November 14, 2003

OutKast : Hey Ya

What-the-frig genius from Atlanta’s premier nutjobs

A soul-smeared, pop-dipped, gospel-kissed clusterfunk,
a one-in-a-million science-fact anomaly that’d have
Professor Robert Winston and the entire Tomorrow’s
World "posse" twitching their learned moustaches in
confusion; ‘Hey Ya!’ is the Chaos Theory made glorious
flesh.

You couldn’t make ‘Hey Ya!’ up. Actually, you could,
but it’d be rubbish. Only Outkast’s Andre Benjamin and
Antwan Patton sport the chops, the sass and the
finger-popping, genre-hopping class to magic its wildly
disparate elements into such a madly cohesive whole.
And, as such, the second single from ‘Speakerboxxx/The
Love Below’ – and Single Of The Year in most known dimensions - is a hip-hop opera squeezed into a pair of
large trainers that manages, in just under four
minutes, to dance the rest of this week’s singles under
the table while laughing like a vaguely unhinged drain.
Trying to describe what it sounds like is, on the other
hand, rather akin to trying to lasso water (ie bloody
difficult) but, as responsible, professional sorts,
we’ll do our best. What we get is, approximately,
a monumental barney between the Camberwick Green brass
band, a cruise-ship cabaret act, a cartoon gospel
choir and a sucker MC hiccuping "Shake it like a polaroid pic-chaaaa!" backed up by the cast of an amateur production of The Wizard of Oz. Sort of. But for all its genre-tickling eccentricity, ‘Hey Ya!’s greatest
achievement lies in its refusal to acknowledge the
existence of either fashion or form. Like Missy
Elliot[/url]’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’, it comes from somewhere
else entirely, a loophole-leaping oddity doused in the
tantalising, unmistakable tang of Something Truly
Unique. Here, there’s the sense of the envelope not
merely being pushed, but being waggled furiously in the
faces of the slack, the lame and the inspiration-free.
Where do Outkast go from here? We’ll hazard a guess at
Jupiter.