How Outkast's "Aquemini" Fulfilled the Prophecy & Changed Hip-Hop Forever
On August 3rd, 1995, hip-hop history was forever altered.
While many hip-hop purists like to refer to the second annual Source awards as the night that hip-hop died, they are overlooking the most important moment of the show that I believe to be the moment when the hip-hop we know and love today was born. While most remember the show for Suge Knight’s not-so-subliminal shots at Diddy during his “Soundtrack of the Year” award speech or Snoop Dogg’s infamous “Y’all don’t love us?!” rant, the most important moment of the night followed the announcement for best new artist. When a little-known hip-hop duo called Outkast was announced as the winner they were met with a chorus of boos as the New York audience lost their mind because hometown hero Method Man didn’t win the award. Amidst the boos, a young Andre 3000 grabbed the mic and silenced the crowd with one of the most iconic acceptance speeches TV has ever witnessed, an acceptance speech that was only six words long: The south has something to say.
This moment is referred to as “Andre’s prophecy” as it came one year before Outkast started what very well might be the best three-album-run in the genre’s history. While ATLiens and Stankonia are classics in their own right, they represent Outkast on both ends of the experimental spectrum and when examining influence it’s important to start at the moment when everything changed. That moment for Outkast (and the entirety of hip-hop) was their 1998 release Aquemini.
The cultural importance of the album goes far beyond the quality of the writing and recording on the project. Aquemini is the most influential album in hip-hop history because it’s the project that liberated the genre and enabled rappers to break free from the restrictive constraints that had previously said what you could and couldn’t do in hip-hop. Aquemini is the moment when successful artists were allowed to transcend the title of “rapper” and step into their full potential as boundless creatives. Aquemini is the album that freed hip-hop.
Although it’s impossible to boil Aquemini’s impact down to one groundbreaking trait, the first that must be mentioned is the group’s willingness to blend a variety of genres without fear of alienating traditional hip-hop fans. While Aquemini is certainly a hip-hop project at its core, Big Boi and Andre effortlessly fuse funk, jazz, gospel, world music, and spoken word into the record introducing a level of genre-bending that had yet to be seen in hip-hop. The album’s second song “Rosa Park” establishes this theme early on by being anchored by a country hoe-down inspired instrumental that’s so southern it even houses a harmonica solo played by a real pastor. The deviations from hip-hop go much further on Aquemini though. From the iconic ska-inspired horns in “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” to Erykah Badu and CeeLo Green versing soulful spoken word over the jazzy “Liberation” instrumental, the duo managed to seamlessly mix sounds throughout the project, somehow making a record for both old-school players AND new-school fools.
It’s easy to see the tremendous impact that Outkast breaking genre rules had on modern hip-hop. This impact is palpable across Kanye West’s entire discography from soulful samples featured on The College Dropout and Late Registration to truly boundless hip-hop housed on 808s and Heartbreaks and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Moving into even more recent examples, without the bold experimentation Outkast employed on Aquemini we would’ve never been lucky enough to see XXXTENTACION push the limits of what a rap album could be on ?, his sophomore album. Finally, the artist where Aquemini’s influence is the most noticeable is none other than Kendrick Lamar who won a Pulitzer Prize for To Pimp a Butterfly, an album with a heavy psychedelic jazz influence that can be clearly traced back to the Southern duo.
One of the most obvious impacts that Outkast had on modern rap was welcoming artists from areas other than California and New York to the party. While there certainly were groups and artists making music outside of the two states, none had reached the mass appeal that Outkast did, a feat that signaled to the average consumer that good music could come from anywhere. Outkast broke the geography of hip-hop allowing new scenes to emerge and have lives of their own. The south became a hotbed for hip-hop after Aquemini resulting in generational talents like Lil Wayne, Killer Mike, and T.I. Years later, a similar renaissance was seen in Chicago with artists like Common, Lupe Fiasco, and Kanye West. While there were certainly great artists from regions outside California/New York before Outkast and the growth of different scenes across the country was inevitable, what the duo did for the south and all other developing regions after must be acknowledged.
Thus far we’ve looked at the impact of Outkast’s instrumentation and regional prowess, but we have yet to discuss potentially the most ground-breaking power the group yielded: The context of their writing. Outkast was the first hip-hop act to leverage their authentic duality as a strength rather than a weakness that needed to be covered up. In 1998, there were specific archetypes that rappers had to fit into to be successful. You could either be A Tribe Called Quest or NWA, De La Soul or Wu-Tang Clan, Talib Kweli or Jay-Z. Andre and Big Boi completely destroyed this idea of a single identity and Aquemini was the album where they truly became the player and poet. Outkast would be the first to tell you that hip-hop was so much more than drugs and guns but then turn around to tell you the importance that both had on the culture.
This duality and authenticity that Outkast pioneered is the reason that hip-hop was able to expand and become the biggest genre in the world. While we love gangsta rap and conscious rap alike, it’s hard for the average person to relate and identify with either sub-genre completely, and if the lines were never blurred both camps would’ve simply gone deeper into their respective niches. Not only was Outkast the first to walk this line, but they were undoubtedly the best at it.
Finally, this examination of influence would be incomplete without mentioning the way Andre’s flow taught the best rappers ever how to spit. Although Biggie had already shown the world how mesmerizing a flow could be by the time Aquemini was released, nobody pushed it further than three stacks. Andre broke every rule of rap resulting in some of the most mind-bending flows hip-hop has ever heard. He seemed to write against the beat instead of with it allowing him to fall into absurd pockets that would pave the way for emcees like MF DOOM, Earl Sweatshirt, and Boldy James.
When speaking about extremely influential works, it’s not rare for an album’s greatest strengths to be the projects that came from it. The most beautiful thing about Aquemini is that well it birthed some of the greatest records in hip-hop history, to this day its greatest strength is not what it became but rather what it is. The record is nearly 25 years old and somehow doesn’t sound dated at all. You can play Aquemini next to any of the great albums to come out in the past decade and it sounds right at home. Outkast is without question one of the most legendary hip-hop acts to ever grace a mic and Aquemini is the project that pushed them to this level. “Even though we got two albums,” Big Boi raps on that album’s “Y’all Scared,” “This one feel like the beginning.”
Spencer Lodbell is the co-founder of StereoVision.
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