In the late ’80s/early ’90s, I was a young and obsessive hip-hop fan. I had posters of everyone from MC Lyte to Digital Underground on my bedroom wall. I watched “Yo! MTV Raps” and “Rap City” religiously. I figured out how to set my mom’s VCR to tape the shows if I wasn’t at home between 4:30 and 6 p.m. on a particular weekday. My dad was a pastor, and after seeing a “20/20” expose on N.W.A, he barred me from listening to rap music.
Nonetheless, I had friends dub cassette copies of albums that I wanted. Classics like The Great Adventures of Slick Rick and AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and even not-so-classic stuff like Tone Loc’s Loc’ed After Dark made their way into my house in the form of blank, red-and-black Sony cassettes with obscure initials like “A.M.W.” scribbled on them in black Magic Marker. (Shout-out to Juan Robinson, Michael Ray, Kelvin Lindsey, Alex Holloway, Brian Brice and David Lindsey for helping me “get my fix” back in the day.)
By late 1993, I was a bit older and actually owned real copies of great albums like The Chronic and Midnight Marauders. My friends and I would ride around on weekends, like most teenagers in small towns, going nowhere and talking about the things that mean most to you in high school. We all loved hip-hop, but hated that where we were from, Georgia, mostly churned out bass music. We always lamented the fact that not enough artists from Georgia had “MC” in their names while dozens proudly claimed the “DJ” moniker.
Then, one afternoon, I was at home watching “Yo! MTV Raps” and this video premiered with two guys, not that much older than myself and my friends, wearing Braves jerseys and Kangol hats. They had the same drawl that we did. They were rapping while surrounded by pine trees and there were street signs throughout the video that read “College Park” and “East Point.” Places we had been — not faraway locales like Compton or Queens.
Those two guys were Andre Benjamin and Antwan Patton — better known as OutKast. The music video was for their first single, “Player’s Ball.” And hip-hop changed forever for me on that day. When southernplayalisticadillacmuzik dropped, I was completely enthralled with how unapologetically southern it sounded and felt, how musically rich and live it was, how deft Dre and Big Boi’s rhymes were. It was an album that all of my peers loved. I had friends who loved the Native Tongues and would never buy a DJ Qwik album. I had friends who loved Spice 1 and couldn’t care less about Arrested Development. I also had friends who were totally into Boyz II Men and Jodeci or Nirvana and Pearl Jam; hip-hop barely registered with them. But everybody I knew seemed to love ‘Kast.
I often compare seeing the “Players’ Ball” video premiere to what I think young people may have felt in 1964 when they saw the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” for the first time. It was that big a deal for me. They were like me. And they were dope. This wasn’t just happiness at seeing two local boys make good–it was joy over the fact that they actually were good. They were great. And they would only get greater. Over the next decade-plus, the soon-to-be Andre 3K and Daddy Fat Sax kept pushing boundaries in hip-hop much in the same way that the Fab Four repeatedly expanded the musical parameters of rock (again, the Beatles comparisons are easy for me); they became more than just the best rap act out of Georgia or the best Southern rap act — they became arguably the greatest hip-hop duo of all time. And I loved every minute of it — even the missteps. Twenty years flew by so fast.
The anniversary of the release of OutKast’s debut album isn’t getting quite the same kind of celebration as another major 1994 hip-hop debut got weeks ago. Nas released his classic first album Illmatic in the spring of 1994, as well; and the anniversary was acknowledged everywhere from “The Arsenio Hall Show” to the Tribeca Film Festival. But nonetheless, southernplayalisticadillacmuzik has arguably greater influence and more far-reaching significance over the last 20 years of hip-hop. And for those of us from the Peach State, it means more than almost any other release in 1990s hip-hop. It announced us as not just spectators, but active participants in a culture that defined a generation. And it represented who we were without pandering to East or West Coast aesthetics or tastes. These 2 Dope Boyz from Atlanta showed the world that the South had sumthin’ to say and, in doing so, set the stage for what would be one of the most critically-acclaimed and commercially-successful career runs the genre has ever seen. Regardless of where you’re from, that kind of thing should always be celebrated.
All day. E’er day.
