Andre called this a little something; Big Boi admonished him for understatement, but, no, yeah, it’s just a little something, Antwan. Dre continues the starchy mashing of roots that marked The Love Below as “experimental” when really it was just “not rap.” This, too, is not rap. It’s not even hip-hop. That’s not the problem.

This song’s a new black spiritual, a midnight rambler, a moonshine holler, with all the stench and wide-eyed froth sterilized out of it. It comes in at a concise three and a half minutes. Vocals are expertly multi-tracked, the drums are fake, and the production is clean and compressed. In short, it sounds like a number off a musical’s soundtrack, which it is, but there’s this part of me that protests, and it’s the same part of me that just wants another OutKast album. I don’t know what happened to the stream and grit that caused “The Mighty O” to totally fuck my stereo feng shui, but it’s sadly absent on these here “Blues.” This is as glossy as a magazine cover, pristine as a sashimi serving plate. The track gains some heft after the 2:30 mark when a descending piano line idles down the spine of the track’s strum and a choral morass works itself up into a swirl, the first hint of some depth to the song’s stretched sugar form, only to get its feet tripped by a glitzy outro that’s very Andre 3000 does Broadway. God, but I want to believe. If only I weren’t separated from the stage by theatrical lighting and sheets of polyurethane.

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