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Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris

Melanphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last

episode, we covered the first decade of the career of Outcast, the duo of Antoine Big Boy Patton and Andre 3000 Benjamin, their emergence

as teenage hitmakers, their upset win at the 1995 Source Awards, and Andre's prophetic

speech at that show claiming rap for the South. We're now up to the turn of the

millennium, and Southern hip-hop is now so successful, outcasts begin thinking bigger, even

beyond the boundaries of rap. Over in Atlanta, Andre and Big Boy knew they needed to up their game.

So, in 2000, they went back into the studio and emerged with a new benchmark for speed.

B-O-B, bombsbs over Baghdad has been acclaimed as one of the most dazzling singles in rap history.

Running at a frenetic 155 beats per minute, the song was outcast's attempt to synthesize the rhythms of the British dance music known as drum and bass,

which had been blasting in UK clubs throughout the second half of the 1990.

That made B-O-B perhaps the most exceptional outcast single.

The famously laid-back hip-hop duo were suddenly rapping like they had mainlined extra-strength

Red Bull.

Critics called it seminal and prophetic.

The Village Voice dubbed it, quote,

just about the damnedest bass track ever,

an electro workout, unquote.

Years later, Pitchfork named it the best single of the 2000s, calling B-O-B, quote, an obliteration

of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance

rock crossovers, unquote.

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