Outkast Reveal Details of Their HBO Film

We will try and make sense of this for you, but the interview adds up to a nigh-Dylanesque tangle of contradiction. Firstly, the film won't be called My Life in Idlewild, as Barber had previously suggested (and we had previously reported). It might be called Speakerboxxx (it's a working title), but not because it's based on Big Boi's album. It is a musical, but according to Barber, "it's not really a hip-hop movie at all. It just happens to have two major hip-hop stars in it. It's more of a 1930s musical. I took some of the music from Outkast and set it in that time. That's one of the things I set out to do. I was trying to make a statement on how music from today could have been music from the 1930s."

However, the music will be mainly hip-hop. Follow? "They mostly rap in it," says Barber. "There are some new tracks and Outkast songs I think should have been released as singles." Whether those Outkast songs are unreleased or existing tracks was unclear, but previous reports have the movie producing an album of mostly new music, so we'll just have to wait and see.

But Barber had plenty more straightforward dope on the film, too. The story is set in the 1930s and is rife with love triangles, family obligations, broken dreams, tough choices, and other things of that nature. Macy Gray and Patti LaBelle join Ving Rhames and Cicely Tyson in a non-Outkast-rapper-free cast. All of which, history tells us, we should believe when it's finally glowing at us in a darkened theater.

Outkast: http://www.Outkast.com