Meanwhile, the dips and dives of Big Boi’s booming voice just get more nimble with age. As happy as I am to hear Dre rapping at all, it’s undeniable that his time away from the mic has atrophied a natural skill that once outshined the competition before he could even vote. His lyrics are funnier and more biting than the hippie-funk simp drool Andre tends toward whenever he stops rapping, and even how he sounds is now more engaging. I don’t say Big Boi’s tracks are better than Andre’s because they’re the most traditionally hip-hop I say it because they’re more pleasurable, more memorable, and funkier. The album sputters hardest when it plays on the movie’s Depression-era setting, padded with charmless jump blues and hot jazz pastiches. And the least best are the ones on which Andre is alone in the studio- when he decides to play the blues on “Idlewild Blue” it’s difficult not to wince. The second best tracks are the nominal Big Boi solo joints, bass-heavy struts like “N2U”, or “Peaches”, with its beat like a screen door slapping in the wind. Opener “The Mighty O” marks the reunion- both men finally rapping again on the same track- but it never fully congeals. The breakdown goes like this: The best tracks are the ones on which the two are performing together, like the 40-yard-line funk of “Morris Brown”. “Too much inspiration,” Big Boi ad libs at the beginning of (the pretty great) “N2U”. But at 79 minutes, exhaustion sets in by the midway mark, and the whole of the album takes on the feeling of someone trying to cap a broken water main. You admire the creative largesse, and there’s no doubt a strong 12-song album here. Initially, it’s thrilling in the way that any spectacle is. And so where The Love Below spluttered through an uncontrollable bout of creative diarrhea, Idlewild is overloaded with hooks and ideas stuffed into songs. But where P-funk floored the engine without fear of either the edge of the vinyl or a club’s operating hours, their motor was an endless stroke-stroke-stroke.īut hip-hop’s compartmentalized three or four minutes don’t lend themselves to endless vamps. Outkast- or at least Andre- prefers a P-Funk-like mess. His own wilderness period makes us forgetful, but Prince was once one helluva fastidious editor, and when it came time for his film debut, he smartly yoked his most outre ideas to nine of his most indelible songs- all clocking in at less than 45 minutes. Idlewild is the soundtrack to Outkast’s forthcoming film of the same name, which means a lot of it is only vaguely comprehensible for those of us who haven’t seen its parent flick (which, at this point, is all of us).
#Andre 3000 the love below full album movie#
It’s gotta stick in your craw when your farewell ends up your ticket to pop immortality and finally gets studio cats to greenlight the movie you’ve been sitting on for nearly a decade. On Idlewild, they’re once again sitting next to each other at soccer games, but this record is still the product of two brains contained in butting heads. By the 2003 release of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Big Boi and Dre had moved into separate bedrooms but kept eating breakfast together for the sake of the kids.
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