Friday, January 22, 2010

Classic album Re-visited:Stankonia







As promised my re-visiting of Stankonia by Outkast is here. First let me fill you in on my brain thinking about this, i'm gonna go back and listen to classic albums of my life, in their entirety and than decide if the album still stacks up to being called a classic. A couple of ground rules are that these are gonna be albums, that I loved, absolutely loved the shit out of. I haven't listened to the album in the last 5 years, so it's not going to be a album that I listen to all the time now. Now that that's out of the way here we go!

Right of the bat, i'm super excited for the album, the art on the cd is terrific. It starts off with an intro that explains what Stankonia is, it's the place from which all funky things come! First 3 songs are great, "Gasonline Dreams", "So Fresh, So Clean" and "Mrs. Jackson" all still get the head moving. They don't feel 10 years old, so five tracks in and I'm loving it but I remember all of those songs, now it starts to get the part of the album that I don't remember. Songs like "I'll call before I come" and "We luv deez hoez" which I forgot, and now the I listen to them again, I remember why. Not terrible songs, but there's the song's that are great blow these away. Hearing B-Real from Cypress Hill on a song was weird. Having not heard Cypress Hill in years, the sound of his voice threw me for a loop, definately one of the worst songs on the album. Then we get to the the piece de resistance, "B.O.B." by far one of the best songs I've ever heard, and it only has two chunks of lyrics, at about the 2:14 mark, it starts into a repeating verse for the next two minutes. Many songs on the second half of the album are good but not great, but the interludes are funny. So the album as a whole is still good, to many good songs to not be still considered a classic album. One thing that really stuck out is that Andre 3000 is an amazing rapper, absolutely amazing and because of the album "The Love Below" which is full of love songs and more than rapping, I might have forgot how raw and heavy he was. Dropping N-bombs and talking about shooting people in the head isn't what I think about when 3000's name comes up now. Well there you go, "Stankonia" still does the job. Next week I'm going to check out "Live from the Pharmacy" by Guttermouth!

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