Stankonia is released

Why it matters

Stankonia came out October 31, 2000, on LaFace. It is OutKast's fourth album. Big Boi and Andre 3000 produced most of it themselves, with Mr. DJ. The album debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 and went four-times platinum. It won the Best Rap Album Grammy in 2002. The Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list (2020 update) has it at #64, the highest-placed hip-hop album in the top 100. Stankonia is the album where OutKast becomes the most ambitious commercial rap group in the world. "B.O.B," "Ms. Jackson," "So Fresh, So Clean," "Gasoline Dreams," "Snappin' & Trappin'." The production is denser than Aquemini, more genre-promiscuous, more willing to break what 2000 rap thought a rap album was supposed to be. The album's central thesis (which Andre articulated in interviews at the time) was that the South was now in front, that everybody else was going to have to catch up, and that OutKast had a responsibility to keep moving the form forward. The next album (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2003) would push the experiment past the breaking point. Stankonia is the last fully-collaborative OutKast album where the experiment held. You should hear it. Twenty-five years and it still sounds restless.