Both have also done well in their acting careers too. Big Boi recently starred in ATL, which was massively successful in urban cities nationwide. Andre has had a couple of different movie roles, most notably his parts in Four Brothers and Be Cool.
Now, the two come back together to collaborate both in song and on film. Idlewild is set in the Prohibition-era American south. Big Boi plays Rooster, a club manager, and Andre plays his partner and club piano player, Pervical. The two face obstacles on their road in the form of gangsters looking to take over the club and Pervical choosing between his love and his obligations to his father.
The music for this movie is appropriately done. The sounds heard throughout this disc sound very much like Prohibition-era music. Tracks like Idlewild Blue (Don'tchu Worry 'Bout Me) and Call The Law do a great job of capturing the era's musical stylings and provide two of the discs great tracks.
The disc does take a few minutes to really get going. Before Idlewild Blue, listeners have a two minute Introduction that has nothing to do with the movie; instead, it is folks talking about the release of the movie. It leads directly into The Mighty "O" which, though not a terrible track, is not exactly the best track to highlight the disc. This is followed by Peaches, which is a rather dull track, definitely ranking near the bottom of the disc's tracks.
However, once the disc does get going, it rarely stops. Aside from a few poor choices (Most notably Greatest Show On Earth, which features Macy Gray), the disc is chock full of excellent song selections. Morris Brown's use of a marching band adds some nice flavor to an already pretty solid track, The Train and Life Is Like A Musical provide back-to-back solid tracks with two very different styles, and When I Look In Your Eyes provides the disc with a great love song.
The last track, A Bad Note, is a truly intriguing track. It is, aside from the last two minutes or so, just an instrumental. And, if the song was merely the final minute, it would be a very dull and poor track. However, the just-a-shade-under-nine-minutes track (Clocking in at 8:47) becomes great in it's ability to continuously build up, layer by layer. It makes what is an otherwise poor track into one great instrumental.
Overall, Idlewild has it's ups and downs. However, when an artist can consistently give listeners discs that are more than 20 tracks long, it is hard to believe that there wouldn't be at least one track that wasn't as great s the others. Outkast's ability to provide great music consistently over long periods of disc time (In this case, over 25 tracks and almost 80 full minutes of music) is what makes this disc a great addition to the collection. A pleathora of great songs masks the few slip-ups on Idlewild.