The 2003 album Timbaland said “changed the game”
While Timbaland’s career started up in the 1990s, it was throughout the ’00s that he truly left his mark, as his distinct production flavour came to dominate the decade’s pop charts.
Tim was among the most influential popular producers of the ’00s, and there is certainly an argument to say that he was the ultimate one, but for his part, he looked to some of his contemporaries for his own dash of inspiration. He felt that Outkast, in particular, were especially important during those days.
In 2003, Big Boi and André 3000 released Outkast’s fifth album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and it proved to be a massive success. It produced several huge singles, including two chart-toppers in the form of ‘Hey Ya!’ and ‘The Way You Move’. ‘Hey Ya!’ also won a Grammy for ‘Best Urban/Alternative Performance’.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was Outkast’s first number-one album in the United States, while it secured the duo with two more Grammys, one for ‘Best Rap Album’ and another ‘Album of the Year’. It is considered to be only the second hip-hop album to win ‘Album of the Year’, behind The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was obviously innovative for the time, mostly because of its structure. It is a double album, with one side dedicated to the efforts of Big Boi and the other to André. The two are markedly different in style, with Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx being more of a straight-up Southern hip hop album and André’s The Love Below incorporating a wider range of musical influences, like pop, soul and funk, not to mention even jazz and psychedelia.
The result of their combined efforts is a two-hour-long, two-disc album unlike any other. It’s quite an experimental work, in its own way, yet it managed to achieve remarkable chart success. It was a defining work of the era, a fact recognised by Timbaland.
Timbaland, for a Pitchfork feature in 2021, described Speaker Boxxx/The Love Below as one of his favourite albums ever. With it, he believed, Outkast had “brought a whole new sonic to the game”.
The two number-one singles, ‘Hey Ya!’ and ‘The Way You Move’, “changed the game”, according to Tim. This, remember, is a man who produced some of the biggest pop hits of the decade, be it with his own solo songs or with so many hits by Justin Timberlake, Nelly Furtado and Missy Elliott.
Timbaland knew a thing or two about fashioning a chart smash with a hip hop or R&B flavour, but as he saw it, Outkast were the masters at it. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was a pivotal moment for hip hop’s rise to popular dominance.