The story of Outkast

Two outsiders in East Point

André Lauren Benjamin was born in Atlanta on the twenty seventh of May 1975, the only child of Sharon Benjamin, a real estate agent, and Lawrence Walker, a collections agent. His parents never married, and his mother raised him in different corners of the city, from East Point to wealthy Buckhead, driving him across town to schools she felt would give him a better chance. As a boy he loved drawing and painting, and his mother expected him to go to art school. In seventh grade he joined a drama club and made his stage debut in Charlotte's Web. André later said he did not grow up dreaming of being a music star. As kids, he and a friend would even kneel and recite what he called the Rapper's Prayer, asking simply to be good rappers.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Antwan André Patton was born on the first of February 1975 in Savannah, Georgia, and spent the first half of his childhood there before moving to Atlanta with his aunt Renee. He came from a big family, with four brothers and six sisters. His grandmother got him hooked on music by sending the kids to the store to buy forty five records, and an uncle played him things nobody else in his world was listening to, above all the English singer Kate Bush. He would sit for hours with her records and later called her his favourite artist. At school he was a strong student, with a grade point average of three point six eight, and he chose to follow his interest in music at Tri-Cities High School, an arts magnet school in East Point.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The two boys met in 1992, when both were sixteen, and became friends at Tri-Cities, where they battled other rappers in the cafeteria. Both were new in the tenth grade and both dressed differently from everyone else. After watching one bad rap video too many, they decided they could do better themselves. They first called themselves 2 Shades Deep, but a local singing group was already called 4 Shades Deep. They briefly tried the Misfits, until they discovered Glenn Danzig's punk band of that name. They settled on Outkast, because of their unusual sense of style. André performed as Black Wolf, a nod to the blues singer Howlin' Wolf, and Antwan as Black Dog. The names would not last. Antwan was soon Big Boi, a joke, since he was the little one, and André became Dré.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Their real school was a basement. The producer Rico Wade had a home studio under his mother's house in East Point, and everyone called it the Dungeon. With Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown, Wade formed the production team Organized Noize. Big Boi remembered an unfinished basement with Georgia red clay dust on the drum machines, broken patio chairs, and seven young rappers sitting on the steps with their notebooks, waiting for a turn on the microphone. They would walk to a deli in a gas station and share one spaghetti special because it came with five meatballs. Ray Murray helped Big Boi, then more of a writer than a rapper, sharpen his delivery. Alongside their schoolmates in Goodie Mob, they became the heart of a crew known as the Dungeon Family.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The break came through Organized Noize. LaFace Records, the Atlanta label run by the producers L.A. Reid and Babyface, hired the team to remix songs by the girl group TLC, and Organized Noize put the two teenagers on the remixes. Their first appearance on record was the remix of TLC's What About Your Friends. The success of Arrested Development's single Tennessee had also shown LaFace there was money in Southern rap. The label offered Outkast a deal, making them its first hip hop act. André later said their parents would not let them sign at seventeen, because they did not believe in rap, so they had to wait. André also dropped out of school months before graduation, against his mother's wishes, and only finished his education later.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The South got something to say

Outkast's first single was nearly a joke. LaFace put the duo on a holiday compilation called A LaFace Family Christmas, and Big Boi admitted they feared it would wreck their careers. Instead they wrote a street song with barely a Christmas tree in sight. It was Player's Ball, with Sleepy Brown singing the hook in a sweet falsetto. The original mix even had sleigh bells, which were removed once the song caught on. Released as a single on the nineteenth of November 1993, it topped the Billboard rap chart for six weeks, spread among students at Atlanta's Freaknik gathering, and went gold. Sean Puffy Combs directed the video, then invited the pair to New York to open for The Notorious B.I.G. They were not yet eighteen when they recorded it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik came out on the twenty sixth of April 1994. LaFace had given them a fifteen thousand dollar advance, and they recorded much of it in the Dungeon on secondhand gear, cutting more than thirty songs. Organized Noize produced every track, using live bass, keyboards, guitar and organ instead of relying on samples, and the Dungeon Family filled in around them, with Goodie Mob joining on Git Up, Git Out, a song urging kids to stop wasting their lives getting high. The two teenagers wanted to show what it meant to be young, Black and from the South. The record reached number twenty on the Billboard album chart and was certified platinum in April 1995. Critics now see it as the album that made Southern hip hop credible.[1] [2] [3]

The first real money went straight to the car lot. Big Boi bought a new Lexus and André a 1990 Cadillac, which he kept backing into things until it was covered in dents. Big Boi later joked that André had taught him how to roll a blunt. André smoked marijuana through the debut sessions, and he later admitted that early success sent him off the rails, with a lot of drugs and drink. One day, he said, he looked at himself in the mirror while high and saw himself deteriorating. He quit cold turkey around 1995. He became a vegetarian, stopped smoking weed, and rarely drank again. That change, and the confidence of their first tour, would reshape the group's next record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 1995 Outkast flew to New York for the Source Awards, held at the Paramount Theater at Madison Square Garden in the middle of the East Coast and West Coast feud. That night Suge Knight of Death Row mocked Puff Daddy from the stage, Snoop Dogg taunted the New York crowd, and fights broke out in the audience. When the Atlanta newcomers won their award, the room booed them. Big Boi got through his thank yous. André, nervous, stepped up and said the South got something to say. The line became a rallying cry. Russell Simmons later admitted he had first dismissed the album as not really hip hop, and regretted it. Years later the Atlanta rapper T.I. said that moment was when people started taking Southern rap seriously.[1] [2] [3] [4]

ATLiens

Platinum sales bought Outkast freedom. LaFace gave them more creative control and more money for the follow up. On a trip to Jamaica with their DJ, David Sheats, known as Mr. DJ, the pair decided to drop their cornrows and stop combing their hair. Dungeon Family member Big Rube noticed a new swagger after their first tour. Life changed off stage too. In 1995 Big Boi's girlfriend gave birth to his first child, a daughter, and André's two year relationship with Keisha Spivey of the R&B group Total ended. André began wearing a white turban while he grew out his dreadlocks, then silk scarves, the start of a wardrobe that would make him one of the most talked about dressers in music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With the Player's Ball money, André bought his own studio gear, including an SP twelve hundred drum machine, an MPC sampler, a mixing desk and turntables with crates of old records. He had never produced a song, but he had watched Organized Noize closely. With Mr. DJ, the duo formed a production team called Earthtone III. They mostly avoided samples, and Big Boi said sampling cheated the listener. They wrote around thirty five songs and kept fourteen. The first song they finished together was Elevators, inspired by a show at Howard University where Puff Daddy was in the audience. It used the ups and downs of an elevator as a picture of fame, and it became their biggest hit yet, reaching number twelve on the Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4]

ATLiens was released on the twenty seventh of August 1996. The title joined ATL, the city's nickname, with aliens, and critics read it as a statement about feeling like outcasts in their own country. The music floated, full of echo and dub bass, with touches of gospel. The pair traded their party characters for spacey, searching personas, and André rapped about his new drug free life. The booklet held a twenty four page comic strip in which the two defended positive music against a villain named Nosamulli, and LaFace ran a Blockbuster contest to win a 1970s Cadillac. The album debuted at number two, sold nearly three hundred and fifty thousand copies in two weeks, and was eventually certified double platinum.[1] [2] [3]

Aquemini and the poet and the player

While promoting ATLiens, André fell for the neo soul singer Erykah Badu. Their son, Seven Sirius Benjamin, was born on the eighteenth of November 1997, the same day Badu released her live album. André's stage clothes grew wilder, with blond wigs, big glasses and marching band uniforms. In a conservative and often homophobic rap world, that drew whispers. André later said people decided he was either gay or on drugs. He answered on the opening track of the next album, Return of the G, telling fans he was still a regular person. L.A. Reid remembered a label executive calling him in a panic from a video shoot because André had arrived in a blond wig, knickers and a Nehru jacket. Reid told André not to stop.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For the third album the duo practically lived in the studio for weeks at a time, mostly at Bosstown, the Atlanta studio owned by the singer Bobby Brown. They brought in a baby grand piano and a stream of session musicians, and engineer Neal Pogue compared the feeling to Motown or Stax. André bought a kalimba at a flea market and played it on the opening track. He also tried singing through pitch correction equipment, but Big Boi warned him it would lose their core audience. The two argued over the running order. Big Boi wanted to open with Y'all Scared, but he missed his flight to the mastering session, and by the time he arrived the others had settled on Return of the G. After a long, heated debate he agreed.[1]

Aquemini came out on the twenty ninth of September 1998. The title blended Big Boi's star sign, Aquarius, with André's, Gemini, and the packaging billed Big Boi as the player and André as the poet. It debuted at number two behind Jay-Z, on the same day as releases by A Tribe Called Quest and Black Star. On Skew It on the Bar-B, with Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan, they complained that their debut had missed a perfect five mic rating in The Source. This time the magazine gave them five mics, the first perfect score for a Southern rap act. The harmonica on Rosa Parks was played by André's stepfather, the Reverend Robert Hodo, and the album closes with Liberation, featuring Erykah Badu.[1] [2] [3]

Outkast had also written a film to go with Aquemini, finishing a script three months before the album came out. They pitched it to MTV, which liked the idea but wanted to buy it and cast Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes instead, believing they had more star power. The pair were heartbroken, but they never let go of the idea, and it would eventually become Idlewild. In 1999 they joined Lauryn Hill as the opening act on the American leg of her Miseducation tour. Rosa Parks earned them a Grammy nomination, and the album, which went double platinum, is now seen as one of the greatest hip hop records ever made. In 2020 Rolling Stone placed it at number forty nine among the greatest albums of all time.[1] [2] [3]

That same song brought them into court. In March 1999 the civil rights hero Rosa Parks, through her attorney Gregory Reed, sued Outkast and LaFace, arguing the song used her name without permission and objecting to its crude language. The lyrics barely mentioned her. Outkast said the song was partly a tribute, and that its chorus, about everyone moving to the back of the bus, was a metaphor for the group pushing the old guard of rap aside. In November 1999 a federal judge in Michigan, Barbara Hackett, dismissed the case on free speech grounds. Parks's side brought in the famous lawyer Johnnie Cochran for the appeal, and in 2003 an appeals court revived part of the claim. The Supreme Court declined to step in, and the fight dragged on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stankonia

Before their fourth album Outkast bought Bobby Brown's old studio near Northside Drive in Atlanta. It was the room where the two had first recorded vocals together, for that early TLC remix. André renamed it Stankonia, joining stank, slang for funky, with Plutonia, the name of a poster of a futuristic city on his bedroom wall. The album was first called Sandbox. Recording began in the spring of 1999 and lasted about a year. Owning the studio meant no clock was running. Big Boi spent most of his time there, while André worked at home with an acoustic guitar, writing lyrics straight onto the walls of his house. One of those guitar jams at home turned into Ms. Jackson.[1] [2] [3]

The sessions were loose. The group and their producers went to Atlanta clubs, picked out performers they liked, and invited them back to jam. One of those new voices was a young rapper from the Dungeon circle called Killer Mike, who made his recording debut on Snappin' and Trappin'. But André was growing tired of rapping, and that worried Big Boi and the producers. His answer was to blend rapping with soul crooning, which shaped the whole album. They stopped listening to hip hop, looked instead to Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Prince and George Clinton, and sped up the tempos. Big Boi said the faster songs reflected people living fast as new drugs like ecstasy spread through the scene, and they became the first rap act to openly credit rave culture.[1] [2] [3]

The lead single, B.O.B., short for Bombs Over Baghdad, was released on the twenty ninth of August 2000. It ran at a breakneck one hundred and fifty five beats per minute, mixing drum and bass rhythms, a screaming guitar solo and a gospel choir from Morris Brown College. Many urban radio stations refused to play it because of the title and what they assumed it was about, and it never reached the Hot 100. Critics disagreed with radio. Pitchfork later named it the best song of the decade. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 the song took on a new life, and some troops used it as a battle cry, but both members said they opposed the war.[1] [2] [3]

Stankonia was released on Halloween 2000 and sold more than five hundred and twenty five thousand copies in its first week, second only to Jay-Z. Around this time Dré became André 3000, partly to avoid being mixed up with Dr. Dre. The second single, Ms. Jackson, was inspired by his breakup with Erykah Badu and addressed to the mother of the mother of his child, apologising for the pain. Badu later said the song hit a sore spot, especially Big Boi's verse, though she found André's honest and inspiring. Her mother loved it, buying a Ms. Jackson licence plate, mug and pen. On the seventeenth of February 2001 the song reached number one on the Hot 100, Outkast's first pop chart topper.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In December 2001, as new fans rushed to catch up, Outkast released a compilation called Big Boi and Dre Present Outkast. The pair insisted it was not a greatest hits album but a refresher course in their history. It included a new song, The Whole World, featuring Killer Mike, which won a Grammy. At the Grammys in February 2002, Stankonia won Best Rap Album and Ms. Jackson won Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. The album was also up for Album of the Year but lost to the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou. The duo had by then launched their own label imprint, Aquemini Records, to release artists such as Killer Mike and Slimm Calhoun.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Speakerboxxx and The Love Below

After that first Grammy win, André moved to Los Angeles to try acting, with little success at first beyond a small role in Hollywood Homicide and an episode of The Shield. He started making a solo record at home on Pro Tools, mostly singing rather than rapping. He did not know how to edit, so he recorded a song called Pink and Blue in a single take. When he told Big Boi, his partner began his own solo project, Speakerboxxx. The label and management felt two separate solo albums were a bad idea, so they were packaged as one Outkast double album. Big Boi finished first and grew so impatient that he considered releasing his half alone. André later said most people never knew the album almost did not happen.[1] [2]

André had written Hey Ya back in 2000. He started recording it at Stankonia in December 2002, strumming an acoustic guitar in the spirit of the Ramones, the Buzzcocks and the Smiths. His biggest spark was the Swedish band the Hives. He flew to New York to see them, arrived late, caught only the last twenty minutes, and said he would not have written Hey Ya without that show. He sang each line over and over, often thirty or forty takes. The ladies answering him in the call and response section were overdubs by an assistant engineer, Rabeka Tuinei. When André played the song to someone close to him, the friend warned him that releasing it would end his career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Speakerboxxx and The Love Below came out on the twenty third of September 2003. The two had been photographed separately for the cover, gave separate interviews and even arrived separately at the MTV Video Music Awards, which fuelled constant talk of a split that both denied. The album debuted at number one with about five hundred and nine thousand copies sold. Hey Ya and Big Boi's The Way You Move, with Sleepy Brown, were released on the same day. Hey Ya spent nine weeks at number one while The Way You Move sat behind it at number two for eight of them, then took over on the fourteenth of February 2004. Outkast became the first duo to replace themselves at the top.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Grammys on the eighth of February 2004 crowned the album. It won Album of the Year, the first pure hip hop record to do so according to the Los Angeles Times, and only the second rap album after Lauryn Hill's. It also won Best Rap Album, and Hey Ya won a third award, though it lost Record of the Year to Coldplay's Clocks. Accepting Best Rap Album, André said thank you, flashed a peace sign and walked off. During the Album of the Year speech he reminded everyone that their first album was Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. He said later that Big Boi's hug on stage lasted about fifteen seconds. André closed the show with Hey Ya in a fringed green outfit, in front of a giant metallic tepee.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The record went on to be certified diamond. Hey Ya became the first song to sell a million downloads on Apple's iTunes store, and its video, with André playing all eight members of a fake band called The Love Below on a British television show, won Video of the Year at the MTV awards. Its run at number one even bridged Casey Kasem's last American Top 40 broadcast and Ryan Seacrest's first. Yet André was pulling away. He would not tour the album and told Blender that in a perfect world it would be the last Outkast record. Three days after the Grammys he began filming Be Cool with John Travolta, and he told Rolling Stone he was taking saxophone and clarinet lessons and dreamed of studying at Juilliard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Idlewild and the long pause

The Rosa Parks case finally ended in this period. In 2004 her lawyer refiled against the record companies, asking for five million dollars. That October a judge appointed Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit, as guardian of her legal affairs, after her family worried that her caretakers and lawyers were pursuing the case for their own gain. Her niece, Rhea McCauley, told the Associated Press that her aunt would never go to such lengths to hurt young artists. André said relatives had approached him after a Detroit concert and hinted that the case was more about the lawyers. It was settled in April 2005, with no admission of wrongdoing and a promise to fund educational programmes about her life. Rosa Parks died six months later.[1] [2] [3]

The film Outkast had dreamed of since Aquemini finally arrived. Idlewild, written and directed by their longtime video director Bryan Barber, was a musical set in a Georgia juke joint in 1935, during Prohibition. André played Percival, a shy pianist who worked in his father's funeral home, and Big Boi played Rooster, a singer and bootlegger. The project was delayed repeatedly from 2005. The soundtrack, Outkast's sixth and final studio album, came out on the twenty second of August 2006 and debuted at number two, and the film followed three days later. Reviews were mixed. The movie made about twelve and a half million dollars worldwide on a ten million dollar budget. In 2007 the duo went on hiatus.[1] [2] [3]

Big Boi kept busy. He ran his own label, Purple Ribbon, where he championed a young singer named Janelle Monáe, and in April 2008 he staged a show called big with the Atlanta Ballet at the Fox Theatre. His first proper solo album was a struggle. His label, Jive, rejected his singles and, he said, even asked him to make his own version of Lil Wayne's Lollipop, which he called the highest form of disrespect. He left Jive in 2009, and L.A. Reid, who had first signed Outkast, brought him to Def Jam. Jive still blocked the songs featuring André. Sir Lucious Left Foot, The Son of Chico Dusty finally came out in July 2010, named partly for his late father, Tony Kearse.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 2011 Big Boi was arrested at the Port of Miami as he returned from a cruise, after a drug dog alerted officers. He was charged with possessing powdered MDMA and Viagra and released on a sixteen thousand dollar bond. In 2013 he tore his kneecap attempting an air kick on stage at a festival and needed surgery. His second album, Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, arrived in December 2012 without André, and Big Boi blamed contractual obligations. André, meanwhile, became hip hop's most sought after guest, reportedly charging at least one hundred thousand dollars a verse, with appearances for Beyoncé, Frank Ocean and many others. When Big Boi added a verse to a remix of Frank Ocean's Pink Matter, André issued a statement saying it was not an Outkast reunion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

André's own life was quieter and harder. He created and voiced the Cartoon Network series Class of 3000, which ran from 2006 to 2008. He spent seven and a half months preparing to play Jimi Hendrix in the film Jimi, All Is by My Side, learning to play guitar left handed, only for the Hendrix estate to refuse the use of the songs. In those years he lost his mother, who died in 2013, and his father, who died in 2014. His stepfather died later, and André said the grief came when he least expected it. In 2019 he revealed that he had been diagnosed with social anxiety, which he said never really goes away. He gave up veganism after around fifteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The reunion and the Dungeon Family

In January 2014 Outkast confirmed they would reunite to mark twenty years since their debut, headlining Coachella in April and then playing more than forty festivals around the world. The first night did not go well. André later admitted he checked out halfway through, with Paul McCartney and Prince in the crowd. The next day Prince called him and told him his problem was that he did not realise how big the group was, and that he had to remind people who they were. André said the shows went better from then on. The tour ended with homecoming concerts in Atlanta in September, featuring guests including Janelle Monáe and Future, and a final show at New Orleans's Voodoo festival on Halloween.[1] [2] [3]

The reunion tour earned mixed reviews, with many writers noting that André looked uncomfortable playing old hits. He was open about it. He told Billboard that songs he wrote at nineteen did not mean the same to him any more, and that without a son to support he was not sure he would have felt the same urgency. L.A. Reid said the tour had been tough for André because he would rather celebrate his present than his past. André also said there were no plans for a new Outkast album, not even one song. But he rejected talk of a feud, comparing it to brothers who were expected to share bunk beds forever, and calling Big Boi his brother and a vital part of his life.[1] [2] [3]

In March 2016 Netflix released The Art of Organized Noize, a documentary about Rico Wade, Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown directed by Quincy Jones the third. That September, at Atlanta's ONE Musicfest, the Dungeon Family played their first ever reunion show, just a few miles from that old dirt floored basement. André was not advertised, but he walked on fifteen minutes in, during Goodie Mob's Black Ice, and Erykah Badu joined for Liberation. That year André also turned up on songs by Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Solange and A Tribe Called Quest, and on Travis Scott's The Ends he recalled childhood fears in Atlanta during the years of the child murders later tied to Wayne Williams.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Big Boi released his third solo album, Boomiverse, in 2017, and built a quieter life with an unusual menagerie, including licensed pit bull breeding, a forty acre ranch and a flock of pet owls. When the Super Bowl came to Atlanta in February 2019, he joined Maroon 5 at halftime and performed The Way You Move. Many artists were avoiding the show over the NFL's treatment of Colin Kaepernick and the players who knelt in protest, and some Atlanta fans told Big Boi they expected more from him. André, meanwhile, released two surprise songs on Mother's Day 2018, including a seventeen minute instrumental called Look Ma No Hands, on which he played bass clarinet, and a song titled Me and My, To Bury Your Parents.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Flutes, farewells and the Hall of Fame

Outkast's catalogue kept earning honours. In 2020 Stankonia was reissued for its twentieth anniversary. In 2021 Drake leaked an unreleased Kanye West song featuring André on his radio show, and André said it was unfortunate to see two artists he loved going back and forth. In June 2022 Big Boi and his wife Sherlita divorced. In 2023 he fulfilled a lifelong fan's dream by inducting Kate Bush into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, praising how she ignored any formula. That September, just after its twentieth birthday, Speakerboxxx and The Love Below was certified thirteen times platinum, passing The Eminem Show as the highest certified rap album ever. Big Boi celebrated by declaring on Instagram that Outkast is everlasting.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

On the seventeenth of November 2023, André released his first solo album, New Blue Sun, seventeen years after Idlewild. It had no rapping at all. Instead it was eighty seven minutes of ambient music built around flutes, made with the percussionist Carlos Niño, whom he met by chance at a Los Angeles health food store. The packaging joked that it contained no bars, and it was first titled Everything Is Too Loud. Its opening track, with a title saying he really wanted to make a rap album but the wind blew him this way, ran twelve minutes and twenty seconds and became the longest song ever to enter the Hot 100. The album was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammys.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the thirteenth of April 2024, Rico Wade, the man whose mother's basement gave the Dungeon Family its name, died at the age of fifty two. His family gave no details at first, and later reports said he died of heart failure. Tributes poured in. Atlanta's mayor, Andre Dickens, echoed André's old line, saying the South would always have something to say. Killer Mike wrote that he did not know where he would be without them. Wade was also the older cousin of the rapper Future, who once said everything he knew about music came from Rico. Organized Noize carried on as a duo of Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown.[1] [2] [3]

André kept releasing small instrumental projects, including the Moving Day EP in November 2024 and 7 Piano Sketches in May 2025. In late 2024 he told Rolling Stone that Outkast were further from a new album than they had ever been, and that some things are not meant to last forever. On the twenty seventh of April 2025, Outkast were announced as Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees in their first year on the ballot, and on the eighth of November 2025 they were inducted. André spoke emotionally, crediting Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan and Goodie Mob. Tyler, the Creator, Killer Mike, JID, Doja Cat and Janelle Monáe performed their songs. Stankonia got a twenty fifth anniversary reissue on Halloween 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

As of 2026 Outkast have released no new music since Idlewild, yet their reach keeps growing. They have certified sales of twenty million records and six Grammy Awards, and in 2015 Rolling Stone ranked them seventh among the greatest duos of all time. More than any act, they proved that Atlanta, and the South, could lead hip hop rather than follow it, opening the door for everyone from Ludacris and T.I. to the trap stars who followed. Their fingerprints are on Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe and Tyler, the Creator. André once said the Dungeon was the dirt everything grew from. Big Boi still calls Outkast everlasting, and André calls their chemistry something that belonged to a certain time in both their lives.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Outkast

André 3000 and Big Boi. They met as sixteen year olds in 1992 and were opposites almost from the start, the sober vegan dandy and the pit bull breeding player, as Rolling Stone put it. Big Boi could write fast and efficiently, while André agonised over every verse. By 2003 they were making separate halves of one album. Yet they have never publicly feuded. André calls Big Boi his brother, and Big Boi insists Outkast is everlasting, even though André says a new album is further away than ever.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

André 3000 and Erykah Badu. André and the neo soul singer dated for about three years in the late nineties, and their son Seven was born in November 1997. After they split in 1998, André poured the aftermath into Ms. Jackson, addressed to Badu's mother. Badu sang on Liberation and Humble Mumble, stayed a friend, and brought André out as a surprise guest at her birthday concert in 2016. Her mother, meanwhile, embraced her fame as the real Ms. Jackson.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Outkast and Rico Wade. Rico Wade ran the Dungeon, the basement studio where Outkast learned their craft, and with Organized Noize he produced their entire debut album. Big Boi called the production team their big brothers, the ones who gave them their first shot. Wade was remembered as the cornerstone of the Dungeon Family when he died in April 2024 at fifty two. André credited the Dungeon as the ground everything he later made grew from.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Big Boi and Sleepy Brown. Sleepy Brown, one third of Organized Noize and the son of the singer from the funk band Brick, sang the hook on Outkast's very first single, Player's Ball. He became Big Boi's favourite collaborator outside the group, singing on The Way You Move, So Fresh, So Clean and many more. Big Boi signed him to Purple Ribbon, and in 2021 the two finally released a joint album, The Big Sleepover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Outkast and L.A. Reid. L.A. Reid co-founded LaFace Records and signed Outkast in 1992, when both were seventeen. He encouraged André's wild wardrobe from the start, telling him not to stop. Years later, after Big Boi left Jive Records, Reid signed him to Def Jam after hearing a single track, and later the group was reunited with Reid at Epic Records. Reid said André never made music for money.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Outkast and Rosa Parks. The civil rights pioneer sued Outkast and LaFace in 1999 over their song named after her, objecting to the use of her name and the crude language. The case went through dismissal, appeal and the Supreme Court before a court appointed guardian stepped in amid family fears that others were using her. It was settled in April 2005, with educational programmes about her life, six months before she died.[1] [2] [3]

Big Boi and Jive Records. After Idlewild, Jive controlled Outkast's contract and clashed with Big Boi over his solo debut, rejecting his singles and, by his account, asking him to copy Lil Wayne's Lollipop. He called it the highest form of disrespect and left in 2009. Jive then blocked his songs featuring André from appearing on his Def Jam album, and those tracks leaked online instead.[1] [2]

Big Boi and Janelle Monáe. Big Boi heard Janelle Monáe after she was fired from an Office Depot job and wrote a song about it. He put her on his Purple Ribbon compilation and on Idlewild, told Sean Combs about her, and helped her land at Bad Boy Records. She later performed at Outkast's homecoming shows and at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.[1] [2] [3]

Outkast and Killer Mike. Killer Mike met Big Boi while briefly studying at Morehouse College and made his recording debut on Stankonia. He shared a Grammy with Outkast for The Whole World and appeared on Speakerboxxx. He left Big Boi's label in 2008 after release delays, later co-founded Run the Jewels, and performed at Outkast's Hall of Fame induction in 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Big Boi and Kate Bush. Big Boi's uncle introduced him to Kate Bush as a child, and she became his favourite artist. He tried and failed to get her on his first solo album, announced in 2021 that they had recorded a song together, and in 2023 inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, saying she ignored anything that looked like a formula.[1] [2] [3] [4]

André 3000 and Prince. André named Prince as the performer who impressed him most, and critics called The Love Below the great lost Prince album. After Outkast's shaky first reunion show at Coachella in 2014, Prince phoned André and told him he did not realise how big the group was. André said the shows improved from that point on.[1] [2] [3]

Outkast and Bryan Barber. The director Bryan Barber made a run of Outkast videos, including Hey Ya, The Way You Move and Roses. His idea to restage the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in reverse, with an American band conquering British television, became the Hey Ya video. He went on to write and direct their film Idlewild.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Outkast

• Before settling on Outkast, the duo briefly called themselves the Misfits, until they discovered Glenn Danzig's punk band of the same name. Pitchfork reports that the duo's early names included 2 Shades Deep and the Misfits. They dropped the Misfits after discovering Danzig's band, and 2 Shades Deep clashed with a local group called 4 Shades Deep.[1] [2]
• André's first stage name, Black Wolf, was inspired by the blues singer Howlin' Wolf. In their earliest days André performed as Black Wolf and Antwan Patton as Black Dog. André's name paid tribute to the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.[1] [2]
• Outkast's first single, Player's Ball, was written for a Christmas compilation and originally had sleigh bells. LaFace first released Player's Ball on A LaFace Family Christmas. The sleigh bells were removed once the song started getting airplay, and it went on to top the rap chart for six weeks.[1] [2] [3]
• Big Boi and André were not allowed to sign their first record deal at seventeen because their parents did not believe in rap. André told Rolling Stone in 2004 that their parents refused to let them sign L.A. Reid's contract at seventeen, so they had to wait a year.[1] [2]
• Outkast's first record advance from LaFace was fifteen thousand dollars. LaFace paid the duo a fifteen thousand dollar advance in 1993, and they recorded much of their debut in the Dungeon on secondhand equipment.[1] [2]
• At their audition for Rico Wade, the duo freestyled for eight minutes over A Tribe Called Quest's Scenario. Pitchfork's retrospective says the pair proved themselves to Rico Wade with an eight minute freestyle over the instrumental of Scenario.[1]
• In high school Big Boi had a grade point average of three point six eight. Pitchfork notes that Big Boi was a strong student who kept a three point six eight average and a secret love of Kate Bush.[1]
• The Stankonia studio was the same room where André and Big Boi had first recorded vocals together. The studio, formerly owned by Bobby Brown, was where they recorded their verses for a TLC remix in 1992. They later bought it and renamed it Stankonia.[1] [2]
• The word Stankonia came from a poster of a futuristic city called Plutonia on André's bedroom wall. André combined stank, slang for funky, with Plutonia. He described Stankonia as an imagined place where you could be free to express anything.[1]
• The harmonica on Rosa Parks was played by André's stepfather, the Reverend Robert Hodo. Hodo also appears in the video during the harmonica breakdown, which was filmed with the Morris Brown College marching band outside the Royal Peacock club in Atlanta.[1] [2]
• Aquemini was the first Southern rap album to receive a perfect five mic rating from The Source. On the album the duo had complained that their debut had missed a perfect score. The magazine gave Aquemini five mics, which Pitchfork called a coronation for the South.[1] [2]
• MTV liked Outkast's first film script but wanted to recast it with Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes. The duo wrote a film to accompany Aquemini. MTV wanted to buy it and use bigger stars, leaving the pair heartbroken, and the idea later grew into Idlewild.[1]
• The Aquemini interlude Nathaniel is a real collect call from a friend of the group who was in a Georgia prison. The seventy second a cappella rap was recorded over the phone and introduces the eight minute song Liberation.[1] [2]
• The ATLiens booklet contained a twenty four page comic strip starring the duo against a villain called Nosamulli. The strip continued in the artwork of every ATLiens single except Elevators. LaFace also ran a Blockbuster contest to win a 1970s Cadillac.[1]
• André wrote many of Stankonia's lyrics directly on the walls of his house. He said he had planned to paint the house anyway. One stray lyric on his wall grew into the song Gasoline Dreams.[1]
• B.O.B. runs at a frantic one hundred and fifty five beats per minute. The song mixes drum and bass rhythms with a gospel choir from Morris Brown College. A remix by Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine was sent to rock radio.[1] [2]
• Erykah Badu's mother bought herself a Ms. Jackson licence plate. Badu said her mother loved the song so much she also had a Ms. Jackson mug, pen and headband.[1] [2]
• André said he would not have written Hey Ya without seeing a Hives concert. He flew to New York to see the Swedish band, arrived late and caught only the last twenty minutes, but the show inspired the song.[1] [2]
• The female voices answering André in Hey Ya belong to an assistant engineer, Rabeka Tuinei. André overdubbed his own voice for the fellas, and Tuinei, an assistant to the audio engineer, recorded the ladies' reply.[1]
• André name checked Beyoncé and Lucy Liu in Hey Ya because a Destiny's Child video was on his television. The Independent Women video from Charlie's Angels was playing as he wrote, so he used the two women as shorthand for independent women.[1]
• All the dancing in the Hey Ya video was improvised, and André performed the song twenty three times during filming. Releasing Hey Ya as a single was a last minute decision, so there was no time for choreography. By the last character he was so tired he sat on a stool.[1]
• Hey Ya was the first song ever to sell a million downloads on the iTunes store. The song also spent seventeen straight weeks at the top of Billboard's digital tracks chart.[1] [2]
• Hey Ya was number one on Casey Kasem's final American Top 40 and Ryan Seacrest's first. Its nine week run at the top of the Hot 100 bridged the two hosts' eras of the famous countdown show.[1] [2]
• Someone close to André warned him that releasing Hey Ya would end his career. André told GQ in 2023 that the friend's reaction did not stop him, because he simply liked the song.[1]
• Barbara and Jenna Bush quoted the Polaroid line from Hey Ya in a speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. The president's daughters joked that their parents would shake it like a Polaroid picture if they begged, a moment Stereogum called deeply embarrassing.[1]
• André recorded Pink and Blue in one take because he did not yet know how to edit in Pro Tools. He began The Love Below at his Los Angeles home and was still learning the software during the early sessions.[1]
• An estimated one hundred and twenty songs were recorded for Speakerboxxx and The Love Below. One outtake, Millionaire, went instead to Kelis, who released it as a single from her album Tasty.[1]
• The Way You Move was the nine hundredth number one in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. It replaced Hey Ya at the top in February 2004, making Outkast the first duo to replace themselves at number one.[1] [2]
• When he won Best Rap Album in 2004, André said thank you, flashed a peace sign and left. The Recording Academy later called it perhaps the shortest acceptance speech in Grammy history.[1]
• As a teenager André was supposed to go to the Savannah College of Art and Design. André told NPR his mother expected him to go to art school before he discovered rap.[1] [2]
• Big Boi starts every album on Martin Luther King Day as a good luck charm. He began recording his first solo album, Sir Lucious Left Foot, on Martin Luther King Day in 2007.[1]
• The Chico Dusty in Big Boi's album title honours his late father, Tony Kearse. Kearse earned the nickname while serving as a fighter pilot. Big Boi said his Sir Lucious Left Foot persona represented his grown man side.[1]
• Big Boi owns pet owls, and the same breed of eagle owl appears in the Ms. Jackson video. His owls include Hootie Hoo and Hoodini. When he noticed the Ms. Jackson owl, he took it as a sign.[1] [2]
• In 2008 Big Boi staged a full production with the Atlanta Ballet called big. It was billed as the first major collaboration between a hip hop star and a ballet company and ran for six shows at Atlanta's Fox Theatre.[1] [2]
• André's New Blue Sun was originally titled Everything Is Too Loud. He renamed it because he felt the original title gave off negative energy.[1]
• André's twelve minute New Blue Sun track is the longest song ever to enter the Billboard Hot 100. At twelve minutes and twenty seconds, it beat the record held by Tool's Fear Inoculum when it debuted at number ninety.[1] [2]
• Before playing Jimi Hendrix, André spent seven and a half months preparing, including learning to play guitar left handed. Director John Ridley said few actors would give that much time to one role. The Hendrix estate still refused permission to use the songs.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.