OutKast releases 'Hey Ya!'

Why it matters

"Hey Ya!" came out August 25, 2003, as one of two lead singles from OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Andre 3000 wrote, produced, and performed essentially every part of the song. Big Boi is not on it; the song is from the Andre half of the double album. The track is built around a four-chord acoustic-guitar progression that does not actually behave like a standard 4/4 song; it skips a beat every other measure, which is part of why it lands the way it does on the ear. The song spent nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It went into rotation on pop, alternative, adult-contemporary, R&B, and rap radio simultaneously, which was almost unprecedented genre-crossing for a single. By the end of 2003, basically every American with a radio had heard "Hey Ya!" "Shake it like a Polaroid picture" entered the cultural vocabulary so quickly that Polaroid itself eventually had to put out a statement asking people to stop shaking their pictures because the action damages the film. The song won the Best Urban/Alternative Performance Grammy in 2004. You have heard "Hey Ya!" You will hear it again. It is the song most likely to be played at any function you attend through approximately 2050.