I remember watching Outkast on a since canceled HBO show called Reverb. Filmed during a 1999 tour, it was about a year before the release of their critically acclaimed album Stankonia. During one segment, they put on a concert and were surprised to be performing in front of a predominantly white audience. "I didn't know that many white cats were into this" was roughly how I remember Big Boi reacting to it during the interview portion. It was during a time where a considerable shift was happening in hip hop where the music was becoming less and less a part of black culture alone and more apart of overall pop culture. Of course this had been going on for a long time to some scale, but around this time it was becoming more and more apparent. Hip hop was now a highly profitable business, having gained nationwide acceptance from mainstream audiences. Entire crews were being signed left and right and began dominating music charts until it no longer was uncommon for many, if not most, of Billboard's top ten bestsellers to be hip hop.
It didn't happen overnight exactly, but based on Big Boi's reaction you might've thought that it did. In a later interview, he talked about the upcoming release of Outkast's NOT-A-GREATEST-HITS-ALBUM greatest hits album Big Boi & Dre Present..., where he explained (on top of reiterating that it wasn't a greatest hits album) that it was for people who may not know what Outkast is about. If pressed, he might've further explained that it was for fans who came on board after the release of Stankonia. After all, "B.O.B", 'Ms. Jackson", and "So Fresh, So Clean" were pretty huge hits, and the album even earned them a Grammy nomination, so more people were paying attention to them than ever. But listening to him, and remembering that episode of Reverb, you could pretty much tell that by "people who may not know what Outkast is about" he probably meant white people.
During the recording of Stankonia, Big Boi and Andre reportedly weren't really listening to rap much, as the genre "was getting real comfortable". But I imagine that some dilemmas arose. I vaguely remember reading about the disagreements between the two ("Niggas don't like when you change your voice like that") and how that led to the solo albums three years later and the long period of inactivity as a duo since (minus the Idlewild movie soundtrack), but I can't help but wonder how it came to that.
My assumption comes down to fame; the typical tortured rock star thing (although maybe not as cut-and-dried). The realization of how big they were becoming. The awards and nominations and the attention that followed and the pressure that came with knowing that more people than they originally thought were paying attention. From that one reaction on Reverb, I gather that Big Boi was probably the most conflicted (or at least the most obviously conflicted, since Andre doesn't seem to be into interviews as much). He wanted to keep the music innovative and fresh but still appeal to his original fanbase: whom he might assume was predominately black.
Don't worry, I'm not going to get into a discussion about selling out, as I don't think it applies here and because I feel that it's a shallow area of discussion to begin with. I'm more interested in analyzing how some black artists deal with fame and why.
Big Boi's mindset was probably along the lines of hip hop trio The Perceptionists. During an interview with URB Magazine in 2005, the group commented on their mostly white audiences at shows:
"Now everyone is welcome to any show we do, and we want people of all colors to be there, but it's not fair that promoters are setting it up so only white kids come to the show....Hip hop was started in the ghetto...it wasn't shows with 600 white kids in college. The passion of being broke and trying to survive in the city - that's what hip hop is. So if all the fans of that type of music are people who can't relate to the struggle, it becomes fraudulent."
The dilemma of a black artist with a predominately white fanbase isn't often spoken about aloud by the artists themselves, and with good reason: it alienates a huge chunk of their fanbase based on skin color and more or less amounts to career suicide. Of course, that's assuming that all of them feel that way, which I'm sure is not the case. But still, it's not very uncommon for black artists to be thrown for a loop when the idea of who they think they are appealing to is different from who they actually are appealing to. The 2007 biopic Talk To Me, starring Don Cheadle, explored this exact dilemma: where a popular inner-city DJ begins to get national recognition only to leave it all behind and return to his roots in local radio. A few years ago, comedian Dave Chappelle famously broke a $50 million contract with Comedy Central, retreated to Africa, had his sanity questioned, and later returned to pick up his career in small comedy clubs where he started. Around the same time, cartoonist Aaron McGruder, who's famed Boondock's had exploded onto comic strips in newspapers across the country, had his creation picked up for a cartoon series, which ran with critical praise for a short time before he suddenly called it quits (PopMatters ran an excellent article regarding Chappelle and McGruder's decisions).
Of course, some black artists get over it and enjoy the ride. Last year, Public Enemy performed their militant breakthrough album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in it's entirety in front of a predominately white audience at the Pitchfork Music Festival (one picture I found online taken within fifty feet of the stage had a surreal frozen image of white fists pumping in the air). Individually, Flava Flav has resurrected his career by exploiting his caricature, which was enough to earn him a couple of television shows and a roast on Comedy Central. But others don't adapt so easily. Jason Tanz wrote in his 2006 book Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip Hop In White America about being in the predominately white crowd at a Digable Planets concert in the 90's, where the front woman ad-libbed an anti-establishment lyric from one of their songs, saying "93 million miles above you devils" (referring to the largely white audience who paid to see them) rather than the original lyric of "these devils". I suppose the audience matters to some because it subconsciously changes the way they think about how the artist views or approaches their art. As Dave Chappelle put it: "The bottom line was: white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that's familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize?"
I can't help but listen to Stankonia and feel this dilemma playing a role in the sound of the music, with Big Boi trying to keep it true to their origins while Andre longs to push the envelope even further, and trying to find that balance between being innovative enough to satisfy themselves artistically (and thus appealing to a so-called "backpacker rap" crowd) while still, for lack of a better term, keepin' it real. Basically, Outkast had changed with that album. And though this could be for any number of reasons, creative or otherwise, I can't help but feel that that one Reverb interview, that one tour and Big Boi's reaction, played some role in the recording of Stankonia and all of what happened with the duo afterward, the years of relative inactivity and series of broken new album promises included. Maybe we'll never know exactly why, but at this point all we know for sure is that they haven't been the same since, which has been quite a loss to the music world as a whole. Here's hoping that 2009 is (as 2008 was supposed to be) the year they settle this dilemma.
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