Songoftheday 6/7/24 - Ready for action nip it in the bud, we never relaxing Outkast is everlasting not clashing not at all...

 

 

"The Way You Move" - Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown

from the album Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 35

 

Today's song comes (nominally) from the rap duo Outkast, who after four successful studio albums released a greatest hits collection that spun off another hit with "The Whole World", which reached the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in the beginning of 2002, and won a Grammy Award for Best Duo/Group Rap Performance. 

 

But all that success was happening concurrently with Antwon "Big Boi" Patton and Andre "Andre 3000" Benjamin veering on different musical paths. So much so that after two years of putting together a fifth album, the result was a sprawling double-disc set with each member getting their own "solo album" if you will, but under the Outkast name (to please the label chiefs) and making contributions to their partners set. The project was called Speakerboxx, the Big Boi hip-hop centered record, and The Love Below, Andre 3000's multi-genre trip around the musical spectrum. 

 

In the early summer of 2003, they released a "hype" track from the set, "GhettoMusick", which would eventually find itself on the Speakerboxx side but have both of them performing prominently on over a Patti Labelle sample. It's an awesome tour de force, with Big Boi's rapid-fire delivery over Andre 3000's 1980's-style electro-rock production, which was possibly too much for radio at the time. Since it was only released on 12" vinyl, and with lack of radio love, the song stalled down at #93 on Billboard's R&B Singles chart.

A month later, they rolled out the proper promotion of the records, with simultaneous releases from each of the discs in the set. While Andre 3000's "Hey Ya" will be covered soon enough in the series, it was Big Boi's "The Way You Move" which first hit the R&B chart and subsequently the top-40 of the Hot 100. The record featured singer Patrick "Sleepy" Brown, who was also from Georgia and had already seen the top-40 on the Hot 100 before in the spring of 2002 as a featured singer on rapper Ludacris' single "Saturday (Oooh Oooh!)". Brown and Patton co-wrote the track with Big Boi's co-producer Carlton "Carl-Mo" Mahone. The end product is definitely the smoothest of his tracks, with a horn-dominated soul jam merging with the Miami Bass sound which was a decade old but still sounded fresh making the lyrics, which start out flatly addressing the rumors of a rift between the two but then segues to macking on women, go down easier. The music video finds Big Boi and Sleepy on a dream trip in a female-led auto shop which somehow goes to a fancy dance party without missing a beat....

While "The Way You Move" entered the top-40 on the Hot 100 weeks before "Hey Ya", it had to sit at #2 behind it before it finally climbed to the top in February of 2004, while spending three weeks at #2 on Billboard's R&B Singles chart and taking five weeks at #1 on the Rap Songs list. On the radio, the song topped both the Mainstream Top-40 and Mainstream R&B charts for three weeks, and also made the older-skewing formats at Adult Top-40 at #34 and Adult R&B at #7, and peaked at #4 on the dance/R&B-oriented Rhythmic list. Internationally, the single reached the top ten in New Zealand (#6), Hungary (#6), the United Kingdom (#7), Australia (#7), Denmark (#9), and Croatia (#10). It also hit the top-40 in Norway (#16), Ireland (#18), Finland (#19), Italy (#25), Germany (#31), and Sweden (#33). The Speakerboxx/The Love Below double-album, released in September of 2003, spent seven weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and topped the R&B Albums list for a week, going on to sell over six million copies in the U.S. (which made the two-disc set earn 13 times platinum). At the Grammy Awards in 2004, the album won both Best Rap Album and Album Of The Year. As a pair they were also up for Producer of the Year, which went to another high-profile hip-hop duo, the Neptunes.

We'll be hearing Andre 3000 shaking it like a Polaroid picture in the series soon.

(10/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's Big Boi and Sleepy Brown making a TV appearance...

And here's Outkast in full performing "Hey Ya" and "The Way You Move" at the Vibe Awards...

Tomorrow I'll roll out my top 100 hits from this week, then on Monday SOTD will be back with a singer/songwriter going meta.