youth is looked at as a negative trait here, but I'll gon head and give myself away.

The first time I ever bought a CD, I got Stankonia and EWF's Greatest Hits. I was thirteen, and wasn't really feelin hip hop until I heard "BOB", "Ms. Jackson" (yeah, I know, but I still love it), and "So Fresh, So Clean" because my parents clung to the music of their era, and I was spoiled by P-Funk, James Brown, Rick James, etc., and suckered into thinking that hip hop was severely inferior to the music of the 70's and early 80's.

at the time, OutKast were prolly the some of the funkiest and most "musical" amongst their peers, so I really took to it, and listened to that album over and over and over again. oddly enough, the sound of that album is what got me deep into the likes of Prince, Hendrix, and earlier Funkadelic...and that's when my mother started asking me if I did drugs.

anyway, the incredible thing about OutKast to me is that for those first four group albums and even with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, they reinvented themselves every time, stayed ahead of the game starting with ATLiens, and experimented without ever losing my ear. OutKast, to me, can do no wrong (okay, maybe on some of Idlewild).