ATLiens: A Silver Anniversary Retrospective

With an album cover like this, you know you’re in for something special.

By Nick M.W.

This article originally appeared on Medium.com (8/27/2021).

My memories of yesterday.

“It’s like everybody’s talking about sipping champagne and being big time, so we just took it upon ourselves to do something new.” — André 3000

The summer of 1996. West Coast gangsta rap, with its tales of gunplay and pimping hoes, and East Coast Mafioso rap centered on materialism and hedonistic behavior, dominated hip-hop radio waves, MTV, and BET. Make music that sounded like Biggie, Jay-Z, Nas, 2Pac, Dre, or Snoop, capitalize on the craze, and get your bag. The formula worked, and rappers followd this path to short-term success. If you’ve been keeping up with my recent retrospectives on All Eyez On Me, Reasonable Doubt, and It Was Written, then you know I bought into and loved this craze. However, with their sophomore effort, ATLiens, OutKast delivered a hip-hop album that soared beyond ghettos, street dreams, drug hustling and drive-by shootings, and explored existential meanings of life, growing old, intergalactic travel, and Southern mysticism.

OutKast wasn’t alone in creating hip-hop music that was different from the norm of the era. The trio behind Dr. Octagonecologist made an album that stood out like a halfsharkalligatorhalfman among the pack of hip-hop album releases in ’96 for taking listeners on a demented tour of deep space malpractice, but the evil doctor wasn’t saying anything. The music production on this album was unique, a masterwork in its own right, but the lyrics were empty calories. The Fugees and Wu-Tang kicked knowledge and dropped jewels, turning the streets into cinema for your ears, but their music still seemed terrestrial. On their solo efforts, Wu-Tang cornerstones Rae and Ghost delved into the Mafioso lifestyle that was en vogue. These artists committed to their motifs wholeheartedly, with all-time classic results, but they didn’t take you on a journey beyond our atmosphere and back the way OutKast did that summer.

Back in that day, there was a 14-year-old boy who was passionately obsessed with skateboarding and hip-hop music. Like many teenagers across the vast span of modern history, this one loved his summer break. Sure, there was the “no school” thing around which the universe of summertime fun revolved. In that orbit was good weather, which meant a lot of skateboarding. It also meant his parents were at work, and he was left alone for most of the day with his brothers and the neighborhood crew, friends from up and down the block and more remote parts of the area. Everyone gathered around midday to function. Skateboard and chill. Play video games and listen to music. Swim. Laugh. We were fortunate to be so carefree.

My bros and I had a laundry list of weekly chores to handle, which actually didn’t include doing the laundry. Our folks were kind enough to reward our efforts with some scratch. This “allowance” was basically a low-wage job, but when you’re young, though, 5 bucks here or 10 bucks there will get you by, and I pocketed that dough for weeks just to buy a couple new CDs to rock during the summer break. My friends and I would cop different albums and make cassette copies to share with each other, so even though we didn’t have enough money to buy all the new albums that dropped, we still managed to have a lot of them. We started this tradition in ‘96 and rode it out until high school graduation in 2000. Yeah, I’m old.

CD art by André Benjamin. Photo of the CD by Nick M.W.

I bought three albums that summer: Evil Empire (Rage Against the Machine), It Was Written (Nas), and ATLiens. These were my contributions to the album co-op. Give credit where it’s due, Rage and Nas put out some bangers, but OutKast won my heart. The liner notes were a comic book. I’d never seen that before. The artwork on the CD itself was an illustration of a voluptuous naked woman getting doused by a cascade of neon green liquid, courtesy of Andre Benjamin. The production, by Organized Noize, was unlike anything I’d heard from a mainstream hip-hop act, and the ying-yang, poet and player emcees infused their flow seamlessly. The bass knocked and rattled windows, and the lyrics were layered with figurative language and Southern slang. This was an instant classic. It was their Empire Strikes Back to follow up A New Hope, a sequel that outshined a stellar original. “ATLiens” did and still does get the party going (if you’re a crusty dog, like me).

OutKast’s next three albums after ATLiens were more critically acclaimed (Aquemini, Stankonia, and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below), but they don’t get the front-to-back, cover-to-cover listening treatment. Yes, they are great, good, and solid, but ATLiens is excellent. That this duo may forever be known for “Hey Ya!” is criminal. “Wheelz of Steel” runs laps around that track and is one of the best reflections on the salad days before their wisdom lead them to something greater than the pursuit of fame.

Twenty-five years later, I still listen to ATLiens regularly. Once a month, and it all got started with their next-level video for “Elevators”. I caught it on Rap City one afternoon. It was creative and on brand for the duo, looking to define themselves as not of this planet. Indeed, they were extraterrestrial. They were out of place among their peers. I was hooked. I had August 27th circled on the calendar, ten toes down committed to getting it as soon as it dropped. Two weeks’ worth of cleaning the house, pulling weeds, and mowing the lawn were gone in one Sam Goody transaction, but some things are worth the sweat. Who knew picking up dog shit could be such a transformative act?Fast-forward to the spring of 2001, when I got to see OutKast perform at San Jose State University as part of their Stankonia Tour. Big Boi and 3 Stacks put on a two-hour plus show, with a live band backing them. They included half of ATLiens in their set list. It’s as close to heaven as I’ll probably get.

They made a lot of great music, but in my mind they will always be defined by ATLiens. It established OutKast’s unique identity and is a result of bonafide artistic growth between albums. It wasn’t the last time they would move their music forward rather than stagnate in the familiar, but it was the first. And the sonic and lyrical differences between Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and ATLiens is remarkable. The album also set up the anticipation for Aquemini. We wanted to hear where OutKast would take us next. They didn’t let us down.

On ATLiens, the duo took their first swings at producing tracks, like “Elevators” and “Jazzy Belle”; they made significant changes to their lifestyles (Big Boi had a daughter and Andre quit smoking weed); they “went from yelling crickets and crows, bitches and hoes, to queen thangs.” They changed, they changed their music, they brought the South to the forefront of the industry, and they changed the game.

“It’s him and I. Aquemini.” Photo of the liner notes by Nick M.W.

Standout Tracks

The title track is a banger. It’s a transcendent hype song that still makes heads bob and hands wave in the air. “Elevators” is so laid back it slows down time and invokes the chill, and the OutKast bring it with their lyrics. “Ova Da Wudz,” “Babylon,” “Wailin’,” “Mainstream,” “Decatur Pslam,” “Millennium,”…each track so different from the other, yet they flow together, one into the next, without deviating from the album’s vibe or compromising OutKast’s message and vision.

However, I have to choose my three favorite among the best, so here they are:

“Two Dope Boyz (In a Cadillac)”

A robotic alien voice greets us before dropping an atomic bass line that absolutely thumps all the way until this track explodes. Andre and Big Boi attack the beat like they’re in a cypher for survival.

“Wheelz of Steel”

Frenetic scratching is the foundation for the hook on a track about looking back on the days before they had been OutKasted. The emcees go back and forth in both verses, trading bars like Biggie and Hova on “Brooklyn’s Finest,” with a spooky organ loop in the background. This is my favorite OutKast song.

“13th Floor/Growing Old”

Big Rube breaks shit down with his spoken word to open the track that closes the album. Andre and Big Boi meditate on the phases of life, their journey up to this point, and the inevitable changes they’ll undergo along the way on the journey ahead. Wise words from a couple of dudes in their early-20s.