Sir Lucious Left Foot... The Son of Chico Dusty (Deluxe Edition)

Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty was a few years in the making with a label change and all the attendant leaked tracks and snags. Big Boi's first proper solo album nonetheless sounds like it could have come together in a couple of drama-free (if somewhat frenzied) months. It’s one of the loosest, most varied, and entertaining albums of its time. Big Boi is in top form, rattling off agile, head-spinning, and frequently irreverent tongue twisters like “Witness the n*gga that spit that vicious pitbull attack s**t when it comes to this rap shit” and “When she’s liquored up I’m leaving my fingerprints on her butt.” The variety of beats, most of which Big Boi co-produced, are even more mystifying, slathered in ideas yet robust in foundation. What’s most prominent in “Tangerine” is the knocking/snapping rhythm, but it enters with what could have developed into a grunge dirge and incorporates booming bass, a synthesizer vamp filtered through a large plastic tube, electro zaps, scorching guitar flameout, and some piano fit for a power ballad’s coda. It’s an eloquently crude strip-club anthem (of course). The superbly bombastic “General Patton” is a melee of triumphant horns, a blasting opera choir, and rallying rhymes like “Pick on somebody your own size and f**k around, get kilt/But not like the kilt above the knees/BB will plant you n*ggas like seeds, or fertilizer for the trees.” Anchored in whomping bass and rattlesnake hi-hats, the battle anthem is capped by Big Rube's fathoms-deep-toned recitation of the slayed’s last rites. Bullfrog electro that quotes the System and Soul II Soul, a victory lap aided by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and loads of low-slung Southern funk — not to mention what sounds like a warm, bittersweet spin on Diddy’s “Last Night” — are also pulled off to equally excellent effect. Sir Lucious Left Foot lacks something as universally appealing and tidy as “The Way You Move,” but that is not a problem — not when Big Boi casually conveys that he is as much an imaginative artist as his other half in OutKast. [A clean version of the album was also released.]