Stankonia, Joe

I need to start with something small, some tiny detail to latch onto, here at the beginning, and then allow myself to move on from there. Be the investigator, look for that small detail that everyone else missed, and let the story unravel naturally. Because otherwise, Stankonia is just too much to take on. It's too filling. I'm stuffed. There's just too much history, too large a legacy with this band, too much pressure to get it right. Can't fake it—people know OutKast, and they'll know if I'm wrong. So I just need a little something, maybe something with some fiber, get everything to start moving again. A little morsel, here at the start.

Erykah Badu's mom apparently loved "Ms. Jackson." That's where we begin the journey. I don't know why this particular detail has stuck with me over the past week, but it has, and I need to figure out why before we do anything else. I think it would be reasonable to see "Ms. Jackson" as an insult. Like, just put yourself in her shoes. The number one song in America is about you, right? And even though your daughter's baby's daddy is saying kinda nice things, his friend is making it seem like you're an asshole. Now, he's not talking about you (I guess he's talking about his own baby momma's momma, though this friend has never explicitly said who he is referring to), but this song is everywhere, and probably 70% of the population hears it and thinks that, whoever Ms. Jackson is, she's probably a big ol' meanie. And meanwhile, Badu's mom (Kolleen Wright) is out here loving this song. Waking up in the morning with a coffee mug that says "sorry Ms. Jackson" and all that kinda stuff. She leans into it.

It's a detail not embedded in the text, but regardless, it can tell us a lot about the text all the same. I think Stankonia is about... hmm, let's call it forced joy. Optimism against your better judgment. The album begins with a song that posits that American ideals don't look the same for everyone in every neighborhood, it moves through the somewhat paradoxical hazy psychedelia of hard living, crafts its toughest, meanest and most celebratory song around the idea of a mass-murder weapon, manages to find the crawlspace in between not-misogyny and not-not-misogyny, topped the charts with a song whose video features cute dogs nodding their heads to the beat, and all the while, manage to sound like the biggest, tallest, most confident, most self-assured rap group in history. All of this, to me, adds up to happiness. Knowing yourself causes happiness. Being good at something creates happiness. Being confident in yourself, that's happy too. Knowing yourself well enough that life is complicated and that a hit song about familial conflict can feel cathartic, even if you are more or less the target of that song.

I dunno, man, all of this is just so heavy, which sounds stupid to say, because it's also an album about partying in America, and it has dumb skits, and its title I suppose is designed to imply sex smells. I think this is where my mind is just at this morning, as I write this. Life feels big, etc., etc. But OutKast, maybe, cracked the code with their music. Like maybe all these songs might not normally fit together, maybe they are structurally unsound in some ways, lazy in others, maybe this is the sound of two guys who have two completely different visions for an album and they just mashed 'em together in some brilliant ways and also some ways that don't work at all (to the point that they would keep 'em completely separate next time), but also maybe it's all presented in a way that you know that Dre and Big Boi are winking at it, like they fucking know this is messy and like they fucking know that that's what makes it brilliant. Or maybe I'm just more willing to defend it because of its bigness.

I'm trying to practice what I preach. Here's what I've been preaching recently: your album reviews don't have to include every single thought you have about the album. Usually, I say this to encourage people to write a short review instead of them choosing to spend another week not writing a review at all, but I think I'm also saying as a self-protective maneuver. There is too much to say about OutKast. I'm not the guy to do it. I need to forgive myself for that. I could try to write a paragraph about why this is considered "Southern hip hop" (party-oriented, regional slang, low-end production, synths over samples), but that means very little to someone who is just reading this review to see what I have to say about this album they already know (and for those to whom the phrase means a lot to, there are plenty of other places to read all about it besides Puke on Your fucking Birthday). I could say how much I dislike the chorus "We Luv Deez Hoez," not for any woke reasons, just because it feels lazy and cringe, but then I'm just writing something just to write it, too much spotlight on a bad song while there are plenty of great songs surrounding it, but writing about bad songs is just easier. I could expound on the great song "Gangsta Shit," how this is probably André 3000 defending his place in this scene, planting a flag a couple decades before he released a jazz album, and, like, how no matter how goofy OutKast gets (a song about calling before cumming, e.g.), that they could also totally sound like Three 6 Mafia if they wanted to (and I got it mixed up, this isn't even the song that goes "She said she thought hip hop was only guns and alcohol / I said 'Oh hell naw!' / but yet it's that too"—that's "Humble Mumble"—but so there's another claim of authority to speak on What Rap Is Today™), but c'mon, you really wanna hear that shit from me? Some white asshole with a blog on which he has claimed repeatedly that he is still a neophyte when it comes to hip hop music?

I don't know any of that. I do know what it means to connect to an album, and I do know what it means to feel so goddamn strong when a particular song hits you in a particular way, and I do know what it means to be "important" music, even if I'm not good at writing about it or about really anything at all besides what I feel right here, in this moment. And what I feel is that this is big music, loud music, occasionally sloppy music, way-too-long music, cathartic music in the right light, and a bit too much music to handle right now, in this context. I am happy, though. None of these songs are about me, but I'm taking after Erykah Badu's mom—I hear this music, and I am happy.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5