3/27
robert puccinelli
on
Outkast, “Hey Ya”
For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.
March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee
Several years ago a professor told me that if I haven’t been published, then I’m not a writer. It was depressing to hear, but I understood where she was coming from. No one with any authority had recognized my work and nobody had read it aside from teachers and some students. If writers write to be read, I was not a writer.
When I finished my MFA Thesis (which my retiring thesis advisor, a published writer, said was one of the six best he’d read in his long career) friends asked what I’d do with it. I told them I’d stack it in my desk drawer on top of my great American novel, my Complete Collected Poetry and my Complete Collected Short Stories).
While pursuing the aforementioned MFA, I luckily found myself in one of Kathleen Rooney’s classes. Later, for another class, I interviewed her. That interview was rejected by publishers, but when she had a new book coming out, she invited me to try again. Our interview for Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey was published in The Brooklyn Rail. Suddenly, I was a writer.
When Kathleen and our mutual friend Eric were visiting, I discovered that they both disliked my favorite band The Beatles. Eric said if I created a playlist of their ten best songs, he would listen to it. I went overboard and ended up with 30 songs with brief written introductions. Eric never listened to it (understandably, since I’d broken the rules in my out of control enthusiasm), but Kathleen did. I didn’t convert her to The Beatles, but she liked my writing about music and told me to suggest an out of tourney essay for March Faxness. Thus my essay on Patti Smith’s cover of “Hey Joe” was born.
Kathleen may disagree and I may be wrong, but I believe the only reason I have been published is because people trust her taste. Therefore, her recommendation gets me in the door and my words are read by people who would never encounter them. I’m incredibly honored to have my essays included in March Xness amongst official writers. With this piece, I was defeated in the first round by Sejal Shah, who had an NPR Best Book of 2020 (also best of by Lit Hub, Los Angeles Times, and PEN America).
Being defeated in the first round was a bummer because, as Elana Levin writes about “California Girls”: “Losing in round one meant fewer people would read my work, and that was the ultimate disappointment.” Cori A. Winrock writes that Hole’s “Gold Dust Woman” was defeated by Patti Smith’s “Gloria.” That I can understand. But when I lucked out and snagged my favorite song in the entire March Danceness tourney, I did not expect OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” to get knocked out by Amerie’s “1 Thing.”
When OutKast lost, the totals for “Hey Ya!” were actually higher than “1 Thing,” so I wrote a humiliating missive asking if there might have been a mistake. I was hilariously desperate. Turns out, I hadn’t accounted for the time change and the last hour didn’t count.
I definitely started to feel better about OutKast’s defeat when Amerie and Sejal Shah ended up kicking butt all the way to the final. OutKast had lost in the first round to the eventual champion of the entire tournament.
Approval is beautifully affirming, but we create to make meaning for ourselves. The band I’m in released our debut album and we have less than a hundred streams. But it’s out in the world and still feels like an accomplishment and we learned a lot. I finally finished my first play and I’ve done all I can to make it great, but no theater company has consented to read it. However, realizing my fantasy of creating a screwball comedy of the 1930s (inspired by my favorite movie The Awful Truth) fulfilled me and still does. My MFA Thesis has been read by four people, two of whom were my thesis advisors. But that writing journey brought me to Italy and Poland, immersed me in the history of World War II, connected me to my family’s roots, and enabled me to make meaning out of a scary hospitalization. What a blessing to live such a privileged existence that I have time to create art and write essays. The fact that the ones I write for March Xness go out into the world and find real readers is privilege atop privilege. Thank you, Patti Smith, thank you, OutKast, thank you, Kathleen, thank you Ander and Megan, and thank you March Xness! —Robert Puccinelli
OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” by Robert Puccinelli
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “Progress is the realization of Utopias.” With “Hey Ya!” OutKast realized a dancefloor Utopia.
The idea of Utopia was already present in the names of the early clubs from which disco would emerge. Frankie Grasso (acclaimed as the first DJ to ever beat match, using two turntables to blend the end of the last song with the beginning of the next one) began his career at Salvation in 1967. In 1969 he transformed an abandoned New York church into a safe space called The Sanctuary. The underground club often acclaimed as the greatest of them all was The Paradise Garage in Soho.
The underground made its way into the mainstream with 1977’s Saturday Night Fever: working stiff Tony Manero submits to the 9 to 5 grind in order to make enough money to escape into the weekend. His regular Joe existence is forgotten each Saturday night as he dons the polyester finery his labor has paid for; his crown a coiffed pompadour. At the 2001 Odyssey Disco, Tony reigns as royalty, an aristocrat with no obligations beyond keeping time with the beat. In losing himself to the rhythm, he finds himself.
Frankie Knuckles, the DJ at the “abandoned” industrial Chicago warehouse that gave House Music its name, recalled that when his all-night dance parties ended on Sunday mornings, his patrons would be leaving as services at the nearby Old St. Patrick’s Church were ending and the congregations would briefly mingle. “The Warehouse was our church,” he said, meaning a place where community was forged. For those ostracized for their sexual orientation, new families could be found and new connections made in the sweat and heat of the beat.
On August 25, 2004, the street where the Warehouse stood—at 206 S. Jefferson—was renamed Frankie Knuckles Way in his honor. That evening the Godfather of House spun a set at the Spirit of Music Garden. All the old househeads came to celebrate, a few in flamboyant finery flapping their fans to ward off the heat like Spanish flamenco dancers. When storm clouds gathered Knuckles played Eddie Kendricks’ “A Date with the Rain” so that thunder was coming from the speakers as well as the sky. Umbrellas bounced in unison to the beat. I was there. My skinny jeans, Chinese Red Army T-shirt, and hippie hair were drenched with perspiration even before the rain came. I was dancing amongst a bevy of divas as one of Frankie’s newfound disciples. You could feel the love. We were all one. Music had united us.
I appreciate adulterated pleasures, the complexity of irony, lyrics subverting music and vice versa. But on a dancefloor, I prefer to believe in possibilities, in a common humanity, in the notion that we can all get along and accept each other. The goal is the annihilation of self-consciousness. Amy Poehler said, “No one looks stupid when they’re having fun.” When your body is moving and being carried by a groove, the experience feels transcendent. You are leaving your worries behind, shuffling off your mortal coil, ascending to a higher plane. You are a whirling dervish communing with God, a Krishna in a kirtan falling into a meditative state, a lone dancer on ecstasy at a rave feeling connected with everyone around them.
“Paper Planes” by M.I.A. is a masterpiece, but I don’t want to think, when I am dancing, about how “some I murder, some I let go.” Or how “all I wanna do is … take your money.” Dancefloor Utopias are for hugging, not mugging, for escaping reality and visiting Utopia for a few hours.
Like Jimi Hendrix (who he portrayed in the 2013 biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side), OutKast’s Andre 3000 is a Utopian. In the Sixties, he’d have been called a hippie. His new album, his first solo endeavor, has no rapping but lots of flute solos and ambient soundscapes to yoga to. It certainly won’t sell as many units as an OutKast record, but Andre enjoys his newfound anonymity: “Being famous sucks. It’s so unhuman. There’s a classical pianist who said it’s detrimental to a human being to have so much admiration because it actually changes the way you think.” Andre’s always been a searcher. When he and Big Boi formed OutKast, their first hit was “Player’s Ball”, about a gathering of pimps in their hometown of Atlanta. By the time of “Hey Ya!” Andre was finding inspiration far afield, in The Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The Smiths, and The Hives, bands certainly not considered traditional inspirations for hip-hop. He told Rolling Stone that “Hey Ya!” features the first guitar chords he ever learned.
I’m old enough to remember the sterile wasteland that was popular radio in the early 2000s. My 1995 Saturn had a chandelier (as in the light dangled down from wires when it detached from the roof), but no tape or CD player, so I was condemned to the homogeneity of the airwaves. One day while driving on the expressway, “Hey Ya!” burst out of the speakers like a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence searching for signs of life. I was teleported to church, to that Sunday morning gospel service that was happening as Frankie Knuckles was spinning his last jams at the Warehouse. I was in the congregation, the spirit filling me. “Beyoncées and Lucy Lius” were invocations of Gods, the syllables that comprised those names filled with a musicality and meaning I’d never detected before. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I wanted to take my arms off the steering wheel, hold them open, slam the accelerator to the floor, and ascend into the light. I rushed to a record store, bought the album, copied the song onto a mix tape, and sent it to the love of my life who’d just dumped me, as if to say, “This song is who I am! Can you hear it? Can you feel it? This is the joy we could be having! Don’t you want me?”
Apparently, my reaction to my first hearing of the track was far from typical. According to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, when the song was released to radio:
a company named Arbitron was testing a new technology that made it possible to figure out how many people […] switched channels during a specific song. [Listeners] hated it so much that nearly a third of them changed the station within the first thirty seconds of the song. […] It didn’t sound like other songs. […] Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard
Therefore, we “unconsciously crave recognizability” and that recognizability makes a song “sticky,” something that won’t jar us and prompt us to change the channel.
The challenge for the record company and for radio was to make something fresh feel familiar: “To become part of an established listening habit, [… ‘Hey Ya!’] had to be camouflaged,” meaning that . … “DJs started making sure that whenever ‘Hey Ya!’ was played, it was sandwiched between sticky songs that were already popular.” Tom Webster, a radio consultant, explained that, “‘It’s textbook playlist theory now […]. ‘Play a new song between two consensus popular hits.’” Sometimes they’d even play the exact same song before and after, as if “Hey Ya!” was the nutrition in a Wonder Bread sandwich. The originality of “Hey Ya!” forced the creation of this new paradigm. (One mark of the single’s seeming strangeness was a recent internet trend claiming the song’s time signature is 11/4. When people tried to play along with a click track or a metronome, the timing would change, messing them up. This happens because the three bars of 4/4 time are followed by a single bar of 2/4 time, before reverting back to 4/4 for the final two bars.)
Matthew White and Sara Whiteley’s academic essay “‘Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance’: A cognitive approach to listener attention in OutKast’s ‘Hey Ya!’” argues that the lyrics present a depressing view of relationships: “We’ve been together, / but separate’s always better / when there’s feelings involved,” not to mention, “If what they say is / nothing is forever / then what makes love the exception?” These analysts’ argument is similar to that made about Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Lyrically, the song is dark, addressing war, joblessness, and loss. However, musically the song sounds patriotic. The drumbeats are martial, the guitars ringing, the chant of the chorus defiant and triumphant. To my ears, “Born in the USA” encourages persisting in the face of troubles, pushing onwards, and striving to make your country into what you envision it to be. It’s a song about the lies we’re sold, but it’s still a song of faith in the possibilities of the American Dream. The way Springsteen sings his mantra of a chorus, being “Born in the USA” is a blessing, not a curse.
When my heart got smashed to smithereens by my “soul mate”, I found solace in Kate Bush, who seemed to accept me in ways my ex could not. I played her song “Eat the Music” over and over again: “You put your hands in,” Kate sang to me, “And rip your heart out … Insides out / All is revealed / Not only women bleed. … Insides out / He’s a woman at heart / And I love him for that … All emotion … Eat the music.” Lyrically, “Hey Ya!” may be read as cynical and pessimistic, but it takes the pain of the end of a relationship and replaces it with faith in what is still possible, in all the other people out there, in the happiness that awaits if we are brave and free enough to share all of ourselves. That optimism may be partially obscured by the lyrics, but it’s vividly visible in the music. Andre told VH1, “I think it’s more important to be happy than to meet up to somebody else’s expectations or the world’s expectations of what a relationship should be.” The song seems to be saying that you can choose happiness and find it almost anywhere if you are willing to look.
After my breakup, I escaped to Cuba. On my way, I made the unfortunate decision to visit a resort highly recommended by my brother and his girlfriend on the island of Cozumel. Nursing my broken heart, I discovered there was not another single person there, only couples on honeymoons. “Hey Ya!” blasted out from a private wedding party into the starry night taunting me. The next day I was so lonely that when I swam with a dolphin, I felt like she was consoling me—at least this beautiful sea creature likes me!
“Hey Ya!” seems to reflect on the breakup of Andre’s relationship with Erykah Badu. They loved each other, they had a son, but that was not enough to keep them together and “the thought alone is killing me right now.” As he sings, “Thank God for Mom and Dad / for sticking through together / because we don’t know how.” Mom and Dad are an example of what is possible—happy monogamy despite the inevitable travails. Andre is in turmoil, but he expresses his divided consciousness so rhythmically that the rhythm seems to be lifting him out of his misery. His stuttering exclamations are so infectious you can probably hear them in your head as you read: “You think you got it, oh you think you got it, but got it just don’t get it.” “So why oh, why oh / why oh, why oh, why oh / are we so in denial…?”
The lyrics may be articulating problems in relationships, but then Andre points out that nobody listens to the words: “Y’all don’t wanna hear me / —you just wanna dance.” Maybe he shouldn’t be listening to the words either? Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “excessive consciousness is a disease”; sometimes we need to escape the prisons of our minds. Blessedly, the groove is taking Andre out of his head and into his body. Things are getting primal: “Don’t wanna meet your mama. Just wanna make you cumma.”
At a party someone once told me that being cool prevents a lot of fun from being had. Andre asks, “What’s cooler than being cool?” “Ice cold” is the answer. But being ice cold proves impossible in the heat of this intoxicating beat. In syncopation Andre snaps “alright” 14 times in rapid succession as if dismissing “cool” as a worthless façade. He saves his real advice, his most profound scripture, for the “ladies”: “Shake it. Sh-shake it. Shake it. Sh-shake it.” We are moving beyond language. Let us all twitch together. HEY YA!
In the music video, Big-Boi, the other member of OutKast, plays a Brian Epstein figure, an entrepreneurial managerial type encouraging his partner to “act like you got some sense.” Key and Peele have a skit where Big Boi refuses to collaborate with Andre 3000 because he’s turned into a freak who dresses in leprechaun clothes and speaks in different voices. “We was a team,” Big Boi says. “We were on top. Then you went and lost your mind.”
“Look into the pinwheel with your third eye,” Andre responds, “and everything will be revealed.”
Even when the duo formed, they were different from other groups; they chose the name OutKast because they didn’t fit in. By 2003, 3000 was getting weird, leaving hip-hop regalia behind and embracing a freaky, out-there persona, becoming more Prince-like, flirting with androgyny, and designing his own clothes. As he told Rick Rubin:,
I designed [the green tartan trousers for the music video] using fabric I found in my hometown. I got a seamstress to sew them up for me. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as royal green, but that’s what I like to call it. It was fun for me to draw my costumes. Liberating. It became intriguing to me that [my style] pissed a lot of people off, so I kinda just dug in the whole way and started fucking with people. Playing with androgyny, playing with wigs. We felt like we were not of this planet. We were making music that was otherworldly. Let’s look like the music.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in light of these pre-existing differences, Big Boi and 3000 famously split their album in half. BigBoi’s disc, Speakerboxxx, is all rap. Andre barely raps on The Love Below, his half of the album. As he told Fader, “I’m singing around the house, and Erykah’s like: ‘That sounds great. Why are you not doing it?’”
The music video for “Hey Ya!” references the Beatles’ debut appearance on Ed Sullivan, when the USA tuned in their televisions to see a musical revolution. Some of their female fans have argued that Beatlemania was one of the sparks that lit second-wave feminism; in their monomania, groups of girls had found each other and discovered that they were a force that couldn’t be stopped as the baffled authorities tried to control the hysteria of girls gone wild for four men with hair that was far too long to pass as fully masculine. The Beatles’ androgyny (invisible to us now, since long hair on a man is no longer shocking) is evoked as Andre 3000 flails his long locks. OutKast reverses the Beatles’ trip across the pond as the duo performs in London to an audience comprised entirely of screaming ladies, no males in sight. Ryan Phillippe plays the Ed Sullivan MC and introduces the band on black and white television. In sartorial splendor, 3000 plays eight different roles, from Possum Jenkins to Johnny Vulture (“yes ladies, he’s still single”) to drummer Dookie (shirtless but wearing a crown) and the Love Haters (jockey outfits) backing singers. In his persona as lead singer, his hair is thrice the length of the Beatles’ moptops. Just as with Beatlemania, women are fainting, overcome by the presence of The Love Below.
The smash success of “Hey Ya!” helped Speakerboxxx/The Love Below become the best-selling rap album of all time (13x Platinum). I guess one could argue that “ya” means you, but slang.net (and I) disagree: “Ya is slang for ‘Yes,’ a laid-back way to answer in the affirmative, often used in texts and online, may also be used verbally in-person.” Antonym: Nah.
For me, the “Hey” opens space for a question. “Ya!” is the answer. A gospel call and response. A “Ya” is both a “yeah!” and a “yay!”
John Lennon said that when he visited Indica gallery to see an exhibition by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, there was “a ladder which led to a painting hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. I climbed the ladder, looked through the spyglass, and in tiny letters it said, “Yes” (thebeatlesbible.com). If the word had been “no,” he asserts, he never would have met her.
George Harrison recorded an album of kirtans (a form of call and response devotional singing) for the Radha Krishna Temple: “Hare Krishna / Hare Krishna / Krishna Krishna / Hare Hare’ is sung like a mantra. In his song “Awaiting on You All,” George explains the purpose of such meditative repetition: “Chanting the names of the Lord will [set] you free.” One of the neglected songs in the pool for this contest was Armin Van Buuren’s “In and Out of Love,” where in three minutes Sharon den Adel sings the word “love” 27 times. In OutKast’s kirtan, we hear “Ya!” 24 times.
Andre 3000’s affirmation in the face of a collapsing romantic relationship and all the negativity in the world is like Kate Bush singing, “Mmmm, yes” over and over in her song “The Sensual World.” This insistent assertion is as defiant and as liberating as Molly Bloom’s litany of Yes-es at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Out of the depths of confusion and romantic pain comes clarity and hope for the future. So “get on the floor…. / You know what to do.” Surrender. Let the spirit possess you. Start speaking in tongues. Start shaking like a Polaroid picture. And see what develops.
Robert Puccinelli earned an MFA at DePaul University with his thesis Remote Viewing starring Joe Swanberg. He’s just completed his first play, a romantic comedy, has a director attached, and wants your help finding a venue to produce it. If you want to be interviewed for his current documentary, let him know. He’s completing his first novel and has been published in The Brooklyn Review, Lit Hub, and The Chicago Reader. His alter ego performs standup (Zanies and The Improv). He played the lead role in Maggot Brain (https://vimeo.com/268491213). He sings and plays keyboards in the band Happy Nice People (upcoming EP to be released during the 2024 general election). He’s eaten saltah in beautiful Yemen, studied drumming in Cuba, and climbed the pyramids in Egypt. On YouTube you can see him dancing in Myro's video for the song "Sugar" (https://youtu.be/1XLMoz45uoI) or see his photos in the Wayne Nelsen videos "With" (https://youtu.be/I59sGSKm2L4) and "Regiment" (https://youtu.be/BMC1JrDqLeQ). His website needs work (https://www.robertopuccinelli.com/). He wonders who wrote this bio.