30 years later, ‘ATLiens’ stays OutKast’s defining assertion
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Dee Dee Hibbler recollects the precise second she knew OutKast was going to vary the course of hip-hop. It was summer season 1995, within the basement of the southwest Atlanta mansion belonging to Rico Wade, the gregarious chief of the Grammy-nominated manufacturing trio Organized Noize.
Also within the room have been two of Wade’s younger protegés: the swaggering Antwan “Big Boi” Patton and introspective Andre “Dre” Benjamin, who had lately gone platinum with their funky 1994 debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik.
“Dre called me to the side and asked me to hear some of the new music they were working on,” remembered Hibbler, who managed Organized Noize, would develop into OutKast’s de facto supervisor, and whose buttery voice as “Peaches” had opened the duo’s debut album.
They have been within the early levels of placing collectively tracks for his or her bold 1996 follow-up ATLiens. OutKast’s movies have been getting performed on Yo! MTV Raps and BET’s Rap City. Suddenly, Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records and its franchise star Scarface, the godfather of Southern hip-hop, and Miami bass king Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell had firm.
“Dre and Big Boi were not trying to make ‘Southernplayalistic Part 2.’ They elevated soul food to fine dining.”
But the group’s future felt removed from fated. Today, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik is well known as a hip-hop milestone. Back then, some trade gatekeepers dismissed the Atlanta “country boys” as a fluke.
“A lot of people got the message of our first album mixed up,” Big Boi advised the Los Angeles Times in a December 1996 interview. “They just heard ‘Player’s Ball’ and thought it was all about the pimps, the cars and all that mess.”
OutKast aimed to keep away from ATLiens being equally misinterpreted.
“I want you to tell me what you think,” an anxious Andre, nonetheless a number of years away from embracing his eccentric André 3000 persona, advised Hibbler.
One instrumental floored Hibbler. It sounded just like the Nineteen Seventies progressive jazz fusion band Weather Report and reversion Miami bass legend DJ Magic Mike had a session within the Dungeon.
Three weeks later, Hibbler obtained a name from OutKast to come back to Doppler Studios. They stunned her with the completed music “Wheelz of Steel,” one among a number of new tracks produced by Earthtone III, the ragtag manufacturing crew of Andre, Big Boi and frequent collaborator Mr. DJ.
“I was in tears, because it came out so beautifully, from the lyrics and the production to Mr. DJ’s scratches riding it out,” Hibbler recalled of the ATLiens deep minimize. “Dre and Big really started developing as producers and defining who they were as artists. I saw them both go through a metamorphosis during the early stages of ATLiens. They were telling the hip-hop world, ‘You will respect the South.’”
It was the frigid bicoastal reception OutKast obtained Aug. 3, 1995, on the second annual Source Awards that strapped a battery on their backs through the making of ATLiens.
By now, that notorious night at Paramount Theater inside New York’s Madison Square Garden has develop into hip-hop folklore. OutKast actually discovered themselves within the crossfire of a hostile East-West battle between factions within the Bad Boy and Death Row Records camps. When Dre and Big Boi accepted their award for New Group of the Year, they have been met with a smattering of boos.
“ATLiens was the punch that broke through the defenses, through the boos. After that they were undeniable.”
“I remember feeling embarrassed,” stated tv screenwriter and producer Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, who on the time was editor-in-chief of The Source. “You got the sense that the predominantly New York crowd was saying, ‘Yo, this is our house. Nobody can come here and rock the boat.’ Some people refused to see Big Boi’s and Dre’s genius.”
Famously, a fiery Dre would have the final phrase.
“But it’s like this,” he concluded the temporary acceptance speech, “the South got something to say!”
“ATLiens was the punch that broke through the defenses, through the boos,” Hinds stated. “After that, they were undeniable.”
OutKast performs on the International Amphitheatre in Chicago in April 1995.Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
On the thirtieth anniversary of its launch, ATLiens stays OutKast’s defining assertion. It was the album that remodeled Big Boi and Andre from regional stars into artists who may now not be dismissed by the hip-hop institution.
“My 17-year-old ears were not ready for ATLiens,” admitted Phonte Coleman, former member of the seminal Durham, North Carolina, hip-hop group Little Brother.
“It’s an at times dark, somber record,” Phonte added. “‘Mainstream’ is a classic. And ‘13th Floor/Growing Old’ is an all-time top-five OutKast song. But back then I didn’t realize how much of an impact ATLiens would have on me. Dre and Big Boi were not trying to make ‘Southernplayalistic Part 2.’ They elevated soul food to fine dining.”
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ATLiens’ defining monitor, nevertheless, is “Elevators (You & Me).” Nothing on the radio in summer season 1996 sounded just like the Earthtone III-produced curve pitch. The monitor featured a sparse, hypnotic beat, rumbling reggae dub bassline, a unusual refrain and lyrics in regards to the alienating trappings of fame.
Big Boi detailed his previous struggles rising up within the ‘hood to achieve a greater perspective on stardom: “Back in the day, when I was younger, hunger, looking to fill me belly with that Rallys, bulls‑‑‑/Pull s‑‑‑ off like it was supposed to be pulled/Full as a tick, I was stoned like them white boys. …”
Andre supplied an all-that-glitters-is-not-gold actuality examine:
“True, I’ve got more fans than the average man but not enough loot to last me to the end of the week/I live by the beat like you live check-to-check/If it don’t move your feet, then, I don’t eat, so we like neck-to-neck. …”
OutKast’s LaFace label boss L.A. Reid, nevertheless, didn’t need to launch “Elevators” because the album’s first single. He thought it was too gradual, too spaced out, too … esoteric. Big Boi and Dre firmly stood their floor.
“Elevators” went gold, peaking at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its extraterrestrial music video featured a newly sober Andre carrying a purple turban, reflecting a pivotal inventive interval when he stop smoking and ingesting.
Even the album packaging for ATLiens was fantastical. Its liner notes appeared like a ’70s P-Funk-inspired comedian e-book, illustrated by DC and Marvel veteran Frank Gomez, set within the galactic metropolis of Atlantis, the place our heroes went at it the evil drive Nosamulli to save lots of “positive music.”
Big Boi (left) and Andre 3000 (proper) from OutKast pose for photographs after their effort on the Marcus Amphitheatre in Milwaukee in 1995. Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
Before the emergence of OutKast, Atlanta was identified for its thriving R&B hit-making scene. L.A. and Babyface’s LaFace Records, Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def and Dallas Austin’s Rowdy Records dominated the charts. But when it got here to homegrown hip-hop expertise, A-Town was outlined extra by booty-shaking bass music and the kiddie rap act Kriss Kross than critical bars.
That modified as soon as OutKast and the Dungeon Family hit the scene, proving Atlanta could possibly be a critical athlete within the rap contest amid the tug-of-war between the East and West coasts.
Big Boi and Dre had been hardcore hip-hop heads ever since their days as hungry youngsters freestyling for 20 minutes straight over the instrumental of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” throughout an audition at Wade’s makeshift studio, christened the Dungeon, within the basement of his mom’s home. But the 2 MCs have been additionally pleased with native ’80s rap heroes equivalent to Raheem the Dream and Kilo Ali.
OutKast’s bold sophomore assertion set the stage for Atlanta’s hip-hop takeover over the following decade and past.
Curtis Daniel, co-founder and proprietor of Midtown Atlanta’s Patchwerk Recording Studios, which has served as a recording hub for the twenty first century’s largest Southern rap titans, put it succinctly: “There is no Patchwerk without ATLiens.”
Of course, with out Patchwerk, ATLiens won’t have develop into what it’s, both.
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Big Boi and Andre had a minuscule funds to file their sophomore album. They turned to Patchwerk, a fledgling studio Daniel and Atlanta Falcons offensive sort out Bob Whitfield ran out of a transformed house.
Daniel had reached out to Hibbler to inquire whether or not OutKast can be curious about recording ATLiens at Patchwerk for his unit’s first official challenge. With many of the studios on the town booked, the duo took an opportunity on the brand new spot.
Things obtained off to a rocky begin. Some of the early ATLiens vocals have been by chance erased.
“We were really learning on the job,” Daniel recalled. “OutKast, Dee Dee and Organized Noize held our hand.”
With the prolonged Dungeon Family in the home, the ATLiens classes typically felt like a household reunion. Organized Noize performed 12-hour marathons with the Akai MPC3000 sampler and drum machine, accompanied by reside percussion, guitar, bass, organ and piano.
Because Patchwerk recorded on tape, there was no punching in. You tousled? Start the entire music over once more. Fortunately, that was no drawback for an in-the-zone OutKast.
“I came into this world high as a bird/From secondhand cocaine powder, I know it sounds absurd,” Andre confided on “Babylon.” Big Boi mourned a mindless world the place “Taking that life is like taking a s‑‑‑/Hit or miss, n‑‑‑‑s are playing God” on the ethereal “E.T. [Extraterrestrial].” This was a great distance from “Player’s Ball.”
“ATLiens was a show-and-prove statement that OutKast is here, that the Dungeon Family is here.”
“People were saying Dre and Big Boi looked and sounded like aliens,” Daniel stated. “They were just different. I knew the music they were recording would move people in Atlanta and throughout the South, because it was dope. But I didn’t know if ATLiens would move people nationally.”
That query can be answered over the following a number of years, as OutKast developed from Southern upstarts into one among hip-hop’s most acclaimed acts.
Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan and Slick Rick dropped verses on 1998’s Aquemini. Cypress Hill’s B-Real appeared on Stankonia (2000). And Jay-Z joined the duo on the genre-blurring Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003), the primary rap album to conquer Grammy Album of the Year.
Andre 3000 (left) and Big Boi (proper) from OutKast carry out throughout ‘Jam 4 Peace’ on the Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee in June 1994. Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
Acclaimed Atlanta rapper JID, who was two months shy of his seventh birthday when ATLiens was launched, praised OutKast throughout a 2023 Rolling Stone dialog with Big Boi and later expanded on their affect in a 2025 interview.
“They were the foundation of my love for hip-hop,” he stated. “They were my introduction into, like, a Southern artist being like lyricist and all the stuff that comes with it. That’s my apex. They taught me a level of just beating the insecurities and just being myself.”
Kendrick Lamar, one other longtime admirer who got here of age nicely after OutKast had entered rap’s pantheon, stated it “means everything” to have obtained a co-sign from Andre 3000.
“It’s a very huge accomplishment for me … just them words,” Lamar recalled. “I can relive them moments all day.”
And when Doechii — born in Florida two years after ATLiens‘ release — was asked by Yahoo in 2023 what her three essential hip-hop albums were, she included OutKast’s 15-track foray into the cosmos.
Flash ahead to Nov. 8, 2025. There aren’t any boos, solely cheers on the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, the place Antwan Patton and Andre Benjamin are available to simply accept their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“Great things start in little rooms,” stated a visibly choked-up Andre as their prolonged Dungeon Family flanked the duo.
Back within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, nobody imagined such an honor for the 2 Southern youngsters from East Point, Georgia. As Big Boi famous in a 2016 Spin interview, he and his free-spirited associate have been targeted totally on placing Atlanta hip-hop on the map.
“The point that we were proving is that we’ll eat your a– up,” he proclaimed. “We some real MCs. ‘Black dog and black wolf’ is what they called us in high school. Just lyrically dominant, and it’s still about that.”
Dee Dee Hibbler was a witness.
“ATLiens was a show-and-prove statement that OutKast is here, that the Dungeon Family is here,” she stated. “Look at everyone who came after us. Look at what Dre and Big Boi built. We are talking decades later, and the South still got something to say.”
Keith “Murph” Murphy is a senior editor at VIBE Magazine and frequent contributor at Billboard, AOL, and CBS Local. The veteran journalist has appeared on CNN, FOX News and A&E Biography and can be the writer of the boys’s life-style e-book “Manifest XO.”
