Add this one to the You Know You’re Old When files: Saturday marked the 20th anniversary of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Outkast’s double-solo album that proved to be the Atlanta duo’s last hurrah. (Please don’t mention Idlewild.) To mark the occasion, Paul Thompson goes deep into the circumstances around the project—and then, as he so often does, excavates its disjointed, transcendent result with so much acuity that you’ll wish he wrote about every album you loved. And every album you hated. And even the ones that you’re kinda conflicted about.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was released on September 23, 2003, and tempting as it may be to frame it as the end of one era—in Outkast’s career, of course, but also an era of hip-hop, and of the CD-sales economy—it could be more accurately understood as the beginning of their long, drawn-out separation. A conscious uncoupling. The delicate balance that made the first four Outkast LPs so tantalizing had been upset and could never be recovered; in the years since this bizarre quasi-climax, each half of the group has come to sound more like the focus-grouped idea of himself than the frequently conflicted young man who appeared from Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik through Stankonia. Some of this can be ascribed to aging, some to the shifting economic incentives of music in the streaming era, and some to the way nearly all artists hit a point of diminishing invention. But for a group so frequently misread, it’s fitting that the irreparable fissure was mistaken for a crowning success.
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