Speakerboxxx / The Love Below is released

Why it matters

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below came out September 23, 2003, on LaFace/Arista. It is OutKast's fifth and final group album, although technically it is two solo albums sold as a single set: Speakerboxxx is the Big Boi half, The Love Below is the Andre 3000 half. The combination sold ten million copies in the US (so it is double diamond, in RIAA accounting) and won the Album of the Year Grammy in 2004, only the second rap album ever to win the top Grammy (after Lauryn Hill's Miseducation in 1999). The two halves of the album sound nothing alike. Big Boi's Speakerboxxx is a more conventional Atlanta-funk-rap album, with the production aesthetic OutKast had been refining since Stankonia and singles like "The Way You Move" with Sleepy Brown carrying the radio weight. Andre's The Love Below is, structurally, not a rap album at all; it is a 1960s-and-70s-soul-and-jazz-and-rock-and-bossa-nova suite with "Hey Ya!" near the top of it. The combination was the album that proved a rap group could be the biggest pop act in America in a given year. It was also, in retrospect, the album that ended OutKast as a recording group; Big Boi and Andre have not released another studio LP together since. You should hear both halves. The order does not matter.