It's hard to talk about Goodie Mob without talking about Outkast. The 2 best known groups to emerge from the Dungeon Family always included each other in their projects, & both were blessed in the early days with production by the great Organized Noize. Since Outkast achieved a much greater level of visibility & popular success, Goodie Mob are in the unfortunate position of always being compared to them. This is both unfortunate & unavoidable--unfortunate because sonically & conceptually the group displays little of the freewheeling left-field weirdness of Outkast, & is more comparable to hardcore contemporaries from other parts of the South like UGK or 8Ball & MJG; unavoidable because ONP is such a versatile powerhouse production team that the fact that they fully produced both Soul Food & Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik is a major part of their legacy.
Compared to Outkast's colorful sense of fun, Soul Food is a dark album. ONP's bold horn arrangements are nowhere to be found on this album--it's all sparse drum loops & murky keys. The overall feeling is of nocturnal contemplation, & with its conventional textures the album feels more "classically hiphop," for lack of a better term, than the Outkast debut. That's not to say that this album is inferior in any way--the ONP signatures come through loud & clear in little touches like the squealing melodica chops of "Sesame Street," Sleepy Brown's inimitable vocals in the title track, & "Cell Therapy"'s dusty, baroque main loop.
The emcees are equally important components in the sonic spell this album casts, & vocally, Goodie Mob has a lot of variety to offer. No disrespect to Big Gipp & T-Mo, but I've always found Khujo & Cee-Lo to be the most interesting members to listen to. In some ways, the 2 are opposites. Khujo has a booming, authoritative voice (I'll once again invoke the name of MJG) & his syllables land hard on the beat. Future pop star Cee-Lo, on the other hand, uses a high-pitched melodic tone, & his flow seems to dance over the beat, alighting like a grasshopper & then frolicking away again. While the other 2 emcees are somewhere in the middle, those 2 limn the group's dichotomy--light & heavy, airy & moody, day & night.
One thing I've always admired about this album is that Goodie Mob never just rap to rap. Every song is about something--usually a sociopolitical topic, like collective strength & the danger of self-loathing in the Black community in "Live At the O.M.N.I.," or the hood & poverty reminiscences of "Sesame Street." True to their Southern roots, they have a habit of twining together the sociopolitical & the spiritual, as in the meaning-of-life meditation "I Didn't Ask To Come," or the soul-sickness of paranoia that comes with confinement in "Cell Therapy." The album is true to its title--equally concerned with earthly survival & ethereal sustenance, & a comprehensive celebration of Blackness. But in this case, it's maybe even more interesting to notice what the Goodie Mob members don't rap about. This album is unmistakably hardcore & nobody would question its gangsta, but the group never demeans women or glorifies gunplay. Not once. Show me another street rap album from this era you can say the same for.
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