FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Love me some hiphop but would be the first to admit that my knowledge of it is patchy at best - a few big albums like Public Enemy, the first Wu Tang, Straight Outta Compton, then a bunch of individual tunes that caught my ear. I'd formed a picture of Outkast based on a few numbers - Hey Ya obv but I knew that wasn't typical, Ms Jackson which is on this, The Whole World. Wasn't expecting it to go so hard & be so "normal" (hard beats, minimal samples, bit of singing in the choruses). Having said that, I'm only on track 4 & haven't been listening to the words at all. It's a banger so far tho.
MIDSECTION 1
Aw here's Ms Jackson tho, one of the absolute greats in any genre, no exaggeration. Hard, melancholy, genuinely moving, endlessly creative. Already know the words to this so don't have to listen to them. "You can plan a pretty picnic but you can't predict the weather" obv but also "King meets queen, then the puppy love thing / Together dream 'bout that crib with the Goodyear swing / On the oak tree, I hope we feel like this forever
Forever, forever ever? Forever ever? / Forever never seems that long until you're grown / And notice that the day-by-day ruler can't be too wrong / Ms. Jackson, my intentions were good, I wish I could / Become a magician to abracadabra all the sadder / Thoughts of me, thoughts of she, thoughts of he / Asking what happened to the feeling that her and me had / I pray so much about it, need some knee pads / It happened for a reason, one can't be mad / So know this, know that everything's cool / And yes, I will be present on the first day of school and graduation" DAMN
MIDSECTION 2
Yes this goes hard, enough tracks with spare beats to remind you of the old skool but enough fusion type tracks to make it cross over. Drums on BOB same as Hey Ya drums? Also lol I recognised Cypress matey on Xplosion
NEXT DAY
Continues to impress. With amateur muso journo hat on, they're definitely tilting at Sly Stone / George Clinton at times, but not so much that it becomes pastiche. But the audacity of it is, like so many groundbreaking records, the most striking thing. It's incredible hiphop but it's so much more as well.
VERDICT
Like everyone says, it's amazing. Duh.
Only just started this project & only just realised reviews are public. I'm pretty much treating this like a diary so apologies in advance if anyone stumbles across my ramblings & gets incredibly bored. They were never intended for publication.
So I need no introduction to this record. I first heard it in about 1987 after picking up an EC greatest hits & loving it, then deciding in my mildly autistic teenage way that I needed to get all his albums from the start. The only tunes from this that were on the compilation were Alison & Watching the Detectives. Alison isn't typical of the album - it's the only ballad on there - and Detectives sounds like the Attractions, so I was surprised at first by how "safe" the record sounded. I'd heard the range of styles from the first decade of his career & wasn't expecting straightforward west-coast rock & roll pastiche with dashes of country. So it took a while to get on board with it entirely.
Several days after writing the above I realise I'm not going to manage to write an essay every day, so a couple of observations so I can push onward:
- I remember liking some of the "lesser" tunes at the time; Sneaky Feelings & I'm Not Angry were, I'm pretty sure, early favourites. But decades later I have coalesced to the consensus that Alison, Red Shoes & Less Than Zero are clearly the best (also Detectives, but that wasn't on the UK release that I had)
- I read a biography of the man not long after, and a fact I remember from it is that the lyrics to this album contain 2 separate references to premature burial
- It's a statement of intent, but only partially. So much of it is R&R/50s pastiche, & the band are so trad, that it's really only the voice & lyrics that foretell what was to come. So although this is a 5-star record for all kinds of reasons, he didn't really get going until the next year when he clicked with the Attractions
