OutKast was always an exercise in friction. Long before the barely disguised breakup album that became their biggest commercial success, Dre and Big Boi chafed at one another, at different versions of themselves, at the past, the present, their genre, their neighbors. Their debut album, 1994’s remarkably accomplished Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, was buoyed by a pair of hits so thematically discordant that they could only be held together by an impenetrable alloy of charisma and technique.
Two years later, when the Atlantans were just 21 years old, they returned with ATLiens, an album that finds a new vantage point on the outside world to burrow deeper into its authors’ own paranoias and insecurities. Suffused with dread and bathed in reverb, the record captures two virtuosos at their most vulnerable. Even when the revelations seem to be inadvertent, they add depth and dimension to the high school rivals-turned-partners who had quickly emerged as monumental talents in rap.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Southernplayalistic allowed Dre and Big Boi to tour across the continent and in Europe. In interviews around the time of ATLiens’ release, both MCs, but especially Big Boi, cite this as a broadening experience for two teenagers whose lives had mostly been confined to the American South. But tour is also exhausting, and isolating; it’s a lot of airport terminals and interchangeable hotels and greenrooms that blur into a sort of purgatory with fresh towels and stale deli trays. For a nominally social endeavor, it leaves you alone with yourself an awful lot.
When Big Boi and Dre started working with Organized Noize—the production trio Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and Rico Wade, who had nurtured them as part of the Dungeon Family collective and produced Southerplayalistic—the accommodations were no itineraries, no concierges. “The basement wasn’t finished,” Big Boi said to Rolling Stone in 2004, recalling the place from which the Dungeon took its name. “We have red clay in Georgia, so the beat machines had dust on ’em. There were old broke-up patio chairs. You had seven people sitting on steps with their notebooks out. Guys sleeping upstairs on a hardwood floor. It was some gritty shit. We’d walk up to this deli inside a gas station and order the spaghetti special, because it came with five meatballs, so we could split it.” That was then. Now there was money; now there were deadlines. While OutKast toured, Organized Noize rented out the top floor of the Biltmore Hotel and started working on beats for the second album.
Meanwhile, the rappers had invested some of the money from their publishing deal in production equipment and begun tinkering with beats themselves. They worked diligently and smoked copious amounts of weed. Their emerging codependence refracted through both things: Any beat made by either one was credited, simply, to OutKast; because Big Boi didn’t yet know how to roll blunts for himself, Dre would prepare as many as 30 for him to go through during a single day.
