Aquemini. OutKast. 1998. LaFace.

 In the process of desentimentalizing the theme of home for an astute pop audience, Outkast distills the dynamics of Atlanta’s black market economy into era-defining, self-mythologizing lyric rock, similar in tone to Let It Bleed and 1999. Like those masterworks, Aquemini cuts through basic assumptions of the limitations of the western pop experience. Without any formal innovations, the Georgia duo explicate their local reality in a vividly blunt language that broadens your understanding of humor, empathy, and violence, redefining their place in the pop vernacular in the age of the Contract With America and active mass shootings. Inasmuch as both language and economy are models of expression, twin variants within cultures—in this case, hip hop and late stage capitalism—whose rules are in constant flux and, increasingly, beyond the reach of the average man, Aquemini is terminal prophecy, looking forward critically to who we’ve become in the new century, when a person’s worth is measured not by a priceless, intrinsic human value but by an arbitrary dollars metric of their social and creative output. Some of us even refer to ourselves as easy-to-recognize consumer branding. Aquemini charts the progress of the culture that had amassed itself around the entrepreneurial hustle, the culture that was quickly supplanting rock and roll as our country’s sustained commentary on quotidian life both here and abroad, the motto of which wasn’t any longer “You get what you need,” but, according to the Aquarius and the Gemini, “Nothin’ is for certain and nothin’ lasts forever.”

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