a needle in her arm baby two months due and these stories as wildly divergent and tone as they might be still mesh together perfectly the wistful tragedy of one

amplifies the body comedy of the other and vice versa you know what the secret weapon is here actually the glue that holds it all together it's sleepy brown it's like that now it's like that now You better go get the home about your back in my leg now. Equip and I is still very much a dungeon family affair. Production-wise, you got organized noise, and Andre and Big Boy themselves, along with Mr. DJ, their partner in a second production trio, they call Earthtone 3.

You got guest appearances from Seleo, Timo, Kujo, and Big Gip, otherwise known as Goody Mob, the other great Atlanta rap group to emerge from that dungeon. With Goody Mob start at the beginning with Soulphib, from 1995. Start with the song Cell Therapy. Start with the anagram live at the Omni. Start with the line, I struggle and fight to stay alive, hoping that one day I'd earn the chance to die. It's reductive to call Equamini the southern version of anything, but okay, okay, there's a lot of the chronic in Equimini, the full soul-band warmth, even though a lot of that heat is apocalyptic. Do you know what I want?

I'll tell you what I want. I want to take mushrooms, and zone out to the drums on spotty-a-dopolisius for four and a half hours. That's what I want. I'm not saying this is like a super hedonist desire. I will arrange for child care, but that's what I want. Five mics. All of it. Liberation, another late album piano ballad.

You got Silo, you got Erika Badu, you got more drums to take mushrooms to. Five mics, but Rosa Parks is the song that won everybody over. Well, everyone except Rosa Parks, who sued Outcast in 1999 for using her name without permission and trademark infringement and defamation. Rosa Parks is not the bawdiest or rowdiest or most defamatory outcast song by a long shot, but okay, okay, okay. I always love that first line from Big Boy. I'm just grateful to him for finding the time.

Damn. We're the committee gonna burn it down but I's gonna butt you in the mouth with the chorus now. Okay, that's medium body. But yes, the chorus. The chorus is a reference to Rosa Parks

refusing to give her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. The analogy, Outcast is drawing here on the song Rosa Parks. Well, that's debatable.

Is Southern hip-hop in 1998 still a victim of discrimination forced by DMX or Jay-Z or whoever to give up their rightful seats near the front and move to the back of the bus, or are outcast choosing to move to the back of the bus because that's where the action is. Maybe that's where Susie's crew is sitting, or neither. Maybe it's just a rad chorus. Maybe it's just the raddest, catchiest chorus ever concocted by the Greater Dungeon family. Either way, Rosa Parks sued or her people sued.

There was always a lot of chatter about that. Big boy talking to Spinn in 2001 said, one of her nephews came to our concert and was like, yeah, man, I just want y'all to know that it's not my auntie. It's the lawyers and the people she's got behind her. My auntie's old as hell. Anyway, Outkast settled with the Rosa Parks estate in 2005. A billboard report at the time said that Outcast and their record company admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to work on projects to enlighten today's youth about the significant role Rosa Parks. played in making America a better place for all races. Arguably, this is one of those projects.

This is one of those arduous years-long music industry lawsuits that generated a very amusing series of headlines, but was probably a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved at the time. Furthermore, this is an awful lot of way to put on a song so buoyant and so carefree and so gloriously futuristic while also featuring a blues breakdown harmonica solo from Andre's stepfather. Shout out Pastor Robert Hodo on harmonica, but it's Andre's verse on Rosa Parks that I find most fascinating now. I met a gypsy and she hit me to some life game to stimulate and activate the left and right brain. Say baby boy, your only phone can't add your last cut. You focus on the past your ass and be

your handswood. I can't tell you that I'd ever given Andre's verse here a ton of thought beyond wondering where he met the gypsy. But it turns out on Rosa Parks, the apex. of Outcast are really the start of Outcast's lengthy Apex era, Andre's already thinking about the end. He's thinking about what happens when you fall off. I guess specifically he's thinking about an artist he loves falling off. It's been pointed out that a tribe called Quest was on the decline at this point. Beats rhymes in life from 96 is not typically somebody's favorite.

Tribe record, but that's speculation. No shortage of disappointing mid-90s rap albums Andre could have bought. He's trying to empathize. I'm with you because you're probably going through it, but it's hard to. He has expectations like any fan does. Outcast in this moment still have stank on you in front of them. The best song is either Miss Jackson or Humble Mumble. And then Speaker Box the Love Below. And then Ida Wild in 2006, both the movie and what stands for now

is the final Outcast album. Idle Wild is not typically somebody's favorite Outcast album in the very brief and somewhat perfunctory outcast reunion tour in 2014 where they played 10,000 music festivals and Andre later admitted he didn't want to do it

and felt like a sellout. That tour wasn't Outcast's finest moment either. But I don't think it's weak is the last quote. Big Boy is a run of killer solo albums. Andre 3000 has an ongoing run of killer features. He's the best part of Donda, the new Kanye

West album, and he's not even technically on it. But best of all, Rosa Parks and the whole of Aquamanai still feel present tense. They still feel like the future. The sources review of this album starts, many throw the word genius around, but few actually

embody the term. Count Outcast among the few. It was five mics then. It'll be five mics forever. Our guest today is Jewel Wicker and Atlanta, writer and podcaster. She's written for the New York Times, GQ, and NPR, and she's the editor at large for Capital B Atlanta. Jule, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. Of course. From your perspective, what do outcast mean to Atlanta in 2021? Are they still hometown heroes, or given that they're international sort of icons, Do you kind of have to share them with the rest of the world? That's an interesting question to me, because I think as somebody who not only is reported on Atlanta for some time, but is from here, I've always felt like an outcast belonged to Atlanta before they belonged to the rest of the world. And I think even when they kind of blew up and became these international superstars, they very much still feel like hometown heroes, hometown artists.

And maybe that's because, you know, every time I go out, I see Big Boy at shows and, you know, a part of events here in Atlanta. And same with Organized Noise and Dungeon Family. But, yeah, they still very much feel like home. What shows have you seen Big Boy at? Like, where is he when you see him? It's really interesting. He just performed at, it's this new venue called The Eastern that just opened up. And he and one of the producers from Organized Noise did a show there.

opening this new venue. But I mean, I've seen him. I think I always make this joke in Atlanta that you can't have a show in Atlanta without having like some type of guest appearance. And so whether it's Big Boy or Two Chains or T.I. Like you never know. T.I. came out of the Demi Lovato concert once. You know, like you cannot. Whatever. It's just really random. And so I think it's the same thing for a big boy. He just is usually somewhere in the area, even if he's not on stage. Yeah. Listening to Outcast all my life, I have this vivid. visual map of Atlanta that for many years was based only on listening to Outcasts. Do you have a sense of what people who aren't from Atlanta think Atlanta is like versus what

Atlanta is actually like? Kind of, but I think what's really weird when you're from here is it took me a really long time, probably until my early 20s when I moved away from Atlanta for a little bit to realize, oh, the rest of the world isn't like this. I think I just thought everybody grew up with rappers coming to their high school or running into rappers

at breakfast. I just thought that was the norm. Right. Because that's all I knew. Because that is the norm. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of hard for me to answer that question of what people think Atlanta is like versus what it's really like. Yeah. I saw on Twitter you were dismayed.

I think you played roses for your cousins and they didn't know who it was. And then they called you weird for liking outcast at all? I assume these are younger cousins, first of all. These are. I forgot that story, but it was, I went back and looked. It was in 2017, so they would have been in their late teens when that happened. They're in their early 20s now. And we were just driving. I think I was taking them home. And it came up on like an outcast playlist. I don't know. And they were like, what is this? And I thought they were joking. I'm like,

what do you mean? What is this? This is outcast. And they were like, we don't know this song. And I'm like, I thought it was a joke. And they were like, no, this is weird. And not only if they say it was weird, they said, can you turn it off? Oh, dear. And my heart. My heart. Should we be worried about young people, Jewel, and their taste in music?

You know, I think about this a lot. And it's easy for me to be like, oh, they just don't know. But I think this is just a natural evolution of life and of getting older, right? Yes. And so I'm sure my mom had this. my grandma had this, my aunts had it. And now I'm having it because, you know, I'm not, I'm getting older. I'm not old, but I'm getting older.

And I think it's natural that the next generation just doesn't care as much about the things that we care about. It is frustrating. I wish that was not the case. But I also just think that's the natural order of things. I think that's a very healthy perspective. I haven't gotten there yet myself. And I'm glad that you got there faster than I did. It really does hurt, honestly.

Do you hear outcast in younger rappers now? and like current Atlanta rap? You know, I think it's really interesting and I think this is what's helped me have that perspective that we were just talking about. I think it's hard not to be from Atlanta and have some influence of outcast and the Dungeon family at large,

but I think what's really interesting is that the younger artists from today are really intent on distinguishing themselves and being kind of these new age, right? They want to be the future. They don't want to go back to the future. past. And so I think, again, as much as it hurts, sometimes when you ask them or you try to compare them to like older artists, they're very specific in like, maybe they didn't grow up

listening to that because they are a little bit younger. And that's not necessarily who they're trying to emulate. And so I do think that still you get some references and some stuff still seeps in. But I think just as much they are very clear that they want to distinguish themselves and look towards the future. Yeah. Outcast is sort of the group that put Atlanta rap on the map. And now, of course, Atlanta is one of the biggest cities in hip hop. Do you think it changes the tone of the music when you're on top versus when you're the underdog? Like, is there a hunger or an indignation to like outcast's music that Atlanta rap now doesn't necessarily have? You know what's so interesting is I think we still have that underdog mentality. And it might be

for different reasons, but I think it still exists, right? Like, even though it's certainly not the mid-90s where we're still, we're trying to prove that our sound and our lyrics matter. But I think there is still this belief from Atlanta rappers that the business aspect is not taken as seriously here. Like, you can kind of take the sound of Atlanta, maybe the artists of Atlanta, but you're not going to really invest in the infrastructure of Atlanta as much as you do in like a New York or in L.A. And so I think that underdog mentality is still there, still feeling like you have to prove.

that the South is worth investing in, even though it is leading the sound globally. It's really weird, but it's really a thing. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. This is a broad question, and I apologize, but I've been listening to Nothing But Outcast for a week, and I still can't articulate why Big Boy and Andre compliment each other so perfectly.

Like, their differences are just as important as their similarities. Do you have any insight as to what made these two guys the platonic ideal of a rap duo? I mean, I think that is really broad, but I think sometimes when we talk about Big Boy and Andre, we talk of it as polar opposites, which I just don't think is true.

Like we say, oh, the street mentality of Big Boy and like the eclectic style of Andre 300. And I just think Andre 3000 had street mentality and Big Boy was eclectic. And I think the thing that worked really well about them was that they knew each other and they knew their similarity so well. that they were able to play up their differences really well.

And they were able to play to each other's strengths really well because they grew up going to high school together. You know, they've known each other for so long and they kind of came up together in a way that allowed them to play up on their strengths really well. I mean, I just think that's what made them really work well together, but I don't think that they're polar opposites in the way that we talk about them.

No, I completely agree. Like, in the case of Big Boy, like his solo albums are so wild and unpredictable and great, but just by dint of standing next to Andre 3000 all those years, he always seemed like the more conservative member of Outcast. Like, are we still underrating how weird and adventurous Big Boy is? Yeah, there was a tweet. I mean, it happens every few months.

Every few months, somebody will say something about Andre 3000 that kind of takes a dig at him being like so far superior to Big Boy. And then people from Atlanta are like, they were an equal in this duo. They were both equally amazing. they both equally contributed to the success of Outcast. And I think it speaks to the fact that people sometimes still don't get that, because we have this conversation on social media every few months.

But Big Boy is severely underrated in his skill and not just as a solo artist, but in what he brought to Outcast as a duo. Yeah. You saw Outcast on the 2017 reunion tour, which I think Outcast themselves did kind of grudgingly, right? Like Andre at least wasn't super-sighted about it. But did that tour work for you? Like, did they live up to the mystique?

Oh, man, that tour was a dream for me, right? But this is you're talking to somebody who never thought they would see outcast together. So, you're asking the wrong person. But I remember, I saw them twice live. I remember watching the Coachella, the first weekend of Coachella and being like, Andre don't really seem like he wanted to be here, but okay. And then I saw them twice, one at a festival called Counterpoint in Georgia. and then second at Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta.

And, man, that was just so special. Of course. Hearing those songs, specifically hearing them in Centennial Olympic Park, right, in downtown Atlanta, this park that didn't even exist when Outcast debut album came out. We hadn't had the Olympics and all of these moments in Atlanta at that point. And so hearing these songs with a group of Atlantans in downtown Atlanta, it just, that was, I don't think we'll ever replicate that moment. And I understand why it wasn't, why it was frustrating maybe for them as artists.

But yeah, no, that was a dream come true for a hometown girl. No, I think you solved the problem of enthusiasm. Like, they're going to show up in Atlanta. If they don't care about any other show, they do it, maybe they did, maybe they didn't. They're going to care about those shows. So that was, that's awesome. And I think the audience is going to get them maybe more than like a Coachella audience. I mean, I'm certainly not saying that like people at Coachella don't know the deep cuts,

but maybe they don't know the deep, deep cuts as well as like somebody who grew up on hell and in Delo. You know what I mean? Like that is going to be, it's going to mean more to people in Atlanta. And I think you can feel that. Yeah. In terms of preserving that mystique, do we want another outcast album at some point or do we very much not want another outcast album? Is it probably just left, better left where it is? I think Outcast has given us enough.

I think that's the question we get when we ask, do we want Andre to do a solo album? First of all, we know he's not going to do anything unless he feels like it. So if Andre feels like he is ready to give us a solo album at some point, we will take it. We will not ask any questions. But I think they've given us enough more than enough. And if they've decided that they don't want to give us anything else as a collective,

I'm okay with that. You just have such a healthy perspective on these things, Jewel. It's very rare on this show to have so much perspective. In terms of album sales and Grammys, and now even in terms of Spotify, play counts or whatever, like there's a huge divide between the first three Outcast records and then Stankonia in Speakerbox, The Love Below. Does 90s Outcast, you know, Southern Playlistic, A.T. Aliens, Equimini,

do they feel like a totally different group to you? Like, did Outcast change fundamentally when they became basically pop stars? I don't know if they feel like a different group to you. different group. They feel like different iterations of the same group to me, but I will say I find myself, and it's probably the local aspects of it, but I find myself going more towards those albums than I do the latter albums. Like my favorite outcast album is probably Southern Playlistsic, kind of like music. I mean, that's the one that I listen to the most. It's the one that I gravitate to the most. I think it just feels authentically like home, and that's not to say that

the future, the other ones don't. But you know, you get bigger. You experiment more and you have more confidence, you're willing to take on new sounds and all of these things. But man, there's just something special about that debut. Absolutely. At the ringer, we once listed our 50 favorite outcast songs. Like, Jewel, what is the single greatest outcast song? That's a dangerous question. I don't know if I'm willing to give you the single best outcast song. That sounds like a trap that I'm not willing to fall into. Yeah, you got me. But I will tell you, I mean, I think when I think of my favorite outcast songs, I think of liberation. I think

of, you know, the artist storytelling. I think of crumbling herb. Like I said, yeah, I mean, I think of those, Spadi Adopalicious. You know, I think of those songs. And so it's really hard for me to say the single best Outcast song. I think I got a

best song for each occasion, for each mood, for each era. But I think Outkast has certainly given us a body of work that has just, is unparalleled. Yeah. I did want to ask you about Goody Mob, you know, Seelow is on liberation because those first few Goody Mob albums in particular are incredible soul food and still standing. Like, there are so many parallels to Outcast, but other than Seelow's solo career, it feels

like they never, Goody Mob never quite got their due. Is that surprising to you? Or do those guys work better, like, as more of a secret handshake type deal? I don't know if it's surprising. I don't know if they were making songs that were intending or supposed to do kind of what a hey y'all did. You know, that's okay. Yeah, yeah. But when I think of like a cell therapy, my goodness, that to me is one of the best songs ever made.

I mean, that song is just, it's incredible, right? Absolutely. And so you cannot speak to. And I wrote about this NPR when I think it was the 25th anniversary of Andres the South got something to say. That was a great package. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I wrote about Soul Food for that album and just what Goody Mob and specifically that album meant at this time where Atlanta is, like I said, getting the Olympics and coming into its own on this world and global stage.

And what does that mean for the ones that are being left behind, the black people who are not benefiting kind of from this economic growth? Oh, man. I mean, Goody Mob is Atlanta. That is a quintessential southern hip-hop, but specifically Atlanta album. And I think even if it never got the streams or the kind of chart success of other maybe larger albums, it's legendary. And I think it goes down as certainly one of the best Southern hip-hop contributions we have. I know the Olympics are sort of seen as a curse for some cities, you know, but what did the Olympics mean to Atlanta when they came in 96? Did that have sort of a lasting cultural impact as well? I think what it did, and I think of this in the terms of the Goody Maib album, is it just showed maybe some of the different.

And we still see this today in Atlanta, right? The fact that Atlanta is seen as a black mecca in this place where black people can excel and thrive in business and on this big stage. But it's also the capital of income inequality, right? And so there are other black people here who are just struggling and they cannot find housing and they are struggling to make minimum wage. You know what I mean? And so I think that time. in Atlanta really highlighted that really well and so did that Goody Mob Soul Food album

where you have these really successful black politicians trying to get Atlanta on this global stage and then you have these locals who I mean I think at one point they were literally buying bus tickets for homeless people to bust them out of the city so that the city

could be so that the city could look cleaner and so what does it mean for the people who are from here that are making the culture but don't necessarily get to benefit from that success. I think those are questions that Atlanta is still grappling with today. Yeah. So the best outcast song might actually be cell therapy by Goody Mob.

That's, yeah. Well, maybe Dungeon family is not Al Qaeda. But yeah, I mean, I wanted to, if I could just do some kind of homage to cell therapy, I would be so happy because I think it's such a great song. Yeah. Jule, thank you so much. This was awesome. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks very much to our special guest this week, Jewel Wicker. Thanks as always to our producers, Isaac Lee and Justin Sales. And thanks very much to you for listening. And now, without further ado, here's Outcast with Rosa Parks. We'll see you next week.