Outkast - Stankonia
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www.inkblotmagazine.com Rating: 0
Critics, including some of us here at Ink Blot, love this record. Indeed, some of us made up our minds to top-ten it months before it even came out. The set-up was perfect: intelligent photo-ready rap duo comes out with most far-reaching and ambitious album of their career. And with all the hoo-ha over Andre and Erykah Badu's busted relationship and child, critics all had an automatic hook on which to hang the personal interest story thing. Then, we heard the first single, "B.O.B.," with its southernbassalistic beat, spitfire delivery, and Eddie Hazel-like guitar work from David Whild, clearly one of the greatest rap singles ever, and it was critic heaven.
There are tons of superb moments like "B.O.B." on Stankonia. Check out the chorus from the album's first song, "Gasoline Dreams": "Don't everybody like the smell of gasoline?/Well burn muthafucka burn American dreams/Don't everybody like the taste of apple pie?/We'll snap for your slice of life I'm tellin' you why/I hear that Mother Nature's now on birth control/The coldest pimp be lookin' for somebody to hold/The highway up to heaven got a crook on the toll/Youth full of fire ain't got nowhere to go/Nowhere to go." This is, simply, better than anything ever written by anyone, ever. It is a chorus of great brilliance and hard work and insight and blues and love on one fist and hate on the other. And that's just one chorus. "Humble Mumble" is superb, and so is the hilarious "Kim and Cookie" skit, and so is "Slum Beautiful," and so is a lot of Stankonia.
But not all of Stankonia. Scattered among the jewels are shiny bits of glass that aren't as valuable as they might be. Take the much-ballyhooed single "Ms. Jackson," cited as Andre 3000's tortured hymn to Badu's mother: "I'm sorry Ms. Jackson/I am for real/Never meant to make your daughter cry/I apologize a trillion times." Again, it's a great chorus; but a lot of the content of the verses don't fit with it ("You and your girl ain't speaking no more, 'cause my dick's all in her mouth"?) This isn't dramatic ambiguity-it's just confused writing and planning. The same can easily be said about quite a few songs here, which are either bad ideas ("Xplosion," "Spaghetti...
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