Maybe it's hard to see, 10 years removed through rose-tinted glasses, but in the months leading up to the release of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the famed OutKast split double album "could have been a recipe for disaster." Or so said New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh.

Coming off the critical and commercial success of 1998's Aquemini and 2000's Stankonia, halving the best Southern rap duo in history into separate creative visions on one double record seemed like, at best, an unnecessary risk. At worst, a biblical, King Solomon-like proposition, cleaving the OutKast "baby" in two, pleasing no one and horrifying all.

Luckily, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below turned out to be more of a successful, even gleeful experiment. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine described the album as a White Album-type of collaboration, "as one LP of Lennon tunes, the other of McCartney songs," seemingly furthering the traditional OutKast narrative of the player (Big Boi) and the poet (Andr� 3000). That's OutKast, right?

Look closer at that dichotomy on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below ten years later and it isn't so clear-cut. Speakerboxxx finds Big Boi not always engaged in the "player" chicanery and for every rousing "GhettoMusick" (co-produced by and featuring Andr� 3000) there's a track like "The Way You Move," Speakerboxxx/The Love Below's second single, coasting by all breezy with acoustic guitar and horns. "Church" (another Andre 3000 co-production credit) deals with life's big questions ("Why are we here? What the meanin' to all of this?") with black-church wisdom and an uptempo gospel breakdown. To be sure, the "player" shows serious range on Speakerboxx.

"Poet" Andr� 3000's The Love Below is basically a late-'70s/early-'80s Prince record. That's the meat of it, anyway, and it's appropriately freaky-funky for Andr�. But smash hit "Hey Ya" (with a Big Boi credit) is more visceral and fun than anything on Speakerboxxx. "Roses" (with a Big Boi feature) plays like classic OutKast. The stream-of-consciousness "A Life in the Day of Andre Benjamin (Incomplete)" outdistances any Speakerboxxx track in terms of lyrical prowess. There's no lack of collaboration and melding of aesthetics here. But Andr�'s riffs on jazz and classic pop (The Love Below's Burt Bacharach-like titular intro, the Cab Calloway-like smack talkin' of "Love Hater," Andr�'s interpolation of John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things") shows he's in his own, post-hip-hop world.

OutKast left quite a legacy with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, influencing not just Southern rap but the whole of music. The LP won 2004's Album of the Year GRAMMY, the second rap album to date to do so (the other being The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999) and the first and only to date for a hip-hop duo or group. It's also the best-selling rap album to date at about 11x platinum (that is, 5.5 million units sold of a double record). Artists in the Dungeon Family (Killer Mike, Janelle Monae, Cee-Lo), Southern rap (Big K.R.I.T.) and the rap world (Kendrick Lamar) have obviously taken notes. But so have artists of the jam-band circuit (Galactic), the world of hard rock/heavy metal (Incubus, Linkin Park) and legacy artists like Memphis soul legend Booker T (who covered "Hey Ya" on his comeback 2009 release Potato Hole). So while Speakerboxxx/The Love Below has been influential, how has OutKast's legacy fared over the years?