Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Outkast’s Stankonia is a very popular record, certified platinum five times since its 2000 release. But it’s also a very long, 73-minute album stuffed full of different styles and genre experiments, and all the hits are in the first half. So I don’t think some of the later songs on Stankonia get enough attention, particularly the 18th track, “Red Velvet.”
Like most of Stankonia, “Red Velvet” was produced by Earthtone III, the production team that both members of Outkast formed with David “Mr. DJ” Sheats. It was, alongside “Ms. Jackson,” one of the first songs that André 3000 played guitar on, and he delivers the second verse of “Red Velvet” in a cartoonishly pitched-up and distorted voice. But it’s a dark track about the dangers of flaunting jewelry and nice cars in front of the wrong people. The drums shift into cut time for the chorus as the threats become more pointed and urgent: “They know where you live, and they see what you drive / And they say they gonna put one in your helmet.”
Big Boi has long been an outspoken fan of Kate Bush, and he gave a speech inducting the British art rock icon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. And the one time that Outkast has sampled Bush is on “Red Velvet,” which opens with the sound of Alan Skidmore’s titular sax from her 1978 track “The Saxophone Song.”
Three more essential Outkast deep cuts:
“Myintrotoletuknow”
DJ Premier sampled André’s verse from “Myintrotoletuknow” for Jay-Z’s 1997 track “Rap Game / Crack Game.”
“SpottieOttieDopaliscious”
“SpottieOttieDopaliscious” from 1998’s Aquemini is the most unlikely crowd-pleaser in the Outkast catalog, seven minutes of spoken word and a vamping horn section that’s consistently one of the group’s top streaming tracks.
“A Life in the Day of Benjamin André (Incomplete)”
André 3000 barely raps on 2003’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, but he closes out the double album with the kind of long and rambling yet compelling stream-of-consciousness verse that’s become a signature of his collaborative work since Outkast stopped making albums.