But it’s filled with so many pure ass-moving pleasures, you’re happy to indulge its excesses. It’s long - okay, maybe overlong - on skits and stylistic spelunking (see the John Coltrane - meets - Roni Size cover of ”My Favorite Things”). Between these poles is as strange and rich a trip as pop offers nowadays, a song cycle about love’s battle against fear and (self-) deception that’s frequently profound, hilarious, and very, very sexy. The tradition-minded moments also remind you where all this experimentation is rooted: hip-hop.Īnd that’s important because, judging from the swirling strings and Nat King Cole crooning that begin Dre’s deliriously art-damaged ”The Love Below,” hip-hop tradition is fairly low on the list - at least until the Beatles-referencing finale, ”A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete),” an autobiographical epistolary to an ex that lays deep rap testifying over a laptop-techno-beat blur. It kicks off with ”GhettoMusick,” a machine-gun-speed rap reclaiming ’80s electrofunk from hipster ironists while targeting low-aiming rappers: ”You oughta be detained by the hip-hop sheriff/Locked up, no possibility of getting out/Because the s -you make is killin’ me/And my ears and my peers.” ”Bowtie” and ”The Rooster” are good-time anthems with a brass-band swing ”The Way You Move” mates a Dirty South synth-drum bounce with a faux Phil Collins hook and ”War” gets grimly topical with a chorus of ”tick-tick-boom.” Things lose some creative steam on posse cuts like ”Last Call” (with Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz and Slimm Calhoun) and ”Tomb of the Boom” (with Ludacris and others), but even the old-school tracks have a twist, whether it’s Jay-Z rapping the hook of ”Flip Flop Rock,” or ”Reset,” with its dice-roll percussion and sermon by Big Boi’s Georgia neighbor Cee-Lo. But it’s surprising how far-reaching it is. So you’d expect ”Speakerboxxx,” his half of the package, to be fairly straightforward.

In OutKast’s yin and yang, Big Boi is the Everydude - the neighbor you talk football with, who raises pit bulls and admits a fondness for both corny pop ballads and gangsta rap.

Speakerboxxx the love below zip