Billie Joe Armstrong on how Outkast managed to “kick rock’s ass”
Any rock fan entering the 2000s was probably wondering where all the fun went. The entire point of rock and roll in its earliest days was to make music to piss off everyone’s parents and having fun, but ever since people jumped on the grunge hype-train, there was a depressive coating many of the newer acts, whether that was the tortured sounds of nu-metal or the lacklustre post-grunge acts like Creed and Puddle of Mudd. So when Green Day finally came back strong, it was like a night and day difference for people who only followed the charts.
Then again, there was always good music out there for people willing to look for it. The indie boom of the 2000s is still among the finest music that the underground has ever spit out, and around the time that people were blasting songs by Linkin Park, bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs were also making the seedy streets of New York City sound refreshing again.
What rock really needed was a blockbuster album, though, and American Idiot paid off in spades. It might not have been the most authentic punk rock record by most people’s definition of that word, but for a country that was about to head to war under President Bush’s regime, Billie Joe Armstrong gave a firm middle finger back to the establishment by painting the picture of the ideal teenage lifestyle that was slowly falling apart.
But by this point, many teenagers had moved on to other genres. The idea of someone making a difference with a guitar in their hands was far from a pipe dream, but listening to what was coming out of the world of hip-hop, there was a good chance that a lot more people were thinking about how to become the next incarnation of Eminem around 2004 than Kurt Cobain.
And for all of the naysayers who were still complaining that rap wasn’t even music at this point, there were people like Outkast out there to prove everyone wrong. ‘Hey Ya’ was the kind of tune that anyone could get down with, and listening to what Andre 3000 was doing on the back half of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, it was like we were all being treated to the next generation’s version of Prince, complete with that signature blend of rock, soul, and pop all under one roof.
It would be hard for anyone to compete with that kind of talent, let alone a rock band, and Armstrong admitted as much when hearing what Outkast were doing, saying, “Rock’s become such a conservative business. You have a batch of songs, put out a single, do your video, hope you get played on the radio, go on tour. People like OutKast are kicking rock’s ass, because there’s so much ambition.”
And if some of the more jaded rock fans bothered to take down their layers of pretension for two seconds, there was a lot more to love about Outkast other than their hip-hop stuff. Compared to what everyone else was doing at the time in the midst of the bling era, everything from ‘Gasoline Dreams’ to ‘Bombs Over Baghdad’ could have passed as fantastic rock songs had they been dominated by live drums instead of drum machines half the time.
If anything, Outkast were one of the first acts to suggest that maybe things didn’t always have to be black and white in terms of what genre someone fell under in the 2000s. And in the modern age, where most people like the idea of becoming genre-fluid after a while, a lot of that comes back to Outkast taking the best aspects of rock and roll, rap, soul, and anything else they could get their hands on and making it into something beautiful.
