Outkast - Prototype

What this video is

Released in 2004 as the fifth and final single from Outkast's landmark double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below — itself the first hip-hop album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year — Prototype sits at the apex of André 3000's solo artistic statement. The video, André's directorial debut, consciously invokes Afrofuturist cinema, particularly Sun Ra's Space Is the Place, embedding the love song within a cosmic…

Why it matters

Prototype is a canonical example of neo-soul's integration into hip-hop's mainstream vocabulary in the early 2000s. As a guitar-driven funk ballad produced and performed entirely by André 3000, it demonstrated that hip-hop artists could abandon rap convention entirely and succeed on pure sonic and…

The director

André 3000 (André Lauren Benjamin), born May 27, 1975, in Atlanta, Georgia, is one half of the seminal hip-hop duo Outkast. Widely regarded as one of the most inventive artists in hip-hop history, he wrote, produced, and performed the entirety of The Love…