Ringside: Outkast at Firefly Music Festival 2014

DOVER, Del.–At some point on Saturday night, Andre 3000 aka Andre Benjamin, dressed in a vinyl one-piece jumpsuit and a blonde wig, humped a shiny silver trumpet across the stage as the background track from Benjamin and partner Big Boi aka Antwan Patton declared the duo “the coolest motherfuckers on the planet.”

“So Fresh and So Clean” was released as a single in 2001, the year I graduated from high school, and probably when many in the audience finally realized that it was their parents getting up early to stuff their stockings. The kids at the Firefly Music Festival 2014 were more likely to worship DJs than guitar gods, and more interested in finding Molly than anything else, but somehow, more than two decades after their inception, Outkast remains the standard by which all other hip-hop groups are measured.

This was my third time seeing Outkast live, and I never though it would happen. Andre seemed uninterested in being a rapper, and the two hadn’t performed together in public for over a decade. When Outkast announced they would be playing a year’s worth of festival dates