OutKast / YMMV - TV Tropes

Audience-Alienating Premise: Big Grams, Antwan's collaboration group with indietronica band Phantogram, wasn't able to reach anything further than a niche audience. The combination of Southern Rap and shoegazey glitch-pop was too odd to fit on either the urban or alternative formats. The ones that did listen to it, generally liked it, however.
Award Snub: Why on Earth wasn't "PJ & Rooster" (from Idlewild) nominated for Best Original Song?!
Awesome Music:
- Aquemini was given the coveted 5 Mics from The Source's review, Stankonia was regarded as the best album of 2000, and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2004.
- One acronym: "B.O.B."
- André 3000's single "Hey Ya!" got an insane amount of critical acclaim, frequently ranking amongst greatest songs of all time lists.
- A fast-paced remix of "I Like the Way You Move" appeared in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005. To say it's catchier than the original is an understatement.
Broken Base: After Stankonia was released. Some insist Aquemini was their last good album. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below took it to the next level, especially The Love Below. And there are also arguments about who the better member is: André 3000 or Big Boi.
Epic Riff: The trumpet in "Spottieottiedopaliscious". So epic that Beyonce herself sampled it in "All Night".
Fandom Rivalry: The band are friends and rivals with Goodie Mob, and both have collaborated on each others' work often. There's less friendly rivalry with other Hip-Hop duos, namely; Mobb Deep, Black Star, UGK and 8Ball & MJG.
Faux Symbolism: You'd think a song which heavily features the phrase "bombs over Baghdad" in its chorus to be some kind of commentary on the enforcement of the no-fly zones over Iraq, right? Nope; André has said in an interview it was just a phrase that happened to stick to his mind from a newscast.
Harsher in Hindsight: "B.O.B", a song released in 2000, stands for "Bombs Over Baghdad".
Hype Backlash: "Hey Ya!" got so much airplay when it was a new song in 2003, and has been so continually and profusely lauded since then, that it can also provoke this reaction in people just tired of hearing it.
Memetic Mutation:
- The whole bridge towards the end of "Hey Ya!"
  What's cooler than being cool?
  Ice cold!
  I can't hear ya! I say, what's cooler than being cool?
  ICE COLD!
  Alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright okay now ladies! (Yeah?)
  Lend me some sugar! I am your neighbor!
  Shake it like a Polaroid picture!
- The mishearing of "I'm sorry Ms. Jackson, I am for real" as "I'm sorry Ms. Jackson, I am four eels"◊.
- "Forever...forever ever? FOREVER ever?"
Misattributed Song: The rock remix of "B.O.B." is not by Rage Against the Machine but by lead vocalist Zack de la Rocha.
One-Scene Wonder
- This is André 3000's raison d'etre of recent years. He hasn't released any solo tracks and generally appears on around 3-5 tracks a year, and every appearance has been widely acclaimed. These appearances include being on tracks by T.I. ("Sorry"), B.o.B. ("Play the Guitar"), Young Jeezy ("I Do") and Drake ("The Real Her"). His appearance on Lil Wayne's Tha Carter IV track "Interlude" with TechN9ne (another frequent One-Scene Wonder) was widely praised as a highlight in both rappers' careers and as a key moment on an otherwise-boring album. Big Boi is this as well sometimes, but not to the same acclaim as André (partly because Big Boi has dropped 2 solo albums, for one thing).
- Kevin McDonald and Kat Williams' cameos in the video for "Roses" as the Dean Bitterman and a guy who steals the girl of André's affections, respectively, are both utterly hilarious.
Pop-Culture Isolation: A huge majority of people thought OutKast were new artists when Stankonia came out, despite being very popular in the urban community. A promo compilation called "If U Didn't Already Know, U Know Now" was released to lampshade this trope, and the retail compilation "Big Boi and Dre Present Outkast" was released the following year for the same reason.
Retroactive Recognition: As part of Goodie Mob, Cee Lo Green guests on many of their songs. This was before he became known as part of Gnarls Barkley or for his own solo work. Janelle Monáe also appeared on a few songs on Idlewild (and prominently featured in the music video for "Morris Brown") several years before they released their debut album^note.
Sampled Up: The Stankonia skit Cruisin in the ATL is the sampled chorus of a locally released song by Southside Soul from 1999. This was not widely known outside of Atlanta until YouTube, and in fact doesn't even have a Discogs page.
Signature Song: "Hey Ya!" is easily their most famous song with "The Way You Move" a close second, though "Ms. Jackson" or "B.O.B." would better represent their overall style.
Suspiciously Similar Song: "Speedballin'" is this of "B.O.B."
Tear Jerker:
- "Toilet Tisha".
- And, of course, "Ms. Jackson". The first verse definitely hits the hardest.
- "Hey Ya!" can come across as this, mainly due to Lyrical Dissonance and nostalgia.
Values Dissonance: Some of the lyrics on "Jazzy Belle" were changed due to homophobia.
Vindicated by History: "B.O.B" was not a hit when it came out, not charting at all on the Hot 100 and missing the Top 40 on the R&B chart. Some urban-formatted radio stations decided not to play it because they perceived it to be an anti-war song, while others skipped it because its mixture of multiple genres didn't gel well with the rest of their playlist. By the end of the 2000s, several publications hailed it as the best song released in the entire decade and it's now considered to be one of OutKast's greatest achievements.
- When the duo won Best New Rap Group at the 1995 Source Awards, they were met with disdain and boos from the crowd, and even the announcement of the win itself came off as reluctant.^note The crowd was deeply invested in the rivalry between the dominant east coast and the up-and-coming west coast, with southern hip-hop being seen as a nonstarter and the red-headed stepchild of the rap community; André famously declared while accepting the award that "the South got something to say." Not only would OutKast go on to become one of the most successful groups of all time (even more so than many of the acts booing them), southern hip-hop itself became so popular and acclaimed that it overtook the coasts as being the defining influence of the genre.

YMMV / OutKast

Edit Locked