But it is fitting that Big Boi’s Rooster anchors the film’s most exciting scenes, that the crowd’s delirium is directed toward his character as he raps some 45 years too early. Percival is a useful insight into André’s current state: an artist who is shrinking from the light of center stage and instead hoping to time-travel backward through his music. The entire sequence is a dizzying, beautiful collapse of the 20 th-century African-American experience in five vibrant, perfectly choreographed minutes. Meanwhile, onstage, amid fire-breathing girls and a band that looks like it was around for the birth of jazz, Big Boi raps. The scenes in the Church are chilling: Jitterbugging couples heave each other across the room, only to break and pause when one among them dashes to the center and evokes a 1980s B-boy freeze. Frenetic and outlandish, colorful, collision-happy, and witty: It is history written in hip-hop.Īt its best, Idlewild feels like the kind of wild juxtaposition of history and style that hip-hop has enabled. Idlewild tells the story of two best friends making last-ditch efforts of escape, but with the kind of surreal wideness of vision that powers OutKast’s music. #IDLEWILD A DISTANT HISTORY RARE MOVIE#Slimmed to a synopsis, the movie appears to be yet another rapper-driven “hip-hop film,” wherein a virtuous but conflicted protagonist attempts to escape the conditions of his or her life through some climactic act of art, violence, or both. All of this backstory makes Idlewild a fascinating experience, a metaphor for the state of OutKast. In time, as the fork widened and the two settled into roles as Big Boi-the pragmatist with the stripper pole in his house-and André-the sensitive, fashionable aesthete who name-checked Chekhov and the Smiths-it became difficult to keep up with OutKast’s coherence. Throughout a career that stretches all the way back to middle school, Big Boi and André have embraced their dialectical tension, bisecting themselves as “the player and the poet.” Over the first four albums, the pair thrived on this enigmatic contrast.
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