OutKast
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Arista

"OutKast, cell therapy, to cell division/ We just split it down the middle so you see both the visions," promises rapper Antwan "Big Boi" Patton, one-half of the best hip-hop act on the planet. He's referring to the widely publicized design of OutKast's fifth album, a two-disc set entitled Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The first disc, Speakerboxxx, features Big Boi performances of Big Boi songs; the second, The Love Below, belongs to OutKast's other half, Andre "3000" Benjamin. There is overlap — Andre 3000 shows up on a couple of Big Boi's songs, and produces three of them, and Big Boi does a rap on one of Andre 3000's tracks.

It's another bold idea for a group that loves to thwart expectations, and it is thought to be OutKast's final bow. Reports of OutKast's impending split are relentless, and the reasons are detailed and persuasive. Andre 3000 may be the instigator — he's not interested in rapping anymore, he will not be touring in support of the new discs and he wants to pursue an acting career. Big Boi comes off as the more pragmatic of the two, managing the OutKast brand and patiently waiting out Andre's vacillations. He intends to tour solo, though what he'll do to compensate for Andre's absence is undecided.

If Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is OutKast's final go-round, it's fitting. The discs are dense, musically diverse, sometimes phenomenal, sometimes foolish and long-winded, elegiac and uneven. It's a singularly interesting failure — a noble miss along the lines of Radiohead's last three albums and Steve Earle's Jerusalem. The albums are like an amicable divorce between two progressive and well-intentioned people — you see the talent, the vision, the greatness, and are saddened that the two couldn't make it work as a couple.

Atlanta-based OutKast hit the ground running in 1994 with their first single, "Player's Ball," hit No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Rap Singles chart, and it helped establish Dirty South rap as a force in popular music. Since that time, they've released four albums, each one better than the last, culminating in 2000's Stankonia, which is simply one of the finest hip-hop albums ever recorded, and a multi-platinum hit. Stankonia, and its breakout hit "Ms. Jackson," shone a light on a duo that achieved success without compromise and created music steeped in a devout knowledge of musical history.

Speakerboxxx is no different. Big Boi loads his 19 tracks with everything from thick Bootsy Collins bass lines (on the rollicking "Bowtie") and stark, rattling piano figures (the moody, cautionary funk of "Knowing"), to some of the sweetest hip-hop choruses in recent memory, including buoyant Earth, Wind & Fire-style harmonies on "The Way You Move," and Muscle Shoals gospel rave on the gleeful and bizarre musical antidote to existential blues, "Church." Big Boi's raps are, as always, inventive, the words tumbling out with speed and bite. On "War," he assesses the results of the 2000 presidential election debacle by rapping, "Basically, America, you got fucked/ the media shucked and jived and now we stuck!!!" At its peak, Speakerboxxx is the best hip-hop album since Stankonia.

Andre 3000, by contrast, abandons rap almost entirely on The Love Below, opting instead to croon his way through most of his song cycle about the pitfalls and promises in relationships. Andre asks God (who he discovers to be a woman) for a "sweet bitch, you know somebody not too fast but not too slow, 'cause I don't have it all my damn self." The rest of the album follows Andre as he meets a woman who threatens to break down his macho façade and force him to confront the "love below." The synth and piano work on this disc is fantastic throughout, from loping organ on "Spread" to the bluesy lick that opens "Roses," a rant against a former love outfitted with a grinding bass line and such great P-Funk lyrics as, "You'd need a golden calculator to divide/ the time it took to look inside and realize that/ real guys go for real down-to-Mars girls." While "Hey Ya!" romps with Beatle-y abandon, and Andre asks his listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," the smoky jazz of "She's Alive" adds real poignancy and depth to a tale of a single mother struggling to raise her child. At its peak, The Love Below is the best Prince album since Graffiti Bridge.

What's missing is what makes OutKast important: conflict. Recording two separate albums cops to the essential differences between Big Boi, a strip-club-visiting, bong-hitting, Caddy-driving, Dirty South rapper, and Andre 3000, a space cadet and funk impresario who favors astrology and fantasy while his partner keeps it real. But it doesn't play them off each other.

Andre 3000 and Big Boi are endlessly creative musicians — if they record as solo acts from here on out, much of the music will be great, but it won't match what they accomplished as a duo on Aquemini and Stankonia, where Andre's kinder, gentler rap tempered Big Boi's boasting playa language, and Big Boi's pragmatic assessments of hip-hop culture brought Andre's airier musings down to earth. While other rappers try to generate conflict by lashing out at anyone and anything they can in their verses, OutKast use the contradictions in its two personas to keep the music fresh and interesting.

Without Andre's left-of-center musings, Big Boi falls too often into rote hip-hop boasting and self-referencing. His collaborations with Ludacris and Jay-Z are completely pointless, and even fine tracks like "Bust" and "War" cry out for an Andre 3000 lyrical interlude. Without Big Boi's tough raps, Andre's disc dissolves into art-pop meandering. His opening tune, "Love Hater," is, with its Hendrix guitar licks and Lovesexy horns, too cute by half, and his jazz rendering of "My Favorite Things" is five minutes of music none of us asked for. He crafts some supple grooves on songs like "Take Off Your Cool" and "Love in War," but without a Big Boi screed on dope pushers or tennis shoes in the song's bridge, they dissolve into dust.

The dead weight on both albums frustrates, and as you listen to one, you feel compelled to put it down and pick up the other for contrast. (It would be no big surprise to find OutKast fans the world over taking their favorite tracks from the two albums and burning them onto one CD, an Andre track followed by a Big Boi track followed by an Andre track, etc.) Still, there's enough great material on both albums to make Speakerboxxx/The Love Below essential for fans and necessary for everyone else. This set may have brought OutKast down to earth a little, but there's still no one in rap who can touch them.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)