Big Boi Still Wants to Be The Slickest
Though it’s better known for its provocatively titled hit single, its pair of harrowing narrative raps, and its sprawling, horn-filled climax, the emotional core of OutKast’s 1998 masterpiece Aquemini is a gentle song that comes squarely in its middle, and does not even feature the duo’s more famous member. Big Boi’s sunny, autobiographical “West Savannah” traces his life from birth—to a 15-year-old mother—to a modestly lucrative adolescence: “They wanna be me and my family, too,” he raps, preening, “Because the money that I make be putting cable off in every room.” It’s easy to imagine the experiences Big Boi describes in this song, which is named after his Georgia hometown, being rendered in starker terms. But “West Savannah” is brimming with joy, its small-time drug deals going off without a hitch, the creases in his jeans permanently crisp, the Sade tapes in his car deck never jamming.
The Savannah of Big Boi’s youth is seen through the same lens we train on our most idyllic childhood memories; it convinces you, for a moment, that that warmth and sense of belonging can be accessed at will. But that’s not what Aquemini aims to communicate. The album is in fact about decay, about what we struggle to preserve over time and what is irretrievable. (“Even the sun goes down,” Big Boi’s partner, Andre 3000, raps on the title track’s hook. “Heroes eventually die… Nothing is for sure, nothing is for certain, nothing lasts forever.”) The inclusion of “West Savannah,” which was actually recorded for OutKast’s 1994 debut, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, instead serves as a reminder about what gets stamped out over the years, rendered trite or naive. Just look at where it’s sequenced: between the desperate “Slump,” whose grownup hustlers scramble to make rent under the thumb of Bill Clinton’s three-strikes policing, and “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 1),” which ends with the discovery of a troubled woman’s corpse.
In many ways this—the potent raw material and the shrewd arrangement thereof—is Big Boi encapsulated. He is one of the most gifted technicians of his, or any era, able to bend his voice into nearly any shape, silky or gruff as the situation requires. His syntax shifts, too, from the Technicolor patter of 1970s pimp talk to chillingly plain terms, the overtly comic to the sneeringly cool. For nearly 30 years, he has deployed these musical talents to alternately underline or Trojan-horse ideas as simple as the joy of wearing new loafers or as complex as the male impulse to fire warning shots outside a corner store in symbolic defense your newborn baby. His new album, Big Sleepover—a joint LP with his longtime collaborator Sleepy Brown, out last week—is an occasionally convincing argument for this approach, supremely professional form that searches for, and occasionally finds, its function.
Born Antwan Patton in 1975, Big Boi spent his early years in Savannah, on Georgia’s Atlantic coast. He grew up in the Frazier Homes, a housing project just a few miles from the South Carolina border. As a child he loved poetry, reading Langston Hughes and studying the lyrics of the English musician Kate Bush. When he was a teenager he moved, with his ten siblings, the 250 miles inland to live with his aunt in Atlanta. He enrolled at Tri-Cities High, a magnet school for the visual and performing arts that was nevertheless socially dominated by gang culture, or at least its aesthetics. There, he met Andre Benjamin, a fellow outsider who also favored preppy clothes. The pair began rapping together and, before they even graduated, would sign a recording contract.
But the commercial, at least for a moment, was less important than the creative. The earliest OutKast demos were made on ad-hoc recording equipment—“We used to loop beats on cassette decks and stuff like that,” Big Boi says during a call in early December—and so it was a coup when the teenagers were invited into a more professional, and more competitive fold. While still at Tri-Cities, the pair fell in with Organized Noize, a production trio comprised of Rico Wade, Ray Murray, and Sleepy Brown, who worked out of a studio in the basement of a house owned by Wade’s mother. They called it “The Dungeon.” It was there that Big Boi and Dre forged their sound, refined their process, and met the members of Goodie Mob, the quartet whose debut, Soul Food, can go toe-to-toe with any OutKast record, and who would help form the spine of what became known as the Dungeon Family.
“It was free flowing,” Big Boi says of those early days in the Dungeon. “The samples were dusty [and] you had Brown playing the melodies on the keys.” Some of these sessions were packed with people, and so he would occasionally sneak upstairs and into a garage, where he would curl up in a rocking chair and write his rhymes. He had to: Every MC present was competing to get on every track Organized Noize turned out. “They was making beats and every [rapper] was sitting on the steps,” he recalls. “We’d all write to a beat, and whoever came up with something first would just start bussin’. It was always organically created, never genetically modified.”
These Dungeon days would eventually yield the songs for Southernplayalistic, each of which was produced by Organized Noize, many revealing Big Boi as one of the slickest men alive. His on-record relationship to Dre, while not as practiced or thematically intertwined as it would later become, was at turns bouncy and full of grit. Both rappers come off as virtuosos (see the points where they seem to abandon a beat’s pocket, ramble over top of it, then fall back into a new groove) who are too cool to care much about virtuosity. The album was warmly received by most critics and helped cement Atlanta as one of hip-hop’s creative hubs. When I first heard it as a teenager, I found it to be like a skeleton key that opened up different crevices of the genre: the bending flows clarified what the more stoic New Yorkers were doing, the manipulation of funk placed it firmly in a musical lineage.
But this appreciation was not universal. At the 1995 Source Awards, OutKast was famously booed as they walked onstage to accept the Best Newcomer award. This was at the height of a supposed New York/L.A. feud stoked by the music press; it was before acts from below the Mason-Dixon line were treated as those coastal rappers’ creative equals. What people remember about this incident is Andre’s bold, concise proclamation: “The South got something to say.” What they forget is an unperturbed Big Boi, who rattled off his thank-yous as comfortably as if he were in his grandma’s living room.
Rappers who achieve the sort of critical acclaim and financial freedom that Southernplayalistic offered usually reach outside their circle to the most sought-after collaborators of the moment. OutKast did the opposite, disappearing inside themselves, even relying less on Organized Noize. “When we first got a little bit of income, we invested in ourselves, bought beat machines,” Big Boi says. He and Dre set up home studios and started crafting their own material; they would then bring demos back to the Dungeon to play for their mentors. “They’d be like, Y'all are getting good at this shit,’” Big Boi remembers, laughing. The two albums that followed Southernplayalistic, 1996’s ATLiens and Aquemini, were co-produced by the rappers themselves, and ever stranger: surprised reactions to ATLiens’ experiments provide some of the subtext for Aquemini.
By the turn of the century, OutKast was still producing extraordinary music, but the precise chemistry was changing. Where Dre grew hungrier to experiment in increasingly outre ways, Big Boi preferred to refine what he had begun back in the Dungeon. On 2000’s Stankonia, you can hear the group splintering—not in the sense that there was friction between the members (though the music press was eager to speculate), but in that most of its songs can be readily identified as the brainchild of one member or the other. Three years later, the pair explicated this musical rift with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album where each artist was allowed his own, mostly solo disc. That LP won the Grammy for Album of the Year and was certified platinum 11 times over. But it marked the end of OutKast as a unified force.
In 2010, after a long delay due to contractual disputes with Jive, Big Boi issued his first proper solo album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. It was widely acclaimed and revealed that he had an omnivorous streak of his own, pushing ceaselessly into uptempos and marrying his familiar funk to the electronic sounds that were dominating pop music at the time. Take, for example, the stuttering “Shutterbug,” which sounds as if Miami Vice had been modernized and reshot in the heart of Georgia. Then, as if to make up for the gap between Speakerboxxx and Sir Lucious, Big Boi upped his pace, dropping two solo albums and a joint EP with Phantogram between 2012 and 2017. While the prospect of more OutKast music inevitably hangs over everything Big Boi does, an abbreviated 2014 reunion tour was marred by poor reviews. (After the tour was complete, Dre said he “felt like a sellout” for agreeing to it.) Fortunately for Big Boi, that string of festival dates was not his only outlet for live performances—or even his only touring plans with an old friend.
For more than half a decade, Big Boi has been playing club-and theater-sized rooms with Sleepy Brown. In addition to his production work for OutKast and the innumerable hooks he sang on their songs, Brown has appeared at least once on every Big Boi LP. He has also pushed, for decades, his one-time protege into new musical spaces. “Big always could [sing] but never really would,” Brown says. “On [Southernplayalistic], Big came up with most of the hooks. I’ve always seen that in Big. But it took him a while to get used to the idea of singing on record.”
These recent years of touring together allowed Big and Brown time to work on new music at a leisurely pace, and to live with demos of these new songs for months before locking themselves into final versions. Big Boi says he has a running playlist of over 500 beats to write to; during weekends on the tour bus, he and Brown would kick around ideas that they could execute back in Atlanta the following week.
This rhythm of short excursions and steady work is mirrored in Big Boi’s evolving approach to songwriting. While he still uses the extra-long yellow legal pads he’s preferred since high school, some of the notations on those pads revealed to him a changing pattern. “Before I start [writing], I put the start time and the date in the margin,” he says, “because I don’t finish a whole rhyme all in one day.” Over time, he noticed that he was doing his best work while the sun was still up. “I used to be a night owl, he says, “going in around 8:00 [p.m.] and leaving the studio around 6:00 [a.m.]. Now I go in around noon and leave the studio and 7:00 or 8:00 [at night].” He cites that new schedule as the reason he’s able to work with a more uncluttered mind. “You get a clearer thought that way, before you’re barraged with all the calls from attorneys and managers and shit. I’m day shifting.”
Big Sleepover has low stakes and modest aims, and seems happier to strike familiar notes than to play ones that might surprise. It is to each artist’s credit that the songs never feel strained in this pursuit. Big and Brown are professionals, too self-possessed to read as overly nostalgic or starved for approval. When the album does pine for earlier eras, it reaches not the Dungeon, but further back, to the 1970s of George Clinton and their imaginations. Even when it grows rote, as it occasionally does, it has the light touch that has buoyed this pair’s collaborations since the beginning. One merely has to recall the improbably coherent “Player’s Ball”—or “West Savannah” which, entrancingly specific as Big Boi’s verses are, would be incomplete without Brown’s breezy hook.
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Though unfailingly polite, Big Boi is unsparing when asked about whether he feels pressure to stay apprised of the music his peers or successors in Atlanta, or in hip-hop generally, are making. “We don’t give a fuck about what nobody else is doing,” he says. “You try to outdo yourself.” With Big Sleepover, if he has not quite done that, he has at least reasserted himself as a showman with few peers.
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