February 17, 2001

Single Of The Week - OUTKAST : Ms Jackson

Head, shoulders, body, legs and ankles above everything else on offer this week.

This isn't even the best track off 'Stankonia', not by a long chalk. But it's brilliant enough - head, shoulders, body, legs and ankles above everything else on offer this week.

The demise of excellent bands like New Kingdom used to leave you wondering if there was room for mavericks amid the new corporate orthodoxy of latter-day hip-hop. OutKast are here to tell you it ain't necessarily so. Like De La Soul with '3ft High And Rising', OutKast have revitalised hip-hop when it most needed revitalising, by going utterly against its grain. It doesn't take the music any place it hasn't been before, but does bring it out of the tight, jittery, churlish, dark place it's been festering in for too long into the primary daylight and psychedelic colours of P-Funk and '80s Prince, among others. With its sunlit piano break, Silicon Valley futurist synths and sawing, backward rhythms,
'Ms Jackson' has you blinking and rubbing your eyes in amazement.

Amazing indeed, because beneath all
this Southern-fried frippery and flippancy, what is this we have here - an apology? "I'm sorry Ms Jackson... never meant to make your daughter cry/I apologise a trillion times". Inspired by Andre 'Dre' Benjamin's break up with Erykah Badu,
it's described by OutKast themselves as "the slowly enrapturing notice to the baby's mama's mama". An extended, extraordinary essay of rap contrition on behalf of every guy who ever did wrong, addressed to the angry mother-in-law, this is a desperately needed chink in rap's macho armour. For that, and a myriad of other reasons, OutKast are the best thing that's happened to hip-hop in years - Eminem included - and that's no disrespect to the Marshall.

David Stubbs