OPINION: For a Black kid from the South, Outkast changed everything about how I viewed hip-hop and music. 

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

Over the weekend, it was announced that Outkast, along with Chubby Checker, Bad Company, The White Stripes, Soundgarden, and Cyndi Lauper would be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The announcement was made live during a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-themed episode of American Idol. When I saw the news, aside from saying to myself “of course,” I also had a moment of reflection about how significant Outkast has been to hip-hop education and life. While most hip-hop groups, especially those who came to prominence in the 1990s have been less concerned about mainstream accolades (like the Grammys), being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame seems significant. 

For starters, it’s an acknowledgment from the “establishment” of the power and strength of hip-hop, which has seen various acts of the past few years be inducted. Past hip-hop inductees include Eminem, DJ Kool Herc, A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliot, Jay-Z, LL Cool J, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G, and N.W.A., Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Run-D.M.C., and Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. 

How the Wu-Tang Clan isn’t already in the Hall is beyond me, but thankfully, Outkast will soon add the Rock & Roll Hall to their already cemented legacy. Outkast is a group that made a lot of us kids in the South who grew up on hip-hop feel seen in a way that other groups didn’t. Sure, there were plenty of groups from the south that preceded the Atlanta duo before they hit the national stage in 1994—groups like Houston’s The Geto Boys and Memphis’ 8Ball & MJG, to name a few—but there was something about Outkast that made them different. 

For one, they represented Atlanta during a time when Atlanta was becoming a Black national curiosity. For those of us with ties to the city—my step-mother is from Atlanta, so my grandmother’s home on the west side of the city felt like ground zero for all of the excitement of Atlanta’s music scene, largely spawning from the west and southwest parts of the city—they felt like “home.” Their first video for “Player’s Ball” had such a familiar feel in 1993. I was 14 years old when “Player’s Ball” dropped and in love with hip-hop.

Most of the music I loved, though, came from the West Coast. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Doggy Dogg took up all of the space in my tape deck, and the videos from those places introduced me to far-off places I didn’t know if I’d ever see. The same went for New York City. Hip-hop made me long for a city I wouldn’t see for the first time until June 2001, when I was 22 years old. But Outkast shot their videos in Atlanta, and I knew Atlanta. I saw streets I knew and stores that weren’t far from my grandmother’s house. I saw home. 

That feeling carried me through their entire career. Despite being one of the most successful hip-hop groups ever, their sound changed almost lock-step with the city, if not changing the sound of the city themselves. I’ve long told the story about how I can remember the exact K-Mart parking space I was in when I first heard the life-changing record (for me, anyway), “Elevators (Me & U)” in the summer of 1996. That song meant THAT much to me.

It changed how I listened to music and how I interacted with what I knew to be hip-hop. While their first album was a Southern classic, they bucked convention and turned their sophomore album, “ATLiens” into an ode to space and ethereal sound. The whole album sounds muddy, a sound Kanye West and Drake would popularize over a decade later, turning it into the sound of music as a whole. 

Their magnum opus, “Aquemini,” was the “one.” It was the album that made sure that the entire country had to rock with Outkast. They were lyrically at the top of their games and sonically on a different planet, delving into funk, jazz, boom-bap…basically every form of Black music. And since we were all like, “Yes!” they took their formula up a notch with “Stankonia,” an album that gave us two of their most genre-bending records in “B.O.B.” and “Ms. Jackson.”

And because no discussion about Outkast can be had without their final act (as a duo) in eschewing tradition to make records that challenge everything we knew about hip-hop, “Speakerboxx/The Love Below” came out in 2003 and because it was so left-field, ended up winning the Grammy Award for “Album of the Year,” only the second hip-hop act to ever do so, following Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” 

For those of us who grew up with Outkast, their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is just another feather in their cap. It’s a cool accolade that allows fans like myself to revisit their catalogs and appreciate them anew. But that appreciation would exist with or without any other accolades.

When I was 14, Outkast made a permanent fan out of me by giving me a sound that looked like the spaces I knew and was familiar with. Hip-hop has long been a music about the environment and the people and Outkast was talking about them both. It helped that it felt like I could run into them at the grocery store if the right errand called. Their contributions to music are essential at this point; they belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and I’m excited that they continue to get their flowers while they’re still around to smell them.

Peace up, A-town down. 

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Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).