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Hip Hop Icon Big Boi: Getting Familiar with Uncharted Territory

The rapper and producer Big Boi has sold over 50 million records as a solo artist and as half of the platinum-selling hip hop duo OutKast . The innovative Atlanta-based group broke out in the mid-1990s with “Rosa Parks” and “Elevators”, then followed up with crossover pop hits like “The Way You Move” and “Bombs Over Baghdad”.

OutKast found huge commercial success with an experimental brand of hip hop, eschewing old-school samples in favor of new sounds. Big Boi has been the more musically prolific member of the group. He’s gone on to produce several solo albums and collaborate with artists across the music spectrum, from fellow ATL-based rapper Ludacris to funk-master George Clinton to the indie rock band Wavves.

Big Boi joins us to talk about the early days recording in a clay-walled basement, coming to terms with fame, and where to go musically when you’ve hit monumental commercial success.

Big Boi’s new album Boomiverse is out on June 16th.

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Catherine O’Hara on Being Slightly, Perfectly Odd

Catherine O’Hara’s work embodies a particularly special brand of comic absurdity. She helped launch SCTV alongside other burgeoning comedy greats like John Candy and Eugene Levy, quit the show, but still moved on to star in blockbuster comedies. She became spiritually possessed in Beetlejuice, played a memorable, anxiety-ridden mother to Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, and became a critical part of Christopher Guest’s ensemble mockumentaries, like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show

More recently, she’s been in HBO’s critically-acclaimed biopic Temple Grandin and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, and CBC’s Schitts Creek.

O’Hara talks to us about the difficulties of being a woman in the SCTV writers’ room, creating memorable characters with her longtime friend and collaborator Eugene Levy, and her own secret comedic formula.

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The Outshot: Fast, Cheap, and Out Of Control

At first, Errol Morris’s documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control looks like it’s about four men and their professional occupations: a lion tamer, a topiarist, a roboticist, a scientist who studies naked mole rats. But the movie is about much more than just weird jobs.

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