Outkast—the iconic Southern Hip-Hop duo of André 3000 and Big Boi—released their fourth studio album, Stankonia, in 2000.
The 24-track effort included the single “So Fresh So Clean,” which was produced by Organized Noize, the Grammy Award-nominated production trio of Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray and the late Rico Wade. The track peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in October 2020.
But “So Fresh So Clean” almost didn’t happen. Speaking to SPIN, Sleepy Brown, who also contributed vocals to the track, revealed 3 Stacks initially didn’t feel inclined to rap on it.
“The funny thing is André didn’t really like it at first,” Brown said. “André didn’t like that record. It wasn’t like he didn’t think it was good—it just wasn’t matching where he was. We really just did it for Big [Boi]. We knew André was moving to something else, but we knew on that album it needed that hood theme. When Big heard it, he loved it. We thought Dre was going to be happy with it at first, but he really wasn’t.”
Then bassist Preston Crump changed André’s mind.
“[André] was cool, but he didn’t really like it until Preston, our bass player, played a cold line on that song,” Brown continued. “When Dre heard that, he got excited and came up with ‘the coolest motherfunkers on the planet’ part. He was following that line he heard. Thanks to Preston, that’s the reason why Dre even got on that record.”
Big Boi, however, immediately wrote his own verse to the beat.
“The song started with me because I heard the melody, and when I went over to Rico’s house, I started playing it for him on the Rhodes,” Brown remembered. “Then he threw a beat on it. So I played that little part, went in and just hummed the melody, and then put all the strings on it.
“It’s a very simple record. It’s not cluttered [and doesn’t have] a lot of sounds. It’s just basically bass, drums, keys and a little lead on it. I wanted Rico to write it because I love the way he flipped words and did wordplay. Once Big Boi heard the hook, he just came with it.”
Sleepy Brown also concluded the song made an enormous impact on his own life.
“It completely changed my career,” he said. “‘So Fresh, So Clean’ gave everybody a chance to put the face with that voice. And you know, for a lot of people, it was just like, ‘OK, that’s who that is.’ So that opened the door to ‘The Way You Move’ and all these other records that I’ve done with them. And the true, true fans knew who I was.”
