New York Times Names André 3000, Lucinda Williams and Smokey Robinson as Greatest Living American Songwriters

The track’s outro emphasizes what makes Outkast’s songwriting special: By naming the local neighborhoods — “from East Point, College Park, Decatur, the ’Briar” — Dré and Big began to undo the timidity of the mainstream Southern rappers before them, who never wanted to appear too deep-fried, lest they be written off as uncivilized against hip-hop’s New York-Los Angeles stronghold. “The South,” as André later put it to industry boos, “got something to say!”

Beginning with their 1994 album, “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,” Outkast traversed the local — intersections, clubs, police units, serial killers (human and chemical) and skating rinks, but chased the universal, providing a blueprint for decades of outré Atlanta street rap to come. Musically, the group nodded to the Afrofuturist funk of George Clinton and Sly Stone. But Outkast also unabashedly grabbed for other limbs of the Black music family tree, like the G-funk of Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” (1992) — Parliament-Funkadelic’s West Coast rap descendants — and Atlanta’s own strains, in part because live instrumentation was cheaper than the disco and Motown sampling that drove rap up North.

Every gloriously indulgent swerve somehow made Outkast more popular. One of their most enduring numbers, “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” from “Aquemini” (1998), is seven minutes of horn hook and what the group called smokin’ word. “B.O.B.,” for “Bombs Over Baghdad,” from “Stankonia” (2000, prewar), is 155-beats-per-minute drum ’n’ bass with assaultive tongue-twisting that turns to spiritual chant: “Power music, electric revival!” “Ms. Jackson,” from that same album, forever-ever warps “Here Comes the Bride” into the lament of an inveterate dog trying to settle into a custody compromise. The M.C.s produced all those, by the way.

André 3000, largely thanks to experiments in dress, is often considered the weirdo wild card, and Big Boi the straight man. But each could be abstruse or crowd-pleasing — whatever they made was pop if they so willed it. When the pair split, first for the double solo album experiment “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2003, each immediately delivered a No. 1 smash in a new mode: Big Boi’s “The Way You Move” is, counterintuitively, the obvious wedding dance-floor standard, and “Hey Ya!” is “Hey Ya!” — but stranger than you might remember. Outkast made their eccentricities feel normal, setting the bar for rap-song experimentation in the stratosphere.

Williams’s comedy is rooted in a pithy, earthbound philosophy. On “Fancy Funeral,” she’s counseling against having one: “’Cause no amount of riches / Can bring back what you’ve lost / To satisfy your wishes / You’ll never justify the cost.” It’s one of those smile-through-tears tunes. The truths in her writing are as off-kilter as her singing. Since the beginning, Williams has been performing with a voice that’s like a door with honey in the hinges. It matches (or inspires) the drunken wisdom in her words.

Williams worries, notices, intuits, chides and calls out. She remembers. This is songwriting whose strength arises, partially, from an ability to texturize all the modes of life — having and losing, looking and longing, comfort and disorientation — and the many moods those modes inspire. That’s how you get the ardent abandon of “Passionate Kisses” or a tear-jerker like “Sweet Old World.” Obviously, Williams composed those two. But everybody thinks of “Passionate Kisses” as being all but copyrighted by Mary Chapin Carpenter, who Ferris-wheels her way through that chorus. And Emmylou Harris has so thoroughly repossessed “Sweet Old World” that even Williams herself has said she, too, envisions stars when she hears it. But Williams drew the roadway that Harris used to get up there, which is her big contribution to American music. It’s not just the locks that she changed; it’s the contours of the map.

Robinson, who also served as a Motown vice president, built a language as much as a business. By the end of 1964 he had written “My Guy” for Mary Wells and co-written “My Girl” for the Temptations — songs that became foundational to those artists’ identities, and to postwar soul and pop.

From that diptych emerged another. “The Tracks of My Tears” (1965) functions simultaneously as pop hook and indelible image — its economy of language doing work that decoration would ruin. Two years later, “The Tears of a Clown” featured an operatic reference as load-bearing beam — and used it to build one of soul music’s most devastating refrains: “Just like Pagliacci did / I try to keep my sadness hid / Smiling in the public eye / But in my lonely room I cry / The tears of a clown / When there’s no one around.” Robinson’s “Cruisin’” (1979) proved something rarer still: He could write contentment. D’Angelo’s 1995 interpretation spotlighted what had always been latent — the song’s vibrant eroticism.

Robinson has inspired the most successful and emotionally textured songwriters who rose in his wake. Babyface names Robinson as one of his greatest influences, and Anderson .Paak’s collaboration with him, “Make It Better” (2019), plays less like homage than like continuity. Stevie Wonder may be the greater innovator. Lionel Richie may have mastered global pop. Neither matches Robinson’s sustained lyrical precision.

“I Second That Emotion,” which would later be covered by the Temptations and Diana Ross and the Supremes, transforms parliamentary language into an expression of romantic assent; it’s playful, tender and faintly formal in a way that heightens its sincerity. This pattern — importing one register to illuminate another — winds its way through Robinson’s catalog. Whether performed by Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, the English Beat or the Grateful Dead, Robinson’s songs reveal new levels of nuance on even the 100th listen. This is because he is still doing the literal labor of love: telling truths about everyday yearning, infatuation, sorrow and joy.