One of my favorite small jokes on Chappelle’s Show is during “Kneehigh Park,” the sexually explicit spoof of Sesame Street. Before Dave introduces a group of small children to the dangers of venereal disease, a young girl says excitedly, “Hey, you’re Chris Rock!” Chappelle lets the mistake slide. With a weariness that shows he’s heard it before, he says: “No, but close enough.”

Since the two most prominent comedians of the post-Seinfeld era happen to both be black males, it’s easy for America to get them mixed up or lump their racial musings together. In fact, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle have fairly divergent approaches to stand-up comedy. Rock is a combative lecturer, while Chappelle is a conciliatory storyteller. Chris Rock likes to remind you of everything that wasn’t accomplished during the Civil Rights Movement, while Chappelle is trying to figure out if a post-racial America is even possible. They’re both incredibly funny, and insightful if you take an extra moment to reflect on any of their jokes. But who’s the better comedian?

For this competition, I decided to do a strictly stand-up comparison. While Chappelle’s Show is brilliant in a lot of ways, it’s the product of a lot of people’s talent and hard work (and would sway my opinion to such an extent that this wouldn’t be much of a contest). Stand-up offers an opportunity to evaluate both comedians at their most essential, with only a mic and an hour to tell us something about the world. I rewatched the two best television specials each comic has produced: Bring the Pain (1996) and Bigger and Blacker (2000) for Chris Rock and Killin’ Them Softly (2000) and For What It’s Worth (2004) by Dave Chappelle. My evaluation is based on all four standup specials in their entirety, but I’m just pulling out a few great bits to discuss for this post. All right, game time:

Chris Rock: The King of Racial Rhetoric

“What the fuck did you expect him to sound like? ‘I’ma drop me a bomb today! I’ll be pres-o-dint!'”
I have seen two bits of stand-up comedy in my life that were truly revelatory, in that they immediately made me view my world a little differently, and this is one of them (the other is Louis CK’s rant about how little we appreciate technology). Chris Rock’s gift is in being able to peel back the layers of our social interactions and reveal the often dysfunctional clockwork that actually makes the world tick. So it is with this segment. It reminded me of learning to read around age 4 by sounding out the signs at the supermarket, and how my grandmother seemed to resent the white shoppers who were so impressed by me. How do you deal with a burden that produces such an odd mix of emotions as the burden of low expectations? One approach is to laugh at it. I love Dave Chappelle, but I don’t think he’s ever said something so true so succinctly.

“Ever since you were 13, every guy you met has been trying to fuck you.”

Mostly I pulled this clip to show that Chris Rock can also be hilarious about things besides race.  He’s equally direct when it comes to relationships and a bunch of other issues (like his awesome rant about medical care). I like this bit because it’s one that both men and women can relate to, whereas most gender dynamic jokes really only resonate for one side. Eddie Murphy’s Raw still has some of the funniest jokes I’ve heard about relationships (“Half!“), but this great bit shows that Rock has range.

“Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people.”

Can Chris Rock take real talk too far? If there’s a boundary, he nudges up to it in this skit. Not because it’s offensive, but because this isn’t necessarily something everyone on Earth needs to hear or is responsible enough to hear. This eight-minute manifesto, so famous it was spoofed on The Office and offered as sage advice by President Obama, is almost like lifting the veil on black culture (and black divisions have only gotten more pronounced since he launched his rant in 1996). It’s devastatingly funny, it’s how lots of (most?) well-off black people think, and it’s an insight that only Chris Rock could really get away with. Bill Cosby sparked controversy almost ten years later when he basically said the same stuff without couching it in comedy. The most interesting thing about this bit is what Rock said on 60 Minutes years after it became a part of our culture and shaped how blacks are viewed: “I think a lot of people were thinking in those terms and hadn’t been able to say it. By the way, I’ve never done that joke again, ever, and I probably never will. ‘Cause some people that were racist thought they had license to say n—–. So, I’m done with that routine.” Whether it was smart to let this genie out of the bottle is up for debate, but you can’t argue that every bit of this eight minutes isn’t side-splittingly funny.

Dave Chappelle: A Universal Comic

“Gun store, liqour store, gun store, liquor store…where the fuck are you taking me?”
The advantage Chappelle has over Rock is his gift for storytelling. I might take a political science course from Rock, but I’d rather grab a beer with Chappelle. His stand-up is filled with great asides and odd, colorful details and bizarre characters, just like his show. Here are some of the elements that set the scene in Chappelle’s trip to the ghetto: a street full of gun and liquor stores, a crackhead leaping from a tree and an angry, drug-dealing baby prowling the streets at 3 a.m. He’s the master of telling small, captivating stories that you’re so happy to listen to, you’re not even concerned about the punchline. But the punchlines usually kill, as this one definitely does. I fell off the couch laughing the first time I heard this.

“I want that purple stuff….”

In the long history of “white people do this, black people do that” jokes (which Chappelle openly mocks in one skit on his show) this is one of my absolute favorites. It’s a wonderfully simple observation that works because it’s universal. It’s also a great exmaple of how his style differs from Rock’s. The joke is set up as a learning experience for two cultures instead of a confrontation. You don’t have to deal with the subtext of the ever-growing wealth gap between blacks and whites if you don’t want to, but that’s a point that would probably be made a lot more explicitly in the hands of Rock. It’s these kinds of jokes, poking fun at all races, that made Chappelle’s Show both hilarious and accessible. Dave really is the master of telling racial jokes that everyone can feel comfortable laughing at. Plus, I actually had never noticed that the “purple stuff” my Mom had been buying from Wal-Mart all my life was in fact called “Grape Drink.” Good eye, Chappelle.

“Once you fuck a monkey, that’s a firm decision.”
Of all the jokes in the four hours of stand-up I watched, “Fucking Monkeys” is by far the most universal. This joke requires no prior knowledge or life experience–you don’t have to understand race relations or be in a relationship or have kids to comprehend the very basic idea that “no one fucks monkeys and people.” It’s a joke without a lesson, without a message, just an absurd desire to take a silly concept to its illogical conclusion. Knowing that Dave has spent time ruminating on this scenario–and the fact that he acknowledges that fucking just monkeys could sort be reasonable– makes it funnier. It’s nonsensical in the best way.

The Verdict

Chappelle and Rock are both brilliant entertainers who cast an insightful eye on how we function as a society. But for stand-up alone, I think the edge has to go to Chris Rock. He’s a thought leader. He said things, especially in Bring the Pain, that people hadn’t been willing to say out loud before. You can laugh watching Dave Chappelle; you can understand how the world works watching Chris Rock. Even now, a decade after these specials were filmed, listening to Chris Rock feels a lot like ripping a band-aid off an old societal wound. The stuff he’s talking about would be tragic if he didn’t make it so fucking funny.

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. “13^th 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.