Laugh at What I Love - Missy Elliott

If you don't like Missy Elliott then you are a straight up asshole. Probably the type of dick who still says shit like "women aren't funny" or "women aren't good at things". Once you get over your incessant need to have every women flatter your amazing wit and end this obvious front about not wanting to sleep with you, you might actually be able to enjoy what a woman brings to the table.

Sorry to get off track, where was I? 

Right I was expressing my love for all things Missy Elliott.

I fucking love Missy, I have since she first came on the scene with her wonderfully sparse song and live action cartoon of a  video for Supa Dupa Fly. She cracked through my cold shell of a heart that was slowly dying under the weight of all the underground purity.

Missy emerged and reminded me that hip hop can be fun and didn't need to be a war with the unforeseen and nonexistent forces that were trying to keep "real shit" down*, and that a light hearted approach, executed properly, can be way more effective than a 7 minute song with no choruses; even if it is jam-packed with obscure references that only 12 people worldwide will get.

It was a refreshing blast that stunk of orginality, artistic merit and left of center fun. Even if she wasn't the best rapper, who gives a Fuck, she was making the best songs. The slightly off kilter "out my window, I can't stand the rain" still rolls around in my head and nestles its self right in the sweet spot. 

With Supa Dupa Fly's success more and more information about Missy Elliott became common knowledge, it turns out she had been a relatively successful song writer. Elliott and her partner Timbaland spent much of the decade crafting R&B hits, and Missy wrote 9 of the tracks on the criminally slept on dirty Fuck fest of an album, Diary of a Mad Band by Jodeci.

Eventually this led to work with R&B ingénue, and possible sexiest woman ever, Aaliyah. In 1996 Missy wrote and Timbaland produced the groundbreaking smash One in a Million, a song that took R&B out of the stereos of lonely executive assistants and unleashed it into the cosmos. With the sparse tweety bird production, Aaliyah's breathy vocals and Elliott's ability to uniquely turn a phrase, the trio single-handedly opened me up to a genre. A genre that previously was only used to express false emotions to get into a coed's pants. Now I was obsessed and would search out anything that Elliott and Timbaland touched. 

Missy Elliott has had missteps. I won't deny that, but she was also one of the most creative voices in the rap genre and still does not get her due. Is she the best rapper? No, but neither is Kanye and we flood that fucker with praise for admittedly interesting work, but compared with Elliott's artistic vision it seems downright pedestrian. shit, the only act that even comes close to Missy is Outkast and their work tends to expand the borders of hip hop, it does not outright redefine them the way Missy Elliott did. 

The best example I can think of is Get Your Freak On, both the song and the video. Elliott, once again working with Timbaland, brought a unique flare to the mix with Timbaland's hectic bhangra production style, full of tumbi strings, spastic starts and stops, and Elliott's dragged out flow, the song was one of the best of the 2000s. The video is perhaps the pinnacle of creative hip hop videos, breaking away from the tired palette of grandiose excess or gritty hardship, the video ventures into Indiana Jones meets jungle orgy territory. The shit is brillz. 

Throughout this period Missy continued writing for other artists and generally raising the bar with imaginative R&B, hip hop and pop. One of the tracks that always stands out for me is Oops (Oh My) by Tweet. With the exception of this song Tweet’s career was relatively unremarkable, but what a fucking song it was. Her voice was flirtatious and oozed the kind of sexual gamesmanship that permanently imprints itself upon your heart.

As for the video?

Well it has earned Tweet her own wing in the spank bank.

I feel this track represents something more. It represents a freedom that Missy was never allowed to explore within her own work, though it was at times raunchy. Through much of her career Missy was overweight, dressed very much like a tom boy and in many ways de-sexualized herself.

Whether this was a conscious choice based on the hope that her work would stand on its own two, or an unconscious choice hoping to avoid the inevitable discussions about body image and appearance that unfortunately come anytime a woman ventures out in public; I don’t know. But I feel as though it is a reaction to her perceived asexual image, a chance to reap the praise that we often hold for sexualized or glamorous female acts. Imagine how large and revered Missy would be if she looked like Beyonce? It’s fucked up. 

In 2003 Missy released Gossip Folks, a brilliant departure from the futuristic style and genre bending of her earlier works; she swung the pendulum in the opposite direction, reinventing the form. Maybe not reinventing the form but certainly reinventing herself. Going back to the early days of hip hop, updating a b-boy style with a stripped down Timbaland beat, a dance heavy video, and a wardrobe pulled out of Wildstyle.

Add in the Run DMC inspired break in the middle of the track and one of the best Ludacris verses of all time you have a track that proved that Missy could play on the same field as the boys, and that she was a master of the craft.

After Gossip Folks, I kind of lost track of Missy, but I think when you look at the direction a lot of the younger artists are going, pushing the boundaries of image, style and production, you have to believe that she played a major role in molding these acts. Eventually she will be given the credit she deserves, but it is a fucking shame that more people don’t realize just how important she is to the genre and obliterating the norm.

I fucking love Missy Elliott.