The Lenox Mall and the Intercontinental Hotel sit no more than ten minutes apart on Peachtree Road, the thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead district. But the journey from the one to the other has taken André Benjamin and Antwan Patton 15 years. Today, the one-time denizens of the mall are holding court in the Intercontinental’s Presidential Suite, blocking out slots for publicists, producers and agents, all clamouring for face time with one of the biggest pop groups in the world. But the two old school friends – better known collectively as OutKast and individually as André 3000 and Big Boi – are unfazed: they always knew they were going to be famous.
“We had these homegirls who were hair stylists, and we were round at their house one day, tryin’ to get fly, so we dyed our hair,” Patton says, recalling their schooldays. “His was blond; mine was reddish-brown. We walked through the food court – just strolled through, and strolled out – and everyone was looking at us like we were superstars!”
OutKast had been performers since they first met at high school (they are now 31), and began hanging out at Lenox Mall in the early Nineties. Their friendship developed partly as a result of their differences from their compatriots: outcasts in a very real sense, their bond deepened over fashion and music, as they found in each other a partner in nonconformity. They worked selling tennis shoes in the mall, which, according to Benjamin, was a “cool job to have”, until, just turned 18, they put the sports shoe selling behind them and cashed the first cheques from their new job, as rappers.
Their seemingly unstoppable rise had begun when they formed a group they first called Two Shades Deep, and began to write rhymes to their rapping heroes’ instrumental tracks. Eventually, they were introduced to fellow Atlanta musician Rico Wade, part of a production team called Organized Noize, who were working with the female Atlanta trio, TLC. Wade liked what he heard when Patton and Benjamin rapped for him on a street corner, and he made the pair, by now rechristened OutKast, guests on a TLC remix. Within months, the duo were TLC’s labelmates, and their debut single, Player’s Ball, became America’s No 1 rap single early in 1994.
They went out and bought “gold, cars and clothes – in that order,” Benjamin recalls. “I bought a Cadillac – Big Boi bought a Lexus. Both brand new.” “He’d be so high he’d be backin’ into mailboxes, knockin’ shit down, and his car was getting all scraped up,” Patton laughs. “He was the worst.”
“Now I know not to buy cars,” adds Benjamin. “They’re terrible investments.” Both men laugh again, relaxed and at home in one another’s company. The comfortable bonhomie contrasts with the curiously disjointed way they work – separately, basically – and the rumours about the future of their partnership that seem permanently to swirl around them.
It was their fifth LP, a double-disc affair called Speakerboxx/The Love Below, which contained the insanely catchy pop song Hey Ya!, that propelled them to superstardom, selling more than 11 million copies in the US, and nearly a million in the UK. Yet it was in essence a pair of solo albums stuck together, with Patton responsible for Speakerboxx and Benjamin for The Love Below. But they were always more than fly hip-hop groove-riders. OutKast – and Benjamin in particular, with his adoption of everything from turbans to plus-fours, straw boaters and cravats – were pure dandies. Their strutting, peacock demeanour, a feature of their act since their days in the mall, made them stand out in an era typified by the greyness and conformity of its dressed-down pop stars.
They follow the tradition of flamboyant, funky music-making that goes back through Prince, George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic collective, and beyond to the socially conscious psychedelia of Sly and the Family Stone. Adding the laid-back insouciance and pimp cool of Snoop Doggy Dogg, Benjamin and Patton augmented those building blocks with something that has set them miles apart from the rest of the mainstream hip-hop world: a rampant, restless, daredevil attitude to music and the confidence to see every crazy idea through to its (il)logical conclusion.
OutKast take more risks per disc than most artists would chance in an entire career. Yet their music, rather than going over people’s heads, seems to connect even better. Speakerboxx/ The Love Below broke every rule in the book, but became one of the 100 biggest selling albums in American music history. It seems that every time they head further off the beaten track, they are taking more of us along with them for the ride. “A lot of people make music for fame and money, and there’s nothing wrong with that – a lot of great music has been made out of a desire to make money,” Benjamin muses. “But I do it to get a kick out of it. You’ve got to keep making yourself happy, just like the people did who left the stuff behind that makes you happy.”
Coming up with new ideas, and how to respond to the success of their previous record, has consumed plenty of time for both men during the past three years. At least, the parts of those years when Benjamin hasn’t been acting (he gave well-received performances in Four Brothers, alongside Mark Wahlberg, and Guy Ritchie’s Revolver), and when Patton has not been busy running the OutKast Clothing Company, his Pitfall Kennels pitbull breeding business, or making his own moves on to the silver screen (he starred in this year’s Atlanta-set drama, ATL).
OutKast’s new LP, Idlewild, is also the soundtrack to the duo’s first feature film, a drama of the same name based on the travails of a club owner (Patton) and a piano player (Benjamin) during the Prohibition era. As a result, partly, of the film’s period setting, the new album has a Thirties feel – lead single The Mighty O reworks Cab Calloway’s Minnie The Moocher for its chorus, When I Look in Your Eyes channels Dixieland jazz, and Idlewild (Don’t Chu Worry ’Bout Me) is a 21st-century Delta blues, in hock to Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf, but with a synthesizer wash at the close that could have come from a Kraftwerk record. It is another insane, eccentric confection.
“It’s not what everybody probably expects,” Patton concedes. “Everything right now is kind of monotonous – everything seems plain, and in a straight line. We’re known for trying to zig-zag, and hopefully people will want to hear us do that again. We have to keep it movin’, keep things different. That’s why we’ve got the movie.”
It is a long way certainly from their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, a collection of rap songs made for people like them. “We were teenagers,” says Patton, “and if you listen to it, you can tell what we were doing at the time – smoking, drinking, riding [in the titular Cadillacs].”
