Cee-Lo went solo and eventually found success as part of the oddball future-soul outfit Gnarls Barkley. (Another Southern innovator, the gothic Houston gangster Scarface, had been scheduled to perform, but didn’t.)Īfter “Soul Food,” Goodie Mob released another excellent album, “Still Standing,” and a stone-cold clunker, “World Party,” before things began to crumble. “Soul Food” was a paranoid, creepy, flamboyant and somehow comforting album, one of the first to understand Southern rap as not dependent on what was happening in the rest of the country. Such a compressed set, in time and sound, couldn’t really do the group justice, though. in a reflective tinsel wig and matching unitard, the Goodie Mob Cee-Lo, Big Gipp, T-Mo and Khujo were exuberant and comfortable, happily taking their rightful place as oft-overlooked pioneers.Įven Goodie Mob’s most banal single, “Get Rich to This,” was grounded by Khujo’s blunt aggression, and on the jagged “Cell Therapy,” T-Mo was virtually manic, in keeping with the song’s flared eyebrow. Dressed in grays and silvers, with a female D.J. Around 1:45 a.m., the 1980s New York hip-hop standout and nostalgia exploiter Slick Rick left the stage after his opening set with him went about half the crowd.Īnd just as in 1995, all of those people missed out. King Blues Club & Grill on Friday night, when Goodie Mob arrived, following several years of fracture, as part of its reunion tour. So in one way, at least, it was 1995 again at B. While New York and Los Angeles were slugging it out, Atlanta was building its infrastructure, one that would eventually take over the genre. The rest of hip-hop, though, was preoccupied with sounds from the coasts.

That year the Atlanta foursome released its debut masterpiece, “Soul Food” (LaFace), one of its city’s defining hip-hop documents. Depending on who is writing the history book, 1995 was either a great or frustrating time for Goodie Mob.

The goodie mob