PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY knows that Outkast's latest album is brilliant. But I didn't know exactly how brilliant it was until I had to review it.

That's because, despite all the accolades heaped on the duo's astonishing Stankonia – that it has elevated the game of hip-hop, provided an antidote to this or that malady run rampant through the genre – its greatest contribution, as far as I can see, is to music writing.

One of my beefs with some mainstream music scribes is this: They bitch and moan about hip-hop's cartoonish excesses, crank up all the "what does it say about us" rhetoric, whenever Eminem belches into a mic. Then when faced with writing about something substantial they manage to say absolutely nothing of consequence. Think of all the reviews of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill that gushed about its "life-affirming positivity" (gak) or cast it as a "welcome relief" from, well, whatever (yawn).

Stankonia, you see, made all that stuff impossible. This was a piece of work so compelling, so wide ranging, that clichéd descriptions of it seemed less like lapses in imagination than crimes against nature. While reviewing it, not only did I feel completely unable to write anything that captured everything I felt or thought about the album, but I felt like Andre 3000 was standing behind me, critiquing every word as it popped up on my screen. ("Ebullient? 'B.O.B.' is ebullient? Nigga, please. You need to come stronger than that, baby.")

Not only did it make me elevate my modest critical game (and, judging from some of the clips I've seen, a lot of other writers have stepped up as well), but also it caused me to wonder just how impotent Stankonia must have made someone not accustomed to writing about hip-hop feel (yeah, as hard it is to believe, a lot of scribes still seem uncomfortable with it). I also wondered how much of the sociophilosophical objections/discussions/dismissals of hip-hop were fueled by that sense of impotence – when, on "Humble Mumble," Dre talks about "making a critic shit her drawers," you wonder whether it was out of surprise that hip-hop was more than drugs and alcohol or from the realization that her all-purpose hip-hop angle had just been kneecapped. (When I first started writing about music in the early '90s, I wondered why some writers could write 20 inches on a Michelle Shocked show and less than 10 on the Digital Underground's entire output. Now I know why).

Stankonia also reminded me just how fundamentally stupid a lot of the all-purpose angles were. Take the old standby "rescuing hip-hop." Rescuing it from what, exactly? Yeah, Jigga takes that ghetto-fabulous shit too far sometimes, but dang, I haven't heard anybody rap in 9/8 before (as he does in "Hey Papi"). And gimme the Yin Yang Twins over "intelligent drum 'n' bass" any damn day. This album did nothing less but remind me that hip-hop, for all its flaws, is still the standard in pop culture, reaffirming my faith in the eternally self-regenerating nature of creative energy. How it could step outside itself to manifest itself in our real-time existence; touching hearts and minds and, eventually, changing the world. Whoops! Sorry Dre ... Yeah, I know that was some flat bullshit ... I'll try again.... (Tony Green)

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