Yeah, so, the sophisticated boom-boom-room boom-boom booming out over the roofs is now fiddling less with diddle-skittles and 'stead making more with whole rainbows of fruit flava. and it begets a sweet tooth. So, y'know, lend me some sugar, b'cause I am your neighbor, and in this hood the cars paisley park'd up on blocks are rockin' to a block-party partying on the punch-drunk funk of Big Boi's punch'd-up 808 and André 3000's princely showman's persona — he all hip-hop Willy Wonka and all, he the one most seem to think is stealing the show out from under Boi's Charlie Bucket nose on this two-become-one solo-discs-as-double-album jamboree. I mean, it's from Dré's The Love Below that we get served the best damn single o'th'year, "Hey Ya!" And it's from that song's promotional rock-video that we get served the André-as-the-winner idea, as The Love Below suddenly b'comes a sprawling pan-musical band knocking out this next-level hip-hop shit like the tite-ist of old-timey combos, and not just the name of Mr.Benjamin's half of this pop-cultural monument. It's easy to hear how folks have fallen in love with the Love, too, with André's sophistifunk all sly sophistication and non-hip-hop-ist fashion, largely making do without rhymes as he gets freaky funky and balladic-ly bitter and skittishly super-silly and, then, on close, closes with a life in the day in which he dallies in that Dalloway way through the history-of-OutKast-thus-far in a spoken-word bit almost as impressive as their all-time kicking-your-ass classic "Spottieottiedopaliscious." That they were doing that five years ago, on Aquemini, also shows that they've been working up to this departure point, this jump-off where they make a leap of faith off of the commercial carousel that's served them so well, for much of a decade. OutKast have always been almost, like, above the regular affections and affectations of hip-hop, and, here, especially when Dré's chasing the love below, they just seem like themselves at their most idiosyncratic. Like they've been working up to this, but that it's always been this they've been working at. Hip-hop heads with their heads in the sand may be decrying (or declaring) the disc's scant resemblance to basic beats-and-rhymes, but, really, for those long riding this Kast express, the scenery will still seem familiar. Well, aside from some of the kinda dubious jazz-like bits that bubble up in The Love Below, which is, if we're to do the comparing, much more of a wild ride than Speakerboxx, with the way it veers wildly b'tween the utterly wonderful (like "Dracula's Wedding" and that "Life in the Day of Benjamin André") and the kinda dubious ("Behold a Lady," "Take Off Your Cool"). Big Boi plays his bat a little straighter, his half often resembling a hip-hop disc in the way he parades famous guests and plumps his protégé Killer Mike and finds times for rhymes and speaks more of social issues than emotional ones. But trying to sticker him as stick-in-the-mud stuck in the old ways is taking the idea of these two discs as competing too far. B'cause, like, aren't they like two sides of a coin or something?
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