Pop music, and both Speakerboxxx and The Love BelowДЄre among the best hip-hop and best pop music released this decade.Д®ach is a knockout individually, and paired together, their force is That spirit fuels not just the best hip-hop, but the best Wind up sounding unified because they share the same freewheelingДЄesthetic, where everything is alive and everything is possible within Took off in different directions from the same starting point, yet they So, both recordsДЄre very different, but the remarkable thing is, they both feel Where classic soul and electro-funk coexist happily. The strange one-man funk of 'Roses' and the incandescent 'Hey Ya!,' Haters' to a breakbeat jazz interpretation of 'My Favorite Things' to The freedom to try a little of everything, from mock crooning on 'Love That cheerfully randy spirit surges through The Love Below, even on the spooky-serious closer, 'A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre,' and it gives Andre The difference between Andre 3000 and Prince is in that dialogue, too: Prince was tortured Andre is trying to get laid. It's not just that the music and song titles cheekily recall Prince - 'She Lives in My Lap' is a close relation of the B-side 'She's Always in My Hair' - it's that Dre disregards any rules on a quest to create his own interior world, right down to a dialogue with God. Instead, Andre 3000 has created the great lost Prince album - the platter that the Purple One recorded somewhere between Around the World in a Day and Sign 'o' the Times. And as theД¬ocktail jazz pianos that sparkle through the first few songs indicate, Isn't so much visionary as it is unapologetically eccentric. Golden age and pushing it into a new era. It's a hell of a ride, reclaiming the adventurous spirit of the Mariachi groove, salted by slippery horns and loose-limbed wah-wah How 'The Way You Move' offsets its hard-driving verses with seductiveД¬horuses, or how 'The Rooster' cheerfully rides a threatening minor-key Unpredictable juxtapositions, such as how 'Bowtie' swings like big-band The arrangements are overflowing with ideas and thrilling,

Grounded firmly within hip-hop, but the beats bend against the grain and Is ignoring boundaries, and the rest of his album follows suit. From the moment Speakerboxxx kicks into gear with 'GhettoMusick' and its relentless blend of old-school 808s and breakneck breakbeats, it's clear that Boi Music, held that Big Boi's record, Speakerboxxx, would be the more conventional of the two and Andre 3000's The Love Below the more experimental, that doesn't turn out to be quite true. If conventional wisdom, based on their public personas and previous Listens, providing some of the best music of 2003, regardless of genre. Thing is, while it would haveД«een a wild, bracing listen to hear these 39 songs mixed up, alternatingД«etween Boi and Dre cuts, the two albums do prove that the music can be solo in execution but remain OutKast Name - it's to prove that the two can exist under the umbrella of the OutKastДЄesthetic while standing as individuals. Of course, is part of the point of releasing solo albums under the group

Slightly, since the focus is on the individuals, not the group. By isolating themselvesДЇrom each other, Big Boi and Andre 3000 diminish the idea of OutKast That the group can do anything is tarnished. Songs - the individual records may be more coherent, but the illusion Although both albums have their own distinct character, the effect is kind of like if the Beatles issued The White Album as one LP of Lennon tunes, the other of McCartney Imagine where the duo was going to go next, but one possibility thatДЇew entertained was that Big Boi and Andre 3000 would split apart, each recording an album on his own and then releasing the pair as the fifth OutKast album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, in the fall of 2003. Was fearlessly exploratory and giddy with possibilities. In its kaleidoscopic, deep-fried amalgam ofДirty South, dirty funk, techno, and psychedelia, Stankonia The most eagerly awaited hip-hop album of the new millennium may be To call OutKast's follow-up to their 2000 masterpiece Stankonia

Speakerboxx and the love below zip