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Sometime in the spring of 2008, I was sitting under the bleachers of a high school track-and-field stadium in South St. Paul, Minnesota. There were still a few hours before I was scheduled to run the 3,200 meters, but my friend Dante was talking my ear off about Outkast. In particular, he was mounting a defense for Idlewild, and in particular “Chronomentrophobia,” the André-helmed song that was named for “the fear of clocks… the fear of time.” I wasn’t really in the mood to talk about Idlewild, because what do you say when heroes eventually die? Eventually Dante grew fed up with my disinterest and stood up to leave. “You don’t understand, bro,” he said, shaking his head and smirking. “You never felt like time had passed you by?”
That was tenth grade, the same age Andre and Big Boi met at a mall in Buckhead, Atlanta. It was also post-Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the 2003 double album that vaulted Outkast to previously unthinkable commercial heights and led them to win the Album of the Year Grammy, which no rap act has done since, and which only Lauryn Hill had done previously.
But after Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the duo’s split was all but official. The drawn-out divorce can be pieced together through the mostly phoned-in takes for their only feature film, also titled Idlewild, which was directed by the music video auteur Bryan Barber. In the movie, André and Big Boi’s characters were childhood friends who grew apart. As André’s Percival prepares to commit suicide, Big Boi’s Rooster interrupts the process and saves his life. On Idlewild’s accompanying soundtrack, which doubles as the last Outkast album we’re likely to hear in our lifetimes, that drift not only continues unfettered, but is weighed down by an unshakable sense that each is merely going through the motions, particularly as writers. But given their near-unparalleled track record, it still didn’t add up. Now ten years since Idlewild’s release, it’s worth wondering: In what seems to have been their final act as Outkast, why were André and Big Boi so forgettable?
In an attempt to understand why, let’s take it back to the beginning. From the ’95 Source Awards through the beginning of the new millennium, Outkast was arguably the greatest act in hip-hop, and maybe in the genre’s history. Their 1994 debut, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, was a slow-burning ode to a Georgia both real and imagined. Two years later, ATLiens burrowed into André and Antwan’s psyches in unprecedented, unnerving ways. In 1998, their masterwork, Aquemini, stared down mortality, taunting and daring it like few others ever have. As the new century began, Stankonia reveled in a sort of creative ADD that would be disastrous in other hands, but instead skipped from Turner Field to the Cheesecake Factory, to bedrooms and wakes and back again, and sported two of the most iconic singles in the rap canon.
And yet on Idlewild, little of what made Outkast so vital is apparent. Take “N2U,” a Big Boi cut with an assist from Goodie Mob’s Khujo and production from Organized Noize. (If that description doesn’t excite you, it’s because you’re part of the minority who remember “N2U” all too vividly.) The song’s crude. Not in the sense that it’s sexist or problematic—remember “Jazzy Belle”?—but in the sense that its characters are poorly drawn, two-dimensional, and all too convenient. “Call the Law” is needlessly devoted to rattling off boring plot points, while “Greatest Show on Earth” finds André and Macy Gray running in sometimes interesting, always tedious circles.
On each of those songs—and indeed, on most of Idlewild—Big Boi and André are barely brushing up against the sorts of ideas they used to deconstruct, then build back up into complex, irresistible records. In fact, the soundtrack is so scattered, so disengaged that it sometimes feels futile to scrutinize it too closely. It’s the sound of two brilliant artists punching the clock, rarely even trying to break new ground. Maybe they’d explored both themselves and one another so thoroughly had finally felt the gravitational pull start to dissipate.
Of course, the two are so talented and well-suited as collaborators that they can’t help but hit now and then. “Mighty O” might not be world-beating, but it hits a groove that you can’t really shake. And “Hollywood Divorce”—aided by that excellent Wayne verse and a very good one from Snoop—has the kind of maybe-it’s-for-the-best gloom that lingers in the front of your mind.
Maybe no fictional world could hold their interests after they’d unlocked so many trap doors in the real one. The painful, acute empathy from “Da Art of Storytellin’” or the immutable joy of “West Savannah” make their Depression-era period piece, however cleverly conceived, feel pale by comparison.
The most puzzling aspect of all this, at least in hindsight, is that it’s not as if André or Big Boi saw their skills atrophy. The former has spent the decade since Idlewild popping up sporadically with guest verses that often overshadow the headliner, from from the “Walk It Out” remix to T.I.’s “Sorry.” He’s also expanded his acting resume, which peaked in 2013 with the starring role in the Jimi Hendrix biopic, Jimi: All Is By My Side. Anticipation for a long-rumored solo album is set permanently to a fever pitch, but despite some public hemming and hawing, André’s given few indications that he has any plans to release one.
For his part, Big Boi has had a full post-Outkast musical career. His solo debut, which finally came out in 2010 after years of dodging label red tape, was widely celebrated; Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dustyis a timeless record, folding in funk and gloss and Gucci Mane and further establishing Antwan as one of the genre’s sharpest voices. He’s more recently teamed up with Phantogram as Big Grams, an act that’s sure to have a long half life at festivals and in dorm rooms across the world.
Perhaps most revealingly, in their rare moments together as Outkast in the last decade, André and Big Boi have been phenomenal. “Royal Flush,” a song that also features Raekwon and was left off Sir Luscious Left Foot because of the aforementioned legal hang-ups, is not only better than anything on Idlewild, but could rank among Outkast's best work. Big Boi is swift and changeable, while André walks the listener through trade school applications and grim moments with discounted video game consoles. (He also raps, “That’s when I broke into my Big Rube impression,” which is a succinct description of the wizened veteran stance he’s taken so effectively in recent years.)
So the only meaningful conclusion I can draw about Idlewild is that it was an aberration. It wasn’t just the clock running out on brilliant creatives, or a friendship strained by business interests and romantic entanglements. (Well, as André might say: it was that, too.) It was a blip in time, one point on the continuum where André and Big Boi couldn’t get on the same page, whether they wanted to or not. It just so happened that that moment was the height of their fame, when they could have done anything they wanted—when their most insane ideas would have been greenlit, when their wildest experiments could have gone triple-platinum. But none of that happened. Now, it seems, the drift has continued on, with one summer of Coachella money the only fuel for a brief reunion. Nothing lasts forever.