ATLiens vs. Aquemini: Which Pair of Boyz Are Dopest?
I’ve decided to launch this blog of comparisons writing about my favorite music group and two of my favorite albums. Like most 23-year-olds, my primary exposure to OutKast as a child was through pop hits like “Hey Ya” and “Ms. Jackson.” It was only when I got to high school, after I’d worn out my Speakerboxx/Love Below and Stankonia CDs, that I realized my favorite group had actually been even better before they became the second rap act in history to when the Grammy for Best Album.
I spent most of college learning to love ATLiens and Aquemini, which Big Boi and Andre somehow made when they were younger than I am now. But trying to pick which one is better is like trying to choose between Chris Rock’s two ‘90s stand-up specials and Dave Chappelle’s two ‘00s specials (a dilemma I’ll address in a later post). The difference in quality is razor thin.
But just because they’re so close, and just because there’s nothing to be gained whatsoever by declaring one better than the other, that doesn’t mean I can’t try. Let’s do this:
ATLiens: Cooler Than a Polar Bear’s Toe Nails
What ATLiens has going for it—what Big Boi and Andre had going for them, at one time—is cohesion. The album has a definite sound melded with compelling themes, and it carries them consistently through 14 tracks. “You May Die,” one of the best intros in hip-hop, sets the tone for the mature, subdued, introspective music that follows it.
But—and this is something I didn’t get when I was 15 and wondering why this didn’t sound more like “Ms. Jackson”—ATLiens is in no way a sleepy album. The title track may be Outkast’s best traditional rap song, though I still prefer some of their genre-bursting works on later albums (“SpotieOttie,” “B.O.B.”) slightly more. Here they’re both at peak lyrical form, displaying how their styles both contrast and complement each other.
Big Boi’s lines are quick, clever jabs (“cooler than a polar bear’s toe nails”) and he’s always grounded in the here and now of life in Atlanta (“shout out to Uncle Donnell locked up in prison”). Meanwhile, Andre launches into one of the first of the many extended metaphors that have come to define his career (“my oral illustration be like clitoral stimulation…”) and worries about the problems his unborn child will face as a black person in America. It’s street talk and cerebral musings rolled into one song. And just when things might be getting too preachy for you, the chorus kicks in and reminds you that OutKast is first and foremost about having fun and celebrating “fish, grits and all that pimp shit.” This song is everything great about the group compressed into four minutes.
Really, the entire first half of the album knocks, from the DJ scratch-breakdown on “Wheelz of Steel” to the cultish chants that haunt the background of “Two Dope Boyz” to the oddly hypnotic “Elevators,” one of the most creative beats in the group’s discography. Only when I reach “Ova Da Wudz” does my finger twitch slightly toward the slightly toward the skip button, but the song serves as an inoffensive intermission before the mellower second half of the album.
The last few tracks aren’t quite as consistent as the stellar front half, but some of the album’s most intimate songs are towards the end. On “Babylon,” Andre recounts the path of sexual discovery and loss of innocence we all go through as children. “Mainstream” focuses on the dangers of conforming to a thug lifestyle, either in the recording studio or out on the streets. “13th Floor/Growing Old” offers some nice circularity with “You May Die” by addressing mortality with one of the all-time great morsels of OutKast wisdom: “Fat titties turn to teardrops as fat ass turns to flab.” It’s really on these songs that the album leaves behind the typical topics of rap albums and breaks new ground.
Though the songs don’t flow into each other, they’re deeply interdependent. Alone, some of them are not entirely remarkable, but they’re enhanced by the quality of what surrounds them. The sound is futuristic, yes, but in some ways it also seems primitive. The videos for the album are about archaeological discovery instead of flying spaceships–there’s nothing “3000” about them. Maybe this album’s sound isn’t supposed to be something we’ve never heard before but instead just something we’ve forgotten how to understand.
All right, Aquemini time.
Aquemini: Strictly for the Caddy Lovers
First off: whether or not Aquemini is the “better” album, it’s definitely the more important one. Not only did it define the modern OutKast sound (there’s no “B.O.B.” or “Hey Ya” without the sonic boundaries they shattered here), but it also created the template for the rap album as a grand, ambitious, genre-bending experiment (see My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and good kid, m.A.A.d city). And it did all this by being the polar opposite of ATLiens.
As a complete work, Aquemini is much more disparate than ATLiens, and if you listen closely you can hear the cracks forming in OutKast’s relationship. There’s only one mid-verse handoff from Big Boi to Andre on this entire album, a staple of their earlier works. Big Boi gets his first solo song, a Southernplayalistic era leftover called “West Savannah.” On “Return of the G,” Big Boi references rumors of an OutKast breakup for the first time, a topic he’s been rapping about ever since. Between 1996 and 1998, something definitely changed between the two dope boyz. Maybe Erykah Badu pulled a Yoko Ono.
But none of that really matters yet because the music they made here is undeniably brilliant. “Aquemini” is a personal favorite. I recommend listening to it late at night in a car with a great sound system. There’s something almost sinister in the odd rattles and hisses that pepper the track’s soundscape. That pregnant pause at around the 3:20 mark, right before the trumpets come roaring back and the beat warps, is one of my favorite moments in music.
OutKast also prove that they’re still lyrical geniuses on tracks like “Da Art of Storytellin.’” Andre only needs 16 bars on part 1 to sketch the life and death of the tragic figure Sasha Thumper (so good Kanye lifted a line from it almost 15 years later). The apocalyptic Part 2 just as affecting, bursting with fantastic visual imagery and a beat that is somehow both frantic and morose.
But the main reason Aquemini is still critically important 15 years after its release is 7 glorious minutes called “Spottieottiedopaliscious” that probably showed OutKast, and hip-hop in general, that anything was possible.
Just the instrumental would have been enough. Just listening to Sleepy Brown croon over the syrupy melody would have been enough. But it’s really the relaxed spoken-word poetry of Andre and Big Boi that elevates this song. There’s a litany of brilliant lines (“It gives me the dickens reminiscing of Charles”), powerful imagery (“A fine, bow-legged girl lulls lukewarm lullabies in your left ear”) and fantastic regional metaphors (“Her neck was smelling sweeter than a plate of yams with extra syrup”). This song alone has a solid argument against ATLiens.
It’s immediately followed by the gospel-inspired “Liberation.” The two combine for 15 minutes of transcendent music that completely free the artists from all the conventional tropes of hip-hop. Add on the wailing electric guitar of “Chonkyfire” and you have all the ingredients that would make OutKast pop superstars just two years later.
But like with any grand experiment, there are some legitimate errors here. “Mamacita” is a genuinely bad song, maybe the worst they’ve ever released. In general there’s too much time wasted giving Dungeon Family members a shot on the mic (“Y’all Scared,” “Slump”). It’s these continual tendencies to look back at their past that slightly temper my excitement for Aquemini (ATLiens, by comparison, seems completely unconcerned with Southernplayalisitcadillacmuzik’s existence). But the heights the album reaches are worth the mild bumps on the journey.
The Verdict
After listening to both albums at length and spending a night thinking about it, this decision really got no easier–I’m second-guessing it right now listening to the beat change-up on “Aquemini.” Both albums escape the confines of what is supposed to define hip-hop—ATLiens does it lyrically, while Aquemini does it instrumentally. But in the end, I’m more compelled by ATLiens’ clarity of vision, the poignancy of its lyrics and the harmony it demonstrates between two talented artists growing into men. They truly earned their name here by completely sidestepping the sound of the day and charting new territory. Without that initial bravery, maybe OutKast is still making g-funk records or just blindly following the musical trends of the day.
On Aquemini, I know that it’s the flaws and the emerging clash of ideologies that allows something as magical as “SpottieOttie” to be created. But I think I appreciate what a deeply Southern album ATLiens still is, despite the futuristic (or ancient?) trappings. Having recently left Alabama to live in New York, the idea that a Southern ethos can live on anywhere, even during an alien invasion, is comforting.
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