Film Fest madness! The 39th Annual Ann Arbor Filh Festival continues at the Michigan Theater tonight with showings at 7, 8, 9:30 and 10 p.m. $7 per show, or $50 for a weekly pass. michigandaily.com /arts (1 i~ktmOaitji RTDS WEDNESDAY MARCH 14, 2001 8 Outkast to throw down rap, funk for D-Town audience Artist, photographef explores ethnicities. By Christian Hoard Daily Arts Writer Outkast's Andre 3000 and Big Boi are cosmopoli- tan motherfuckers. In between chasing hoes and smoking chronic, the Atlanta-based rappers listen to all kinds of music, sit on their stoop and watch the world go by, spend a lot of time talking about their and their peers' problems, out-philosophize their contemporaries and avoid a gangsta cliches like Radiohead avoid guitars. Augmenting their pimp-posturing and coun- Outkast trified drawl with cosmic grooves and sonic sprawl, The Fox Theater they've got big ears as well as Tonight at 8 p.m. big you-know-whats, and they're happy to tell you all about it. They're also popular. They sell lots of records, they make hit singles, their videos are played on MTV, the press fawns over them. In sum, they've got both the talent to make themselves worth hearing and the hooks to make themselves heard - the very alliance of com- merciality and content which from Beatles to Prince to Nirvana has always made for classic rock 'n roll records, the kind that fill top-100 polls, the kind that both you and your kids will listen to, the kind that aren't soon forgotten. Outkast has made such a record. It's called Stankonia, and since it was released last Halloween, it's sold more than three million copies, peaked at number two on Billboard's album chart and spawned a pair of hit singles. It also topped the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll, which is perhaps the most prestigious accolade the duo reeled in amid a flood of kowtowing press. Last week, Outkast embarked on a 29-city, six-week-long tour that has them swing- ing by Detroit's Fox Theater tonight, dragging fellow Atlantan Ludacris (of "What's Your Fantasy?" fame) with them. Not that Outkast need to play live. Beside making them multimillionaires, Stankonia was a statement- and-a-half, one which may very well have earned the group a spot in the pantheon of great forward-think- ing black musicians, right alongside the funksters and R&B singers they grew up listening to. "This thing keeps building," said Andre Benjamin a/k/a Andre 3000 a/k/a just Dr6. "When I read Prince books, he's always sayin' how he just wants to sing like Smokey Robinson. And he was also a big George Clinton fan. Prince was like the next step of that, you know? And I'm a huge Prince fan, so to even be put in the same sentence as any of those peo- ple is a blessing. All I can say is that I love those peo- ple to death, and I hope people love us like I love them." Dre has reason to expect comparisons with his heroes, since Clinton in particular has always been Outkast's spiritual and sonic forbear. Beginning with their debut LP, (1994's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, a record with an appropriately Clinton-esque name), Outkast co- opted both his astral funk sound and pimp poses. Having gone all-out space-funk for 1996's ATLiens, Aquemini (1998) found the duo edging toward with hip-hop maximalism, drawing on new sounds and elastic grooves and even dishing out a certified pop hit (and prompting a stupid lawsuit) in "Rosa Parks." Stankonia's full-on maximalism has less to do with the group's influences than its resourcefulness. The drum 'n bass-isms of "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Bagdhad)" are but one sonic coup de grace that most hip-hoppers couldn't pull off half as well as these guys do, let alone within a song that's garnered big- time airplay and been deemed buzz-worthy by MTV "From listening to just straight drum 'n bass, you kinda know what the street of America will accept," Dr6 explained. "Drum 'n bass or jungle in its sim- plest form or in its origin will probably never work in America, It might work in some clubs, but what you do is take it and make it your own." Mainstreamers as they are, Outkast have the pop smarts to keep the experiments and appropriation from turning into indulgent hip-hop pastiche. On Stankonia, hooks abound. From the way Dre drawls as he rhymes "pie" with "why" on "Gasoline Dreams" to "Ms. Jackson"'s sing-song lamentations to the slinky synths of "I'll Call Before I Come," you're sucked into their cosmic urban playground, where the music's just as interesting as the sur- roundings. The record also works because Dr6 and Big Boi are simply two entertaining and utterly talented MCs. If their cosmopolitanism differentiates them from less-ambitious contemporaries, they've gone global because they lead such interesting lives and manage to set them to music. There's some of the requisite respect-yoself, etc., conceits, to be sure, but Stankonia is by and large the soundtrack to these guys' exploits: Apologizing to their ex's mamas, cavorting around with their homeboys, praising the ghetto women who keep them real By Marie Bernard Daily Arts Writer Courtesy of Arisa Outcast demonstrates their thug appeal In a very, very subtle way. while foolin' around with groupies, waxing philo- sophic about brothers and sisters whose dreams have been deferred by pregnancy and drug arrests, not giving a damn about the American dream while keeping their own egos in check and not popping a single cap in anyone's ass. With so much going on, Stankonias sprawl won't be easy to recreate live, but Outkast certainly aren't rolling over and planning the sort of bullshit live show that's become the hip-hop counterpart to the State Fair classic rock gig. "For our show, it's going to be me, Big Boi, our DJ, three background singers and two guitarists," Dr6 said. "And we also have the crowd-pleasers - dancers. We also got a nice light show. I guess it's a little otherworldly. I really don't know what you call it" Call it Stank-love, live. "Stankonia," by the way, refers to "the place from which all funky things come." Rest assured, there'll be some funky things coming from the Fox Theater tonight. - Jason Birchmeier conducted the interview with Andrd Benjamin that was excerpted for this article. Over the past two decades, Brooklyn-born Lorna Simpson has come into her own as a gifted and groundbreaking female photograph- er. In the past, her photography has penetrated Se ro such subjects as SCenarios sexuality, con- Museum of Art cepts of the body, the through May 13, 2001 A f r i c a n - American expe- rience and human relation- . i&',ships. Her cur- rent exhibition at the University Museum of Art, "Scenarios ," consists of three film-projection works and a number of black-and- white photographs.. The exhibit is both artistically alluring and technically ingenious. Simpson's work explores both the process by which photography is done and how we view photographs. Her pictures are often accompanied by a single line of text, which reflects Simpson's interestL in how a person "reads" a photo- graph. Her prints of remarkably normal situations are never- theless mentally stimulating and visually stunning. Simpson was originally trained in photography at the "I'll have a pizza School of Visual and yes, I do me Arts in New York City. She received her masters degree in fine arts and film from University of California at San Diego. Her earlier work concentrates more on the anonymous figure, but her current exhibit seems to be a more concrete examination of human communication. Recently, the focus of her work has shifted from strict photography a real OURF