Ta-Nehisi's coronation of OutKast on Friday had one line about Big Boi that crystallized something I've been thinking for a while: " it's really pleasing to see how he's grown as an artist in the almost 20 years (!!!) since Outkast premiered." Perhaps it's inevitable and adolescent of me, but I always made the mistake of thinking him as the lesser of the duo. My love for Andre 3000 seems almost adolescent to me. That doesn't mean I feel it any less, or that the memory of that intense and heady passion is any less pleasurable today.
I still think Andre 3000 is, when he is concentrating, wildly talented, among the absolute best in the game. That said, he often isn't concentrating, for reasons unbeknownst to me. And in that space where he's been off, writing music for an animated children's series, trying his hand at acting, and blues singing, and everything else, Big Boi's dedication, both to the project that is OutKast and his craft, seems to have paid off remarkably.
The more that I think about it, the more I really believe Idlewild was a turning point for the duo. Big Boi was just superior in both elements of that project. Some of it had to do with how their parts were written, of course. Percival was almost impossibly melancholy: Rooster really got all of the spark, and frankly, all the arc. And while Three Stacks was off on a musical walkabout, Big Boi came up with "Call the Law," a track that has stayed fresh, and marvelous, and strange for me all these four years later. I thought his work on "International Players Anthem" the next year was actually a step backwards: a jerky, syncopated delivery of some less-than-impressive gender politics. Follow-ups like "Morris Brown," "Tightrope" and "Fo Yo Sorrows" showcase a rapper who's gotten better with age: faster, crisper, interested in creative collaborations in a way that's moving his work forward. I never would have thought Big Boi would be the romance of my mid-twenties, and Andre 3000 a dream. But so it seems to be.