I cheat between ATLiens and Aquemini as my favorite albums. If I wanna ride, I love Hootie Hoo and Gangsta Sh*t. When I’m down, it’s In Due Time or Liberation. What’s your personal favourite OutKast track or album? Tell me a little bit about your personal relationship with their music. Black joy is also protest and resistance. I love that OutKast showed balance in their work: they could be serious and address issues of class and racism and turn around and rap/sing about joy and having a good time. What sort of role do you think OutKast’s music can play in the lives of young people hoping to become more politically engaged? They complicate what it means to be southern and black. OutKast is important because they blend and bend southernness as a cultural concept. They often parody these elements in their music via skits, their music videos, etc. As a cultural and literary scholar, I am interested in how they challenge popular conceptions of southern blackness as rural, backwards, and tragic. I’m not a linguist, but their regionally-oriented use of language, particularly the use and creation of Atlanta slang, demands attention. Students will follow an abbreviated model of traditional academic peer review – the submission of a research prospectus, blind peer review of their work, and a workshop to help them continue to develop their paper into a publishable essay.įrom a linguistic point of view, what do you think makes OutKast so distinctive in the landscape of African American literature? I’m actually thinking through this question as I wrap up my book but the whimsicality and experimental nature of these artists, especially Young Thug, can be traced back to OutKast’s experimentation with fashion, sound, etc.Ĭould you tell me a little bit about the final project for students in the course?īecause the course is an upperclass English seminar, students will submit a 12-15 page original research essay that addresses the themes of the course. How, if at all, do you think OutKast have influenced the “New Atlanta” (Migos, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan et al)? I think this is how they continued the literary and cultural trajectory of southern writers: southernness is mobile, malleable, and open to interpretation according to one’s particular experiences. As OutKast developed their sound and their work progressed, they moved away from thinking about the south as a physical space and moved more towards southernness as a cultural concept. He didn’t say “Atlanta got something to say.” He said the South. How do you think the southernness of Andre and Big Boi impacted the Southern writers and rappers that came after them?įirst, André gave the rallying cry at the 1995 Source Awards – “The South got something to say.” That opened the door for southern artists to show and prove what exactly that meant.
#OUTKAST STANKONIA PARODIES UPDATE#
We will be exploring how OutKast’s body of work can be used to help us update social-cultural conversations about Southern black experiences in the American South after the Civil Rights Movement. I initially pitched it as a means to stay on track with completing my book on OutKast. The class is slated as an upperclass ‘Special Topics in African American Literature’ seminar course. Bradley! Give us a little background on your ‘OutKast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South’ course… Bradley’s class, we spoke to her about the ideas behind the class and what made OutKast cast such an enduring Southern spell. In a recent interview, Big Boi told Creative Loafing that it was “an honor to be studied.”Īs we aren’t in a position to emigrate, apply and enrol onto Dr. Savannah is also the birthplace of Big Boi so there is a particular relevance to the course at this college. Regina Bradley is offering the course which is entitled ‘OutKast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South’. Languages, Literature and Philosophy professor Dr. At the end of last week, news emerged that a college class about OutKast was being offered at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia.
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