Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

The wordplay, the way it is articulated (through endless shifts of register and vocal effects), and the way it is complemented by a plethora of side actors, makes for an exhilarating experience.

Sir Lucious Left Foot features a layered and voluminous production, which Big Boi has described as "like someone's pushing you around the room". Rooted in Southern hip hop, it contains a bounce and bass-heavy sound with dense TR 808-driven basslines, live instrumentation, and backing vocalists. Music writer Greg Kot calls it "a state-of-the-art Southern-fried party-funk album" and notes its bass-heavy sound as "full of surface charm, the type of music that is designed to sound big in a club, the soundtrack for a night of excess. But there’s very little conventional about these beats".

The album's sound also incorporates diverse musical elements from various genres such as funk, soul, rock, dubstep, and electro music. Houston Press writer Shea Serrano describes the album as a "new take on the traditional Southern rap sound. It's slow and fast, wonky and flimsy, lyrical and hook-driven". Tom Breihan of Pitchfork Media perceives "1980s synth-funk" as its predominant musical element, but also finds each track musically varied, stating "New melodic elements flit in and out of tracks just as you start to notice them, and there's a lot going on at any given moment". Big Boi has called the music "basically what you been getting from Outkast. Raw lyricism and the funkiest grooves you can lay your ears on."

Big Boi's lyrics are playful and irreverent, with clever wordplay and boasts, while incorporating non-sequiturs, pop-culture references, and tongue-twisters. His rhymes are delivered through a fast, versatile flow and dexterous cadence. Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard describes his flow as "inimitably slick and speedy". Amos Barshad of New York notes his lyrics as "playful, but his flow is stern and unpredictable". Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker describes the album's mood as "decidedly upbeat" and writes of Big Boi's rapping, "The musical DNA of 'Sir Lucious' lies in a simple strategy that Big Boi has used for years: he often raps in double time, no matter what the tempo of the song is. This means that even the slower songs don’t drag—Big Boi uses the space in the beat to provide another rhythm with his words". Frere-Jones describes him as "simultaneously forceful and careful" with his lyrics and compares his rapping technique to "the clatter of a machine, like a lawnmower, where secondary rhythms whisper underneath the main beat Big Boi is never laid-back when he raps: he defines wide-awake".

Thematically, the album's subject matter mostly concerns self-aggrandisement, sex, social commentary, and "the club". Music writer Omar Burgess comments that the album finds Big Boi "vacillating between a shit-talking B-boy, social commentary spitting vet and a ladies man with a wandering eye". Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe notes "lissome rhyming about things frivolous and fraught" by Big Boi. NPR writer Andrew Noz views that his "spiral of internal rhyme schemes and stop-and-go cadences values style over substance but doesn't neglect writing, whether battling imaginary rap foes or offering advice on fiscal responsibility".