Track for track, Big Boi and Three Stacks, Rico Wade, Organized Noise, and a host of artists featured on the album weighed in their two cents behind the album. Here are a few excerpts from the article that you can read in its entirety HERE.
“Rosa Parks”
Produced by OutKast for Earthtone
Could the Birmingham civil rights icon be a metaphor for OutKast’s attempt to overcome the regional segregation within hip-hop itself? Yeah, right. “Hush that fuss: Everybody move to the back of the bus.”
Andre 3000: I actually submitted that beat to [Diddy’s old group] Total — ’cause I was going with Keisha from Total around that time — but they couldn’t use it, so we ended up using it.
By the time Aquemini came, I was stretching out as a producer. Big Boi was the family man. He had just had another kid, so he would come hang out at the studio and listen to the beats and make these big hooks. So it was a cool combination.
Big Boi: I took the beat home and I remember I was in my bedroom, and I was like, ‘I got the hook!’ I was playing the music loud as hell and I was just singing the hook: ‘Aah-haah, hush that fuss!’ Like, that’s it, we need to lay it down. So then, you know how we use these metaphors, [so we named it] Rosa Parks. Boom. We always do stuff like that and shit just falls into place.
Neal H. Pogue (sound engineer): Naming that song ‘Rosa Parks’ was a big, big statement too, because it was just trying to show people don’t forget about where we’ve come from and where we are now.
Mr. DJ: We got a lot of flak about that. A lot of brothers got held up in lawsuits because of that song. But it was never meant to be a derogatory song towards Rosa Parks. That never even crossed our mind until we heard there was a complaint.
Andre 3000: Their claim was we used her name to sell records and we were like that really wasn’t the case.
Mr. DJ: We were just trying to use her as a symbol — “Everybody move to the back of the bus.” It was just a real fact. We used to have to go to the back of the bus. It was just something real and we tried to make something positive out of it, not in a bad way.
Neal H. Pogue: It was kind of weird, because I think Rosa Parks was misled. She was misled by her handlers. They just wanted her to get some money out of it. And [OutKast] didn’t mean any harm; it was a tribute. But her people felt like it was a slander.
Andre 3000: I think that was a huge confusion and misunderstanding, but when you’re working with someone of [Rosa Parks’] standing you’ve gotta do your job. I understood it. But me and Big always said if something comes across our lap we’re gonna fight it. We’ve got enough money to do it.
Mr. DJ: When we recorded that song, the studio had some dope wood floors, so I can remember when we all went in the recording booth and did the stomping and the clapping on that little breakdown.
Donny Mathis: One Sunday after I got out of church, Dre and Big called me to go in the studio. One of the first songs that I worked on was “Rosa Parks.” That’s me playing acoustic guitar, the bluesy guitar. That’s Preston Crump playing bass, but somehow they got the credits mixed up and it says that Preston’s playing [electric] guitar.
Andre 3000: After doing the track and hearing where we were going with it, it sounded like a hoe-down, it sounded porchy. And I knew [my stepfather, Rev. Robert] Hodo played harmonica, so I was like, ‘Hey, come over and play.’ And what’s crazy is he killed it in like one or two takes.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment