10 Rap Albums That Every Rock Fan Should Listen To

At the start of the '00s, no one really knew the rules of what made a pop hit anymore. Though the teenbopper crowd was still tuning into TRL every day, there were many bands that were pushing the boundaries of what they could do within their genre. And then we come to Stankonia, where Andre and Big Boi practically threw the entire rulebook out the window.

From one song to the next on here, there's no guessing where both of them are going to go. After already serving up a psychedelic experience on Aquemini a few years earlier, OutKast started to delve into different sonic avenues without a care in the world, with songs like Ms. Jackson working just as well on the radio alongside the likes of Nelly Furtado at the time. In the deep cuts though, we were in for a smack in the face on every single track.

On first listen to something like Gasoline Dreams, you'd swear that Andre is trying on his rocker impersonation, which only gets better on BOB, where he flips up his flow and turns in one of the most frantic hip hop songs that would ever come out in the '00s. Even though this was the first time that Andre was stretching his talents in OutKast, this is ultimately what drove them apart creatively. That's not a slight against the music here though. If anything, Stankonia feels like the one album that takes every intense genre imaginable and throws it into a blender.