"Elevators (Me & You)" (OutKast)

I remember hearing OutKast's second album ATLiens (1996) in college and thinking it sounded like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as reimagined by George Clinton.  The whole extraterrestrial/Marvel comics vibe felt like an extension (not a rip-off) of what the latter had created with Parliament in the late 70s.
But what struck me most about the album was its fearlessness, especially at a time when hip-hop had gotten stale and "Puffy-ized": every two-bit rapper in the mainstream seemed to be bragging about the same crap ad nauseam over unimaginative beats and even lazier pop samples.  Instead, here were two young cats out of Atlanta who not only were rapping about more philosophical topics (life, spirituality, and the nature of success), but they also had made an effort to write, perform, and produce/co-produce all of the backing tracks on their songs.
ATLiens really did feel like it had dropped from outer space.
Although I typically gravitate to the unearthed gems on OutKast's albums that didn't get a lot of airplay ("Chonkyfire" anyone?), I do still love "Elevators (Me & You)," the biggest single from ATLiens.
The dubbed out drum track, spacey organ, and that anthemic chorus (Me and you / Your momma and your cousin, too...) all set the stage for Antwan "Big Boi" Patton and "André 3000" Benjamin's seamless flows, which address the fact that they were still struggling as artists despite the perception that they had "made it."
For my money, one of the best verses ever in hip-hop is Benjamin's final stanza, where he tells a fan (who feigns knowing him from high school) that he and Patton are basically still living paycheck-to-paycheck, despite selling a bunch of albums.  It's delivered with such lightning-fast precision and raw truth that I'm sure it made half of the emcees who heard it—you know, the ones who were tooling around in rented Bentleys and yachts, spraying Sprite disguised as Cristal on the engineered breasts of models in their videos, circa 1996/7—feel a bit inadequate.