“Slum Beautiful”-OutKast

Jams

This song, the 22nd on the Atlanta duo’s legendary 24 track Stankonia, is a good portrait of the duo in just 4 minutes and eight seconds.

When the beat first comes on, it’s funky. So funky, in fact, that you may find yourself wondering how anyone is about to rap over it. And then you remember that Andre 3000 and Big Boi are not just anyone.

Dre’s verse, like many of his verses, is weird, but in a fun way. Part rapping, part singing, Andre shows why he is one of rap’s great personalities with this one. He also has a little spoken word bit at the end of the song that discusses “making love to every molecule of,” the song’s titular Slum Beautiful woman. It’s all very Andre Benjamin.

Big Boi raps a little more traditionally, at least relative to his fellow ATLien, during his verse, the song’s second. His clever navigation of the snare-heavy beat even includes a fun shout out to Billy Blanks, the creator of the Tae Bo exercise trend. He also uses the phrase “so fresh, so clean,” which was also the title of the fourth track on the album. It’s a nice touch from Sir Lucious Left Foot.

Oh, and Cee-Lo is featured on this song! Neat, right?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.