![]() ![]() It sold more than 5 million copies, spawned the hit single "Hey Ya!" and won a Grammy for Album of the Year.Ī Cartoon Network executive loved "The Love Below" so much he wanted to create an animated series from it. OutKast's huge recording success culminated in 2003 with the double album "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," essentially two solo albums, with "The Love Below" being Benjamin's funkier, jazzier contribution. I learned a lot that I probably wouldn't have learned if I was at a school in my neighborhood."īenjamin and Patton's Atlanta roots were central to the music they started making right after high school. ![]() I'm skateboarding and listening to rock music I never thought of. But this is really how it was," Benjamin said. "Usually you see shows try to create that forcefully. The result was an almost textbook diversity that's re-created for "Class." He went there in the late '80s through a program that bused kids from predominantly black neighborhoods to schools in mostly white parts of town. Other characters - a diverse, artistic bunch whose backgrounds range from East Indian to white Buckhead rich - mirrors Benjamin's wide circle of friends while at Sutton Middle School, near Chastain Park. "Both of them are just younger and older versions of me," the 33-year-old Benjamin said. Lil' D is a short, talented, overconfident, trouble-finding 12-year-old. Sunny Bridges is a superstar musician who returns to his hometown after his passion for performing has been beaten down by the business. "Class of 3000" is as Atlanta-centric as Benjamin, whose childhood at one point straddled the rough Bankhead neighborhood where he lived and the Buckhead middle school he attended. "You have to look at what your community is, and how you can partner with what's right here that's rich and worthwhile," said director Rosemary Newcott. Three years earlier, the ballet performed "Shed Your Skin - The Indigo Girls Project," which put its dancers on stage with Atlanta's Grammy-winning folk rock twosome of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. Last season, Antwan "Big Boi" Patton, Benjamin's musical partner, teamed with the Atlanta Ballet for "Big," a production that merged Patton's raps with Giuseppe Verdi's "La Traviata." Opening this weekend and running through March 29, "Class of 3000 Live" is the kind of only-in-Atlanta collision of unlikely institutions that has become almost commonplace. His reaction when he heard the Alliance wanted to make a live-action children's play out of "Class of 3000," based in part on his growing up and living in Atlanta: "Perfect." Anything I'm into, it never starts from, 'This is a great business, let's do this.' It starts from, 'Hey, this would be cool.' " "It's kind of like an exciting ride that way," he continued. ![]()
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