Outkast: The ATLiens at Coachella

I always thought that Outkast would eventually reunite after they broke up in 2007. This wasn’t the case of Melo and AI in Denver trading off going 1 on 1 at defenders. This was more Steve Nash and Dirk – they not only complimented each other, with Big Boi the point guard general and Andre 3000 the genre shifting 3 point shooting alien, they appreciated the differences in what the other brought to the table. But Coachella, unlike the NBA, is the place where real life fairy tales happen (Nash and Dirk can headline Coachella next year, I suppose, running pick and rolls and shooting 3’s on the main stage).

 

I’ve never been to Coachella. And as I approach 30, one of my life goals is to shower every day (aka I ain’t built for music festivals). While I won’t attend Coachella, I will watch the live YouTube stream, and I will live-tweet the event. After all, this is the same Coachella that gave us one of the legendary nights on Twitter with Hologram Pac, which ushered in the disappointing Hologram Era. I’m still waiting for the Hologram Jordan vs. Kobe PPV one on one battle we were promised.

 

Either way, a Coachella headlining performance must consist of at least one WTF moment that trends on Twitter for the next two days, thought Outkast has been delivering those moments for the last 20 years in music and in fashion. But since it happened B.T. (before Twitter), it never happened.

 

Outkast and 2014 Music

 

Outkast’s debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik came out 20 years ago in 1994. 20 is also about the average age of someone who attends Coachella. Think about that – there’s going to be people at Coachella the weekend Outkast headlines who weren’t born when that album came out, or have never held a CD copy of Aquemini or flipped through the liner notes of ATLiens. This is a world where Rosa Parks is “old school”.

 

It’s an obvious statement, but today’s music landscape is barely in the same solar system as compared to 1994. In 1994, Bigge went 4x platinum with Ready to Die. Warren G, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the Beastie Boys combined for 7x platinum. Outside of hip hop, Green Day’s Dookie and Hootie & the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View went diamond (That’s the equivalent of like 100,000,000,000 twitter mentions). Compare that to the highest selling album of 2013, the 20/20 Experience, which sold 2.4 million copies.

 

And where does Outkast’s fit in the current hip hop scene? They never exhibited the art angst of Kanye West, nor the high art aspirations of Jay-Z. Andre 3000 might be the most fashionable person in music, but how many times did he use clothing brands to symbolize his status? This is an era where the marketing of an album has a longer shelf life than the album itself, and album leaks (and tweeting about it) are part of the listener experience. And in between, we download mixtapes. And watch hours and hours of Netflix. Culture, and the way we consume it, changes every year, and sometimes even faster than that. But 20 years ago?

 

If Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik were released right now, it’d be a mixtape. And we’d never see the comic book inspired liner notes of ATLiens – and being an “alien” in 2014 is more James Franco Spring Breakers-esque image than it is about a suggestion that “the inner city of (Outkast’s) formative years is out of this world” or an “estrangement from American society”.

 

On the other hand, genius is genius, and genius always finds a way to break through (right?). Outkast’s gift of representing a time and place in a “out of this world” way would translate across art platforms. Outkast might not be a music group if Andre 3000 and Big Boi met as high schoolers today, but they, along with the Dungeon Family, would surely be cooking up the next Netflix mini-series in the fabled dungeon. Or they’d be programming iPhone apps. Or playing Call of Duty: Ghosts. Or streaming Coachella on YouTube.

 

Or maybe Outkast knew something when they broke up in 2007, the baby days of blogs. They saw the consumer changing and went their separate ways before their music would just be data in the bigger machine, before it stopped meaning something tangible. That’s the romantic, noble way of looking at it. Most likely, after 13 years of making music together, they just went their separate ways.

 

But we never had an Outkast Leak Night on Twitter. And knowing how the group reinvents themselves, I figure they would have flipped the digital age on our heads somehow. They’d be the one creating the visual album (which Idlewild basically was). And while Outkast headlining Coachella was a nod to the past, we’re not nostalgic for Outkast in the sense that people get nostalgic for the “good old days”. That type of nostalgia stays in the past. Outkast called their own shot. The feeling of alienation transcends the digital age.