Outkast - “Hey Ya!”

We start out with the band backstage just before a concert. This is a very long scene, where the duo are supposedly getting advice from their manager or their PR person or just some guy that happened to walk by. Who knows, none of us are formally introduced. Besides, I spend most of my time wondering where in the hell Andre found that green pair of plaid pants. They’re quite startling. Did he have to sign a waiver in order to wear them?

Cut to a British announcer guy introducing Outkast while wearing a vaguely-60’s outfit, interspersed with random shots of a screaming, totally-female, vaguely-60’s audience. I think this is supposed to somehow evoke the image of The Beatles appearing on Sullivan or some such, but something’s a bit off. Like the announcer guy’s hat. Why would you put something like that on your head?

After Alistair Tweed or whatever his name is finally shuts up, we cut to the band on stage, and Andre starts to wail. The set looks like an Irish Festival exploded, in a fun way, but it’s hard to study all the details because we keep cutting away to watch yet another female in the audience scream and clutch at her head, like the gynecologist didn’t bother to warm up any of his instruments.

We soon learn that it’s just Andre playing all of the band members on stage, with trick photography and such. We even have triplet male backup singers off to one side performing hand movements that should bring a tear to the eye of any fan of synchronized flamboyance. All of this is accompanied by rhythmic hand-clapping, festive dance steps, and more women being surprised in the stirrups.

We go on like this for quite a while, with singing and dancing and cloning. There’s an extended bit where they put subtitles under all of the Andre characters, and we learn that the backup singers are named “The Love Haters”, the words appearing just as the trio launches into falsetto and flair-filled flapping.

Of course, we have to have the requisite over-enthused female who leaps out of the audience and charges the stage, straddling one of the Andre’s, her go-go boots flashing seductively before her ass gets dragged off into the wings. We also have females fainting, females jiggling, females wearing hair bigger than some condos, and females who perhaps shouldn’t have been hired for this video, because they have no rhythm or any idea where the camera might be.

We also spend a lot of time on the “Polaroid picture” mess, with all those screaming females whipping out cameras, pointing and clicking, doing a shimmy, and then waving the developing pictures about, an action that is apparently only successful if you use your breasts as propellers. In fact, one startling woman with turboprops that could keep a 747 in the air is called up on the stage so Andre can do a surprise inspection of her fuselage.

And we finally wind down with more of the same. We run through all of the Andre’s on stage, get more reaction shots from the overly-heated audience, “The Love Haters” help nearby planes land with their hand gestures, and a bit where lead-singer Andre is trying to do a moonwalk but can’t quite get out of first gear.

The whole thing is kind of fun. And just a tad bit creepy…


Click Here to Watch the Video on YouTube.