OutKast — Dungeon Family, East Point, Atlanta

OutKast — André 3000 (André Benjamin) and Big Boi (Antwan Patton) — met at Tri-Cities High School in East Point, a suburb south of Atlanta, and went on to become the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful hip hop duo in history. Their six albums — from Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik (1994) through Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003) — expanded the boundaries of hip hop more radically than any other act of their era, incorporating funk, psychedelia, soul, jazz, and electronic music into a sound that was unmistakably Southern and unmistakably their own.

The Dungeon Family — the collective of Atlanta musicians and producers that surrounded OutKast, including Goodie Mob, Organized Noize, and Sleepy Brown — took its name from the basement studio of producer Rico Wade's mother's house in East Point, where much of early Atlanta hip hop was created. That basement (nicknamed 'The Dungeon') was where OutKast recorded their earliest material and where the Atlanta sound — lush, funky, psychedelic, deeply rooted in Southern Black musical traditions — was developed. André 3000's declaration at the 1995 Source Awards that 'the South got something to say' was a turning point in hip hop geography.

East Point and the surrounding south Atlanta suburbs remain the spiritual home of OutKast's music. Tri-Cities High School, where André and Big Boi met, continues to operate. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (2003) won the Grammy for Album of the Year — only the second hip hop album to do so — and sold over 11 million copies. André 3000's 2023 album New Blue Sun, a solo ambient flute record, confirmed his status as one of the most unpredictable artists in American music.