In hindsight, “Int’l Player’s Anthem” was the swan song for UGK. With the recent death of Pimp C, one half of the southern rap duo, so ended the Underground Kingz. The legacy of the Dirty South’s founding fathers lives on though, be it through unreleased material on message boards or with Bun B’s Weezyanic (sp?) tear on recent bangers, from Luda’s “Down in Da Durty” to his own “That’s Gangsta.”
The David Banner-produced “Int’l Player’s Anthem” is a soap opera of sorts, in its self-aware absurd dramatization of every rapper’s greatest fear--weddings. Banner laces his trademark energetic drum rolls with a church choir singing wedding vows. Andre 3000 of Outkast opens the song with by admitting he’s leaving the game indefinitely to get married. When the drums kick in (and as in any David Banner song, they kick the fuck in), Pimp C rips straight through Andre, swearing to a life of promiscuous sex and wood grain wheels. Bun and Big Boi repeat the same sentiment that Pimp C put forth.
As the unspoken champions of the now lucrative southern rap clique, the Underground Kingz effectively passed the torch to their heir apparent, Outkast, on “Int’l Player’s Anthem,” a torch that’ll burn as long as the legacy Bun and Pimp left, or as long as the sticky green that Pimp always kept in his Swishers.
mp3: Int'l Player's Anthem ft. Outkast (zShare)
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