Guys, I swear, I do like songs by OutKast that aren’t on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Not that it should matter whether I do or not. But you click on the ‘outkast’ tag at the bottom of this post and see that the only songs by the group on here are from the double album, you might think it a little strange. I was eight years old during that era of OutKast. ‘Hey Ya!’ and ‘Roses’ were everywhere. ‘The Way You Move’ to a lesser extent, but that was in the UK. I liked ‘Hey Ya!’ just like everyone else. I wanted the single. My aunt got me the double album. And so, that was from where I got the OutKast songs to put on my iPod, iPhone, whatever, up to 2021, which was when I decided I needed to stop adding songs and eventually bring an end to this entire series. Any additional tracks of theirs are in my Liked Songs playlist on Spotify. But in this space, it’s the double album all the way. There are much worse options out there.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to prefer Speakerboxxx over The Love Below. The latter has the big, big hits, it was the first big artistic statement of André 3000. But I find myself returning to Big Boi’s half more often. There are more posts on the blog from Speakerboxxx than from The Love Below, so my feelings on the two were always kind of present. One of the songs on Speakerboxxx that I’ve been going back to for a while now is its third song on there, ‘Unhappy’. I didn’t really get around to this one until about 2010 or something. Think it came up on an iTunes library shuffle session when I was playing a FIFA game at the same time. Or maybe I just decided to listen to the whole double album one day… Either way, I got to know the song a lot better. I feel like ‘Unhappy’ could have been a single. But maybe it’s the pessimistic overtone of the lyrics that prevented it from being so. “Might as well have fun ’cause your happiness is done, and your goose is cooked” is the hook. Sung with a real warmth with all the vocals alongside the upbeat production, there’s that melody that sounds like a ringtone in the right channel chirping for most of the track. The “flip that smile upside down now” phrase, first sung by Big Boi (I’m sure) and then later by Debra Killings, are almost childlike in their respective deliveries. But I think it’s all a trick to distract you from what’s relayed in the words.

Scattered in between the hooks come Big Boi’s three verses in which he provides some life lessons and gives the listener a look into his own experiences. Just a couple of those lessons as detailed in the first verse include staying out of harm’s way and to prevent people from taking advantage of you. He tells us that happiness can’t be bought and ties that in with how his mum and dad would earn enough money to get by and keep up appearances, only to end up in debt by the start of the new year. He reminisces on a time in 1979 when things weren’t particularly great within the household. But then he grounds himself in present-day 2003, where he’s confident with who he is as a man and proud to have achieved the success he has. So there’s a little light there by the end. I once read an interpretation in a comment somewhere that the finished happiness as referred to in the chorus is that of the true kind you had when you were a child. Less inhibitions, the innocence and all of that. So the hook is telling us have as much as we can in this life, ’cause we’ll never truly be happy as were when we were young. And the way the hook repeats with a fade-out to silence, makes it feel like a very unresolved type of situation. Had to bring the mood down a little after ‘Ghetto Musick’ somehow, I guess.