After the success of their third album Aquemini, OutKast moved out of the Dungeon. Stankonia was an actual place, though it wasn’t seven light years away from the “B.O.B.” video shoot.
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This was not the kind of thing I was accustomed to seeing on my dorm’s common-room TV on a mid-afternoon Rap City episode. Then they embark on a seven-light-year journey to some place called Stankonia, their cars turning into astral blurs. They arrive together at a utopian throwdown in some kind of church/club hybrid, where they’re surrounded by choirs and dancers and at least one baboon. Big Boi jumps between highway-speeding big-body slabs like he’s the Road Warrior.
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Andre 3000, shirtless in leather gauntlets and banana-yellow pants, sprints across purple grass under impossibly blue skies, as a whole housing project full of kids chases him in some new-millennium Beatlemania freakout.
When the music video arrived shortly thereafter, it made the whole thing seem even more like a dream. I couldn’t believe that a song like this existed. It was overwhelming, and it made everything else suddenly sound small and timid. Other sounds kept showing up and disappearing - jittery 808 breakdowns, gospel-whoop massed-choir shout-alongs, pinging electro-bleeps, swampy guitar chicken-scratches, nattering DJ scratches, a climactic Hendrixian solo. Andre 3000 and Big Boi’s verses zoomed all over the track like runaway remote-control cars, moving too quickly to let me process anything they were saying. It sounded like a futuristic rave divebomb attack, and it also sounded like a widescreen take on circa-1990 Miami bass, an entire genre that I’d been conditioned to think was stupid. “B.O.B.” felt like everything happening at once. My reaction was something more like: “ What fuck whoa holy shit fuck whoa what.” I kept hitting repeat, trying to make some kind of sense of everything I could hear. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for anything like that in the moment. I would like to tell you that the arrival of “B.O.B.” felt like some kind of big-bang moment - that I knew the rules had been shattered and nothing would be the same again. Threw it in the Discman as soon as I was sure nobody else from the station was watching me. Grabbed one, shoved it in my pocket, walked out of the student center all paranoid, like I had purloined diamonds jammed in my boxers. A couple of CD singles had shown up at the college radio station where I was volunteering, and I immediately stole one.
This would’ve been September of 2000, a month and a half before Stankonia landed. I remember the sunlight reflecting off of the windshields of the cars around me, the faces of the people walking past, the air suddenly tasting a whole lot more vivid in my lungs. I remember all those sounds and ideas pinging around in my head as I walked across that parking lot. I remember everything about it - the tingly music-box intro, the whispered count-off, the sudden adrenaline-jamming surge of booming bass and rampaging drums and needling dubbed-out electric guitars, the way that adrenaline surge didn’t let up over the next five minutes. I remember exactly where I was the first time “B.O.B.” hit.
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