'the best hip-hop album--Big Boi's Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty'

'Ladies and gentlemen, the best hip-hop album of 2007-- or 2015, take your pick. Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty became notorious for frustrating the bottom-line industry heads at Jive to the point where they just sat on it-- not enough easy-sell, cheap-hit material, they told Big Boi. They wanted a ringtone; they got "Tangerine", which proved problematic in that cell phones don't have big enough subwoofers. They wanted a "Lollipop" knockoff; they got "Shutterbugg", an 808 funk monster so uncompromisingly true to the Dungeon Fam legacy that its answer to Weezy's Auto-Tune was a Jimmy Spicer "The Bubble Bunch"-style robo-voice loop run through a vintage talkbox. Now, nearly three years after it should have been released, the long-stewing record not only sounds like a right-album-at-the-right-time classic, it sounds like something lesser artists are going to keep catching up to half a decade from now. Nobody does retrofuturism quite like the production team assembled here, and in advancing the sounds of mothership space-funk (Organized Noize's "Turns Me On" and "Fo Yo Sorrows"), Southern trunk-rattle (Mr. DJ's "Daddy Fat Sax"; André 3000's "You Ain't No DJ") and slow-jam gangsta soul (Lil Jon's "Hustle Blood"; Cutmaster Swiff and Big Boi's co-production "Shine Blockas"), the sound of Sir Lucious Left Foot is an exercise in recognizing traditions and pushing them miles ahead. Big Boi crowns it all with a lyrical acumen so detailed and charismatic-- acting as benevolent hustler, knuckle-dusting elder statesman, trickster smartass and street-level philosopher-- that he easily proves to the rest of the world what heads knew all along: there is no "that other dude" in OutKast.'

--Nate Patrin