I wrote a letter to the New York Times.

Posted by Maximum Fun on 22nd August 2006

I’m getting sick of the way the MSM torques the story of Outkast to fit into their misguided ideas about what’s good and bad in the group’s music. (quick guide: rap stuff = bad, singing stuff = good)

I was excited to read this piece in the New York Times Magazine about Outkast, but I ended up so annoyed I wrote this letter (reprinted below, given that it’s basically Dungeon Family Week and all):

When I saw that the Times Magazine featured a piece on Outkast this week, I was delighted. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the group a few years ago, and believe there are few groups in any genre who can match ‘Kast. The piece itself, unfortunately, did not live up to my hopes.

In order to tell his apparently pre-ordained story, which amounted to “the further apart they grow, the better the group gets,” Mr. Dee offered a complete misrepresentation of the group’s early career. The group’s first three records, and particularly ATLiens and Aquimini, their second and third releases (which Mr. Dee dismisses out of hand), are generally considered within the hip-hop community to be their best. On those records, they represented themselves as much more than just “two dope boys in a Cadillac,” as Mr. Dee asserts. Indeed, they offered one of the most complex identities of any popular music group of the time. Their complex relationship and personae have always been part of their music. Outkast may have had their first gargantuan pop hits with Stankonia, but they were interesting and important well before the pop world picked up on them.

My impression from reading the piece, frankly, was that Mr. Dee doesn’t actually like hip-hop. Otherwise, why would he be so strongly privileging other forms? I’m tired of the mainstream media feeding me the “hip-hop is so limited, but this guy mixes hip-hop with XXXX!” line. And goodness knows that if Mr. Dee was a hip-hop fan, he certainly wouldn’t write anything as silly as this:

“In their brand of Southern hip-hop there had always been traces of the more outward-looking, less preening, light-on-samples rap of bands like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.”

You would be hard-pressed to find two more sample-heavy groups than Tribe and De La, while Outkast have used live instrumentation extensively from the start. Indeed, while Mr. Dee seems to find the presence of producer/vocalist Sleepy Brown on Big Boi’s hit “The Way You Move” a “telling” sign of dissension within the group, it was Sleepy who both played and sang on the group’s first hit, “Players’ Ball.” And of course, his comment implicitly devalues preening and samples, two of the basic building blocks of much hip-hop music.

Mr. Dee’s piece is very well written, but it demonstrates clearly that he has no idea what he’s writing about. Comments like the one quoted above betray the fact that he is only too happy to apply rock & roll values to the hip-hop world.

Within your very building, you have one of the most insightful urban music critics in this country, Kelefeh Sanneh. Maybe you should have run this silly piece by him before you put it in the newspaper of record.