What is the “Mighty O,” besides the new stanky twist that OutKast breaks upon Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher”? Calloway was talking about a Pretty Woman prostitute, a gold digger with a heart of gold. So is the “O” sex? Near the end of this track Big Boi calls it the worst thing that the government’s trickled into the poor since crack cocaine. So it’s probably not sex specifically, as funny/interesting an interpretation as that might be. And you do get the feeling that the Kast loves the O, that they’re its dealers and preachers; maybe the O is pure pleasure, because pleasure is one of the most common means of control, and the control exhibited here is total in its might. Like Minnie, the intent might be a little suspect, but the harm feels so good. Or we could just go with the obvious and say the 'O' stands for OutKast.

First off, in case you haven’t heard, Dre raps. Then Big Boi raps. We’re talking about the same song here. The beat’s all woozy string chops and chalkboard drums dribbling off the edges of the dust-layered vinyl. It’s intoxicating but also perfectly mixed, shit-faced yet tightly wound, which is sort of the legacy of the best OutKast beats. The Kast warps Cab’s “hidey-ho” for the hook, providing perhaps the most precise in-music footnote for where they’ve been getting their ingratiating Southern nadsat. But whereas Cab grew up in Baltimore to head bands called the Alabamians or the Missourians, OutKast are the real ATL deal, and hearing this song makes me believe that they’re better suited for the Calloway-esque parts they’ll play in Idlewild than Calloway himself ever would have been.

A lot of people have been framing “The Mighty O” in terms of “pretty damn good” but not “earth-shattering.” For one such as me, who has always been bewitched by OutKast’s charms, who considers them perhaps the most important rap group of the past decade, who was completely unprepared for this song to come crashing through the parlor doors of the radio, glove-slapping the plebeian flows and malnourished snap music of E-40 and Bubba Sparxxx on the way in, Dre drawling his cadence accents Southernplayalistically, Boi flowing unseemly meters so he can rap, “I’ll hurt you like the president’s approval ratings by serving your ass with words, fool,” well, my earth was pretty well shattered. The split of The Love Below and Speakerboxxx left a lot of shit-talk and end-of-group conjecture for the OutKast fan to wade through. To my ears, “The Mighty O” kills all that, and the gratification’s huge. You want to talk single-of-the-year honors, so far it’s this, “Mr. Me Too," "Crazy" and “Promiscuous Girl,” standing tall at the top. The radio DJ was like, I was like, the world should be like:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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