Big Boi

The Dirty South wasn't always known for rap. When Outkast first emerged in 1994, the southern hip hop scene was largely discounted in the music world. The duo's Atlanta upbringing felt like a liability.

"We come from a time when it wasn’t cool to be from Atlanta," the rapper known as Big Boi tells me. They weren't cowed. The title of Outkast's debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, explicitly nodded to geography. The animosity boiled over at the 1995 Source Awards, when Outkast won for best new rap group and drew overt boos from denizens of the East Coast rap scene. In a tense acceptance speech, André 3000 declared, "The South got something to say."

The proclamation proved true when the group's intergalactic ATLiens record arrived a year later, packed with little morsels of Southern pride ("If you like fish and grits and all that pimp shit..." goes the title track refrain). "We had to make them respect us," says Big Boi. "When we won best new artist and we got booed, that fueled the fire. That just made us go harder, know what I mean? Since then, it's got to be elite street jedi rap shit. It’s got to be the cream of the crop."

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It’s not your typical class on a campus known for engineers and scientists.

“The name of the course is Engaging the Lyrics of Outkast and Trap Music to Explore Politics of Social Justice,” explains Dr. Joycelyn Wilson. “We turn Outkast’s lyrics into a text and we use the narratives to have a larger conversation about social justice.”

Wilson studied the music and lyrics of Outkast as part of her dissertation.

“I felt like Outkast represents innovation,” she explains.

Originally, the students were not aware the class was about Outkast. It was just billed as a “race, science, and technology” course.

“When I found out it was about Outkast and social justice, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to take this class,’” says industrial engineering major Raianna Brown.

Wilson says she introduces students to the lyrics first, and then the class listens to the music.

“Often we’re attracted to the sound first. Then we analyze the words.”

While much of the focus was on Outkast, Wilson and her students reviewed songs across the hip-hop spectrum from Lauryn Hill to Lil Yacthy.

Through a course like this about music, students are introduced to urban issues and that begins a conversation.

“Having a course where you have discussions about social and political issues, it’s nice to have that change,” says mechanical engineering student Ahmed Aly.

To wrap up the course, Wilson arranged for Antwan Patton, better known as Big Boi from Outkast, to visit the class and take questions from the students.

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Big Boi gave a funky, propulsive performance of new single "Mic Jack" on Monday's Tonight Show. The Outkast rapper spit rhymes into a gold microphone, backed by DJ scratching, a trio of vocalists (including longtime collaborator Sleepy Brown) and the Roots' Questlove on drums.

"Boomiverse coming soon," Big Boi declared after the performance, hyping his upcoming solo LP – his first since 2012's Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. The rapper announced Boomiverse last week and released a pair of new tracks: "Mic Jack," which features Maroon 5's Adam Levine and "Kill Jill," assisted by fellow Atlanta stars Killer Mike and Jeezy.

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