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Welcome back to hip parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the

hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, 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 Bigboy 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, Outcast begin thinking bigger, even beyond

the boundaries of rap. Over in Atlanta, Andre and Bigboy 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, bombs 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 1990s. 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 Seminole and Prophetic. The village voice

dubbed it, quote, just about the damnedest bass track ever, an electro workout, unquote. Years

...