(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Singles: #02: OutKast – B.O.B. (2000)

Back in 1999, a friend wanted to sell to me his copy of OutKast’s Aquemini that he got for Christmas because he wasn’t impressed with how tedious the album’s southern drawl is. Despite its lyrical ingenuity, its spacious grooves and its smooth live hooks, he said, “other than ‘Rosa Parks’, they were really boring.” I don’t know if he gave up on OutKast then and there, but it’d be unfortunate if he did. If only I could tell him back then to wait on “B.O.B.”, because if he wanted an OutKast that wasn’t uneventful, “Bombs Over Baghdad” was OutKast in a song chock-full of events.

I remember when I saw the video, which is also the first time I heard the single; I distinctly remembered my jaw dropping. This is it, the next level shit experts have been prophesying, the result of envelopes being pushed, the extremes of hip-hop, the extremes of popular music, even. Many venture out to climb this musical Mount Everest—a quest for the loudest and the fastest—only to flop far from the top, hampered by the weight of their naked ambition. With “B.O.B.”, Andre 3000 and Big Boi planted an Atlanta flag at the peak and waved at the hip-hop world below them.

If they ever make a rap “Rock Band” game, I can’t think of another song that would be more fun to try to conquer than “Bombs Over Baghdad”. The whole track is just a blitzkrieg of sonic extravagance: the twinkling intro, the skating synthetic organ, the 808s (especially the snare fill to close out the first verse), the funked-out guitars, the choral gospel, the dual-action laser synths in the second verse, the guitar solo, the speed scratching, and, of course, Andre 3000 and Big Boi fleet-footed rhymes. If they somehow have figured out how to turn a kitchen sink into a hook, it would’ve been in “B.O.B.” as well.

Another thing about “B.O.B.”, because of its high BPM rate, it’s extremely tough to dance to. You may do some flailing, some twitching, some high-speed two-stepping, maybe some booty shaking to keep up with the rhythm. And yet, you persist because the song is involuntarily making you move and you have to do something, anything. Back in high school, when my friend and I were DJ’s for our Valentine’s dance, 2001, I was determined to end the set with “B.O.B.”. When I mixed the song in, sure enough, the couples on the bleachers stopped their juvenile face sucking for a moment, the girls drunk off a shot of Sourpuss squealed from glee, the guys that don’t dance shrugged off their too-cool-for-school persona, and all of them filled the dance floor. For an indelible five minutes, my high school gymnasium transformed into a big sea of adolescence pulsating to the beat of “B.O.B.”. When the song ended, they wanted more, and I couldn’t give them more. How do you follow-up a song as colossal as “Bombs Over Baghdad”? Anything else will be dwarfed in comparison.

To say that “B.O.B.” was the weirdest hit single of the decade is inexact for a coule of reasons. The first is that, in reality, it wasn’t really that much of a hit to begin with. It cracked the hip-hop charts by the narrowest of margins and missed out on the Billboard hot 100 altogether. Think about it, do you ever remember the song being played on the radio all that much, even when it first came out? (For obvious reasons, you probably didn’t hear it at all after the incidents of 9/11). Nevertheless, everyone knew about it, mainly because you only needed to experience it once to remember it for the rest of your life. Secondly, “B.O.B.” was unquestionably peerless this decade, not only in sound and style, but also in quality. Sure, I’ve ranked it second in this long list of songs we’ll remember the zeroes by, but, really it should be 1b. While compiling these rankings, I’ve switched back and forth between this and the #1 song, and when I’ve coerced myself to make a decision, I finally took a snapshot of what I was feeling that moment and the #1 song BARELY edged out. Yes, “B.O.B.” didn’t sound like everything else, and that was a tremendous accomplishment, but most importantly in most days, it also sounded head-over-shoulders above everything else from the zeroes.