Antwan Andre Patton, aka Big Boi, is half of the multi-platinum selling, Atlanta-based super duo OutKast. OutKast, who have earned 6 Grammy Awards, 3 World Music Awards, 3 BET Awards, and 4 American Music Awards, stared their luminous career in 1994 when their classic hit, "Player’s Ball," became an unlikely single on LaFace Records’ Christmas album. Soon after, the young twosome became the label's first hip-hop act laying a solid foundation for the current explosion of Southern hip-hop. Patton made the essence of the modern day South a national way of life, making the S.W.A.T. (Southwest Atlanta) feel like everybody’s home, and the dialect of his region the new urban exchange. Moreover, he continues to push the artistic envelope to new boundaries.
In 2004, Patton formed his own Atlanta-based record label, Purple Ribbon. The label's foundation was built on a solid mixture of established artists as well as young up-and-coming MCs and R&B singers. The first album Big Boi Presents...Got Purp? Vol.1 was released in fall 2004, which was followed up by Big Boi Presents...Got Purp? Vol. 2 in fall 2005. In 2005 he also joined the world of the NASCAR World Racing Team. Patton also established the Big Kidz Foundation with helps children make lifestyle advances through film and music.
The year 2006 marked Patton's acting debut with the critically-acclaimed film ATL and in the same year, he starred in the Universal feature Idlewild starring opposite Andre Benjamin. The film was a musical set in the prohibition-era South, where a speakeasy performer and club manager "Rooster" (Patton) must contend with gangsters who have their eyes on his club. Patton's acting career doesn't stop there - he is also known for his role in Who's Your Caddy and appearances in Girlfriends.
Surviving the passage of time (not often heard of in this industry), Patton commemorates each year with the celebration of yet another triumph with no inventive regrets. The soul of this celebrated artist has evolved and manifested into a raw continuum of a never-ending saga of divine lyrical and musical lunacy that has been part and parcel of OutKast’s legacy and endless victories.
Patton's fame and notoriety has yielded him a type of Southern Aristocracy and has made him a favorite amongst his peers, his fans, and the industry-at-large. He’s easily relatable, approachable, and he reminds everyone of someone they’ve known and respected before. He’s a warrior that has survived the game with badges of honor that bear every syllable of every lyric he’s ever uttered from Southerplayalisticadillacmusic to Speakerboxxx and beyond; this is his time in hip-hop history and we are all the better because of it. Patton currently lives in Atlanta with his family.
Sleepy Brown
The influence of the '70s on Atlanta crooner Patrick "Sleepy" Brown is manifested in almost everything he does - from the soulful and funk-driven textures overlaying his urban hip-hop sound to his taste in sunglasses and pants. To incognizant hip-hop listeners, Sleepy Brown is simply the singer associated with OutKast, emerging in the 2000s on tracks like Big Boi's "The Way You Move" and his own Top 40 single, "I Can't Wait." Nevertheless, he has been active sinthe early '90s as a member of the renowned Atlanta-based production group Organized Noize. Arguably the South's most influential hip-hop producers, founders Brown, Rico Wade, and Ray Murray not only helped build the Atlanta urban contemporary scene, producing and co-writing songs for groups including TLC ("Waterfalls") and Xscape, but were intrinsically involved in cultivating the groundbreaking music of OutKast, Goodie Mob, and the rest of the Dungeon Family collective, shaping the sound of Southern hip-hop as a whole.
Although Sleepy Brown was raised in Atlanta, he grew up behind the stage, so to speak, because of his father's band, frequently bumping shoulders with the likes of Barry White, Cameo, The Commodores, and Parliament. He was fascinated with music and often used to carry around an old four-track machine and small keyboard everywhere he went. That earnestness appealed to Wade and Murray when they first met Brown around 1990. A few years later, once they were a tight crew, some of their first major accomplishments included introducing OutKast (one of hip-hop's best-selling and critically acclaimed groups) and T-Boz and Left Eye of TLC (one of the most commercially successful girl groups of all time) to executive Antonio "L.A." Reid at LaFace Records. Brown's upbringing in funk added an integral element to the formula of Organized Noize's work. A talented keyboardist and advocate for live instrumentation, Brown developed into a savvy multi-instrumentalist. Producing was his major task in the initial stages of his career, and he mainly saw singing as a hobby. In the early 2000s, Sleepy Brown gradually ascended from behind the studio boards into the artist spotlight. Initially, his high, sweet vocals were hooks for hit singles, including OutKast's "So Fresh, So Clean" in 2001 and their number one hit "The Way You Move" in 2004. In tandem with the latter, Brown hit the charts with "I Can't Wait," which featured OutKast and appeared on the soundtrack for Barbershop 2. He joined Big Boi's Purple Ribbon label in 2005 and release his full-length solo debut, Mr. Brown, in October 2006.
Janelle Monáe
Since the publication of The Wizard of Oz in September of 1900, citizens throughout the world have come to realize that fantasies can come from the tiniest, nondescript places, and that the most wondrous journeys can begin in your own backyard - especially if your home is located in Greater Kansas City, Kansas. Like Dorothy, the aspiring producer, songstress, and actress Janelle Monáe is a native of Kansas. And like Dorothy and other famous fairy tale heroines, Janelle has a big, bright smile and grand ambitions that involve leaps of imagination and different ways of seeing the world. This imaginative sensibility started early at the age of nine when Janelle Monáe decided that the world should be a different color: "preferably purple." Thinking back on it now, Monáe says, "I was different. Of course, I did the normal, little-diva-in-training things like running up phone bills by dialing 1-800-Be-A-Star and singing Anita Baker's 'Sweet Love' for anyone that would listen...but I was also on some different stuff...there was a lot of confusion and nonsense where I grew up so I reacted by creating my own little world...I began to see how music could change lives, and I began to dream about a world where every day was like anime and Broadway, where music fell from the sky and anything could happen..."
In pursuit of this world, Janelle Monáe moved to New York from high school with her best friend so that she could attend The American Musical and Dramatics Academy, a musical theatre conservatory program. In this program, she fell in love with the soaring melodies and harmonic possibilities of classical music, as well as labored endlessly onstage and off to perfect her vocal instrument. Deciding to change the world beyond Broadway, she soon headed to Atlanta, the home of progressive sould and hip hop music to start her music career. "Musically, I was ready to do something big, wild, and adventurous. And I knew if Atlanta was big enough for the vision of OutKast, it'd be big enough for me." Within eight months of arriving in Atlanta, Janelle Monáe had met Nate "Rocket" Wonder and Chuck Lightning of Wondaland Productions and begun work on her masterful debut album Metropolis. In the summer of 2005, Janelle performed "Dear Mr. President," a soulful, Curtis Mayfield-like political burner, complete with strutting bass and blaring horns, for an audience of one: the hip-hop legend and musical innovator known as Big Boi. After hearing this single song, Big Boi was an ecstatic believer. He quickly gave the emerging talent a starring role in his new enterprise: two song placements on his compilation record Big Boi Presents...Got Purp? Vol. 2, as well as the opportunity to write and record on several songs on the forthcoming OutKast album. However, Janelle Monáe is surprisingly grounded and clear-eyed about the future: "I feel so blessed. I have so many people I look up to: Bjork, OutKast, Fiona Apple, Janet Jackson, Madonna...I want to take the things they've taught me to the stars...."
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