Outkast Idlewild Album Reassessment: Better Than Its Reputation Suggests

The Outkast Idlewild album reassessment feels overdue: twenty years on from its release, the record still occupies a strange, disputed position in the duo’s catalogue, simultaneously dismissed as their weakest hour and quietly cherished by those who have actually returned to it. It deserves better from history than it has so far received.

When Idlewild arrived in August 2006, the commercial numbers were, on the surface, encouraging. According to Noise11 Music News, the album opened at No. 2 on the US Billboard 200 with 196,000 copies sold in its first week, and simultaneously reached No. 1 on the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, Top Rap Albums and Soundtrack Albums charts. Internationally, it peaked at No. 27 on the ARIA Albums Chart in Australia. For most acts, those are the numbers of a genuine success.

For Outkast in 2006, they were read as disappointment, and the critical reception compounded matters. Pitchfork‘s Jess Harvell acknowledged an initial thrill ‘in the way that any spectacle is’, before citing ‘exhaustion’ at the 79-minute mark. SPIN placed it at No. 25 on its best albums of the year list. Then, in 2023, Rolling Stone included it at No. 46 on a list of 50 ‘genuinely horrible’ albums by great artists, with writer Andy Greene preemptively challenging any dissenting reader to recall when they had last actually listened to it.

The Shadow of Speakerboxxx

Context matters here. Three years before Idlewild, the duo’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below had hit big at the Grammys and eventually became certified 13x Platinum, generating megahits including ‘Hey Ya!’ and ‘The Way You Move.’ That record cast a long shadow. Arriving alongside a Prohibition-era musical film, released at the same moment that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was the highest-grossing film of the year, Idlewild the album contained precisely zero ‘Hey Ya!’ replicas. The audience it inherited from Speakerboxxx was, in many cases, the wrong audience entirely.

Returning to the record now, with the benefit of André 3000’s flute-focused solo album New Blue Sun having arrived in 2023, it becomes easier to hear Idlewild on its own terms, as the work of two artists constitutionally incapable of repeating themselves for commercial convenience.

Outkast Idlewild Album Reassessment: What Holds Up

Lead single ‘Mighty O’, driven by a sample of ‘Minnie The Moocher’, opens on an energetic note, with André 3000’s delivery as confident and propulsive as it is anywhere in the catalogue. Stronger still is ‘Morris Brown’, a college marching-band stomp that shares something of the melodic shape of ‘The Whole World’ but pushes it into a grander, more theatrical arrangement. Neither single found much chart traction, peaking at No. 77 and No. 95 respectively, which tells you something about how poorly the album was positioned rather than how good the songs are.

‘Idlewild Blue (Don’tchu Worry ’bout Me)’, the third single, is a bluesy groove that builds gradually and efficiently over a memorable guitar figure. ‘N2u’ recalls Prince at his most flirtatious; it would sit comfortably alongside ‘I’ll Call Before I Come’ or ‘We Luv Deez Hoez’ on Stankonia. The ease with which several of these tracks might have slotted onto the duo’s earlier, more beloved records is, on reflection, precisely the point of this Outkast Idlewild album reassessment.

‘Chronomentrophobia’ is a meditative piece about the fear of clocks and the sensation of time slipping away, undercut with just enough of André’s humour (‘got to funk ya now’) to keep it from sinking entirely into dread. ‘Call The Law’, a collaboration with an up-and-coming Janelle Monáe, is a thrilling old-timey piano rave-up that demonstrates both members’ ability to shift genres without strain or self-consciousness.

The album’s genuine weaknesses are real. ‘Hollywood Divorce’, featuring Lil Wayne and Snoop Dogg, runs to five-and-a-half minutes of fairly conventional mid-2000s hip-hop. The interludes of dialogue lifted from the film function as insider references rather than musical contributions. And album closer ‘A Bad Note’, nearly nine minutes of electric guitar over an ominous piano riff, is an extraordinary display of André 3000’s musicianship that nonetheless likely sent a portion of the 2006 audience reaching for the eject button.

Idlewild has since achieved Platinum status and remains the final chapter in a particular instalment of Outkast’s story. It is not a flawless record, but its contradictions are more interesting than the Rolling Stone verdict allows, and the Outkast Idlewild album reassessment it has been quietly receiving for two decades now seems, at twenty years’ distance, considerably more fair. The Outkast catalogue has always rewarded patience.