After Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Outkast suddenly found themselves with a lot more money, a lot more prestige, and a responsibility to be stewards of the Southern rap culture. They responded to these circumstances by crafting their debut album's bigger, more colorful, more ambitious (with a whole ass comic book in the liner notes!) little sister, ATLiens. Where its predecessor was fully produced by ONP, Outkast themselves took the helm of 5 out of 15 songs on the new album, & committed themselves to original composition & live instrumentation even more fiercely than before. This is high-profile production work from the duo, including the first 2 singles, "Elevators (Me & You)" & the title track, which are arguably the album's most iconic songs.
ONP's relative absence here is a mixed blessing. On one hand, all 5 of Outkast's self-produced beats are spacey, trippy, stone-cold classics (my favorite is probably the Dan the Automator-style reverb synth soup of "ATLiens"). On the other thing, there's one thing absent from this album that I've come to expect from Outkast: horns! Everybody knows I love a good horn arrangement, & ONP's are always godly. On ATLiens they only show up as brief stabs through "Decatur Psalm," leaving me with a brass jones so bad I almost have to put on "Spottieottiedopaliscious" after this album finishes to get me back to equilibrium. Otherwise, ONP is in top form here, from the wordless background vocals on "2 Dope Boyz (In a Cadillac)" to the new-agey piano of "13th Floor/Growing Old" to the languid Daniel Lanois-esque guitar on "Millennium" (which contains the album's best bar: 3Stacks's "a monster truck done came & ran over my picket fences").
Lyrically, the album is full of gems like that. You can hear Andre's new woke (borderline Hotep?) consciousness developing in songs like "Babylon" & the album closer "Growing Old." The duo makes statements of purpose standing in opposition to consensus reality--as if their group name & album title weren't enough--in songs like "Mainstream," assisted by Goodie Mob members (which back in the early 2000s was my favorite song on the album).
Okay, last & definitely least, let's talk about "Jazzy Belle." Fuck this song. No matter how "woke" Andre got, he never got woke enough to realize that policing women's behavior is none of his damn business. "Jazzy Belle" is 4 straight minutes of slut-shaming & homophobic slurs. It's times like these when I have to remind myself that the guys were barely 21 when this album was made, & god knows I said some equally stupid shit at 21, about women & otherwise. But at what age do boys magically become accountable? (That's a rhetorical question.) Sure, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik has equally cringey stuff in it, but that album feels like it's made by teenagers--supremely talented teenagers, but still. For better or for worse, ATLiens feels like the work of mature, seasoned artists with critical perspectives, so bullshit like "Jazzy Belle" is much harder to swallow in that context.
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