Let Us Remember: Willie Hutch’s “Out There”

 

Listening to “Out There,” off Willie Hutch’s Foxy Brown soundtrack, I was blown away at how psychedelic and strange the arrangement is. Besides some seriously spacey wah-wah guitar and the echo effects on Hutch’s vocals, there is also what sounds like a trumpet run through an Echoplex, a combination that sounds remarkably like an old analog synthesizer. Along with these psychedelic touches come Hutch’s staples, like strings and harps and cooing female vocals.

 

The song’s lyrics (“It’s so sad/Our people won’t respect the ways of one another/But pretty soon they’re gonna find out/They’re gonna have to learn to love one another/Don’t you know/Ain’t you know/You’ll be out there”) are pretty boilerplate Black Power anthem stuff, but the use of echo effects on Hutch’s vocals, along with the aforementioned weirdness, create an idea of “out there” that sounds like both the harsh reality of poverty and life on the street and a total mental breakdown, brought on by drugs or impossible amounts of stress. Hutch wants his people to love one another, not because it would be nice or groovy, but because without a sense of community or purpose, “out there” threatens to destroy them.

 

While Hutch’s classic soundtrack to “The Mack” has come to be associated with “pimpin” music, a close listen to a lot of its songs reveal a far less bad-ass attitude. “I Choose You” isn’t about a girl choosing a pimp, but a man choosing a wife (“You were then when no else would be in my corner/And it’s you that I’ve learned to love and place no one above/So how could I ever thank you except take you home and make you my loving wife?”), something I’m sure most idiot pimps would refer to as “trick” behavior. And “Slick’s Theme” makes explicit that that character is a piece of shit and you should stay away from him. Foxy Brown was probably the first movie that Hutch soundtracked that actually reflected his worldview, with its portrayal of selfish and weak-willed pimps and dealers in cahoots with the government and organized crime to exploit the black community.

 

What sets “Out There” out from countless other empowerment anthems is that it sounds a lot like the bad trip it’s warning against. Unlike in other uplift songs of the 60s and 70s, where respect and love sound like corny signifiers of a naive era, here they sound like the only thing protecting an oppressed people from madness or death.

 

Willie Hutch – Out There

 

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