Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty was a few years in the making with a label change and all the attendant leaked tracks and snags.
Big Boi's first proper solo album nonetheless sounds like it could have come together in a couple of drama-free (if somewhat frenzied) months. It’s one of the loosest, most varied, and entertaining albums of its time.
Big Boi is in top form, rattling off agile, head-spinning, and frequently irreverent tongue twisters like “Witness the n*gga that spit that vicious pitbull attack shit when it comes to this rap shit” and “When she’s liquored up I’m leaving my fingerprints on her butt.” The variety of beats, most of which
Big Boi co-produced, are even more mystifying, slathered in ideas yet robust in foundation. What’s most prominent in “Tangerine” is the knocking/snapping rhythm, but it enters with what could have developed into a grunge dirge and incorporates booming bass, a synthesizer vamp filtered through a large plastic tube, electro zaps, scorching guitar flameout, and some piano fit for a power ballad’s coda. It’s an eloquently crude strip-club anthem (of course). The superbly bombastic “General Patton” is a melee of triumphant horns, a blasting opera choir, and rallying rhymes like “Pick on somebody your own size and fuck around, get kilt/But not like the kilt above the knees/BB will plant you n*ggas like seeds, or fertilizer for the trees.” Anchored in whomping bass and rattlesnake hi-hats, the battle anthem is capped by
Big Rube's fathoms-deep-toned recitation of the slayed’s last rites. Bullfrog electro that quotes
the System and
Soul II Soul, a victory lap aided by
Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and loads of low-slung Southern funk -- not to mention what sounds like a warm, bittersweet spin on
Diddy’s “Last Night” -- are also pulled off to equally excellent effect.
Sir Lucious Left Foot lacks something as universally appealing and tidy as “The Way You Move,” but that is not a problem -- not when
Big Boi casually conveys that he is as much an imaginative artist as his other half in
OutKast. ~ Andy Kellman