Missy Elliott is hip hops foremost female. With five innovate albums and numerous eye-catching videos to her name she’s also one of pop music’s most inventive and important musicians. Live and direct from Puerto Rico Missy talks Madonna, mothers and money.
South Beach, Miami, May 2003
The car park of Miami’s Hit Factory recording studio suddenly stills. R&B singer Ashanti, our subject for today, drops the basketball she’s dribbling, Enrique Iglesias leans out of his idling car and rapper Ja Rule stops mumbling into his cellular phone. A huge rust-red Hummer (hip hop vehicle du jour) has just motored noisily through the tightly protected security gates and a whisper goes round. “It’s Missy’ someone squeals excitedly, “hey Missy.”
A tiny black woman dressed in jeans and tracksuit top, hair stuffed under a cap, jumps out of the driver’s seat and heads into studio B, seemingly oblivious to the distraction she’s just created. This is the artist The New York Times trumpeted as ‘the biggest and blackest female hip hop star Middle-America has ever seen’?
“Oh, Missy’s cool,” coos Ashanti, “she’s real cool.”
San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2003
Some six months later (being too busy hit-making to talk that day) we finally catch up the little woman with the big hits a (hip) hop, skip and a bumpy plane ride away two hours southeast of South Beach promoting the fruits of her Hit Factory labour on the exquisite island of Puerto Rico. Despite the tropical temperatures Missy is once more sporting standard-issue jeans and tracksuit top, topped off with trainers (she owns over 600 pairs worn but twice each), requisite bling-bling shimmering about her wrists, neck, fingers and ears, “a lil’ something, something” she giggles shyly.
Unable to enjoy the beautiful beaches and scorching sunshine, Missy ‘Misdemeanour’ Elliott is here to “work, work, work.” Throwing parties, handing out copies of new single Pass That Dutch, the rap superstar is on hand to meet and greet the DJ’s, press and promo people gathered on the Island for a week-long ‘hip hop summit.’ Hoping these taste-makers and opinion-formers will help break her forthcoming fifth album This Is Not A Test, the past few days have been a non-stop grind of smiling, schmoozing and sales-talk.
“Pshew-ey,” she whistles sinking deeply into the soft hotel chair that practically swallows up her tiny 5’2 frame. “I’m beat!”
She may have sold millions and millions of albums, but Ms Elliott is apparently not one to rest on her proverbial. Rarely, if ever, taking a day off (save Christmas and Thanksgiving - “a must”), Missy can normally be found holed up at the aforementioned Miami studio either making her own music, or charging $150,000 per track to the likes of uber R&B babe Beyoncé or fellow hip hop femme fatale Lil’ Kim. In rap, she points out you’re only a good as your last record, drop a stinker rather than a ‘bomb’ and the vultures descend. “It’s a pressure,” sighs the woman with four platinum albums tucked tightly into an ever-decreasing waistband. “But I try not to let that get to me. It took a lot for me to get to this point and I know a lot of people would kill to be where I’m at right now.”
Where she’s ‘at’ right now is the owner of the face of one of the most recognisable black women in the world, save Oprah, Halle and Condeleeza Rice. Where those women have subjugated TV, Film and Politics respectively, Missy has edged musically into the mainstream consciousness with her avant-garde videos, high profile ad campaigns, prolific work as a producer and songwriter and consistently creative chart-breaking singles. Nowadays, most people may not know exactly what she does, but they darned sure know who Missy Elliott is. Owner of her own record label, Gold Mind Inc (which has so far spawned platinum artist Tweet), producer for Mel B and Madonna as well as Mary J. Blige and Mya, Missy Elliott is the woman who accepts MTV awards beamed into 1billion homes worldwide dressed in bright green tartan and line-dances in leather on Top Of The Pops. She may propagate verbiage like ‘bitch’ with ease but she’ll exclaim, “I’m just taking the term back. People can call me a bitch if they want to, if that makes me a successful woman – then cool.”
Born 32 years ago in the coastal town of Portsmouth, Virginia, Missy has faced an arduous ascent to near her spot at the top of the tree. Life in the Elliott household was far from happy with father Ronnie frequently violent toward her mother Patricia. Ronnie never hit Missy, although he would occasionally hold a gun to her head when he felt in a particularly mean mood.
“I can’t compare anyone to Ronnie Elliott – he’s on a whole other page,” she chuckles able to laugh, sort of, about it now. “But like I always say I won’t take no shit when it comes to a man telling me what to do. It’s like – no way,” she says seriously with an adamant shake of her head. “No way.”
Besides hiding from her father Missy spent her days wistfully writing letters and sending demos to heroes like Michael and Janet Jackson, pleading with them to turn up in a limo and take her away from the torment. The Jackson’s never replied but she and her mum did eventually escape. Sneaking out while Ronnie was at work, 14 year old Missy and Patricia bundled their belongings together and took off in a truck. “My mother is so strong now,” says a proud Missy. “For so long she went through not being able to do what she wanted to do, not having money to spend on things she wanted – everything was on my fathers say so. Once she got away and realised how strong she was by herself it was like she was a brick wall that couldn’t be broke. I love that,” she says rubbing her ring-encrusted hands gleefully. “She’s Pat Elliott now, not the Pat Elliott that Ronnie Elliott married. She’s very strong.”
Missy is very strong too. Despite the Jackson’s no-show she was determined to become a star. After her band Sista were dropped from a shoddy deal in 1991, she picked her very disappointed chin off her ample chest and went solo. When record company after record company told her she didn’t ‘fit’ the right ‘image’ she kept on writing, producing and sending out demos regardless. People like Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, Whitney Houston and the now deceased R&B singer Aaliyah liked her kinda kooky style, and she started selling a few songs, even appearing on a Diddy track called That Thing That You Do by girl of the moment Gina Thompson. It was here that Thompson’s career sunk and Missy’s began to soar. CEO of Elektra Records, Sylvia Rhone decided this young woman had that certain something she was looking for, not only signing but offering the young Elliott her own imprint, which she named Gold Mind Inc. Rhone’s job is something these days Missy, ambitious as ever, lasciviously eyes. “To be behind that desk, uh huh, that would be a beautiful thing right there,” she practically salivates.
Rhone’s gamble paid off and in 1997, Missy ‘Misdemeanour’ Elliott finally released her debut offering, titled Supa Dupa Fly written by herself and produced by school friend Tim ‘Timbaland’ Mosley. Having taken a mere week to record, the pair promptly ‘saved hip hop’, (or so said Mike D of the Beastie Boys fame).
1.5 million people agreed with D and went and bought Missy and Tim’s music. Supa Dupa brilliantly and abruptly stopped the increasingly jaded hip hop in its self-obsessed tracks and sent it rocketing skywards. With its rubber-band beats, sci-fi samples and stuttering sonics topped off with Missy’s eccentric eulogy’s echoing forth on sex, rain and Hitting Em With The Hee (whatever that be), it was quite unlike anything anyone had heard, or seen before. In her videos Missy dressed up in hugely inflated black rubber suits and rode horseback dressed as a Nordic Viking. “I don’t mean to be so different,” she shrugs. “It’s only when I see the other videos on MTV or whatever that I realise…” she trails off eyebrows raised. “It just comes out that way.”
Well, from the recesses of what-addled mind do lyrics, like “Put my shit on wax, watch it blaze like May/ Go yippe yi yo yippe yi yi yay,” from her second album, 1999s murkily mysterious Da Real World - come from? “There’s times I listen to stuff and think that even for me, I’m coming out of my character,” she chortles, before pointing out she doesn’t smoke marijuana anymore as she did back then. And the lyrics are still as ludicrous. “When I hear the beat I immediately write what I’m thinking and, I can’t even explain,” she doesn’t explain albeit excitedly. “I don’t want to say it’s like the 10 Commandments and Moses is like ‘write this!’ but it’s almost like words come on the paper without me even thinking about what I’m gonna say. It’s pretty much the music that does it. Whatever it make me feel – it just come out.”
And ooze it does. On last years electrode-exploding ear-splitting fourth album Under Construction, inspiration arrived in the form of Pussycat, the original title changing after Patricia Elliott got wind. “She called me and said ‘Missy, do you have a song called Pussy?’ Oh my God, to hear my mother say that,” says a still embarrassed Elliott about the track that pleaded ‘pussy, don’t fail me now.’ What mum will think about the song Toys from new album This Is Not A Test, Missy can’t bear to contemplate. Is it about vibrators, Missy? “Yes it is,” she laughs, delighted despite herself. Surely Patricia won’t be too happy when she hears the line ‘don’t slam the door on your way out - you fucking up my concentration’? “Oh my God, I don’t even want know,” head buried in hands.
On the strength of the above two tracks alone, would it be safe to assume Missy’s quite a sexual person in her private life? “I think I let it come out in the albums,” she says deflecting neatly. “I think it’s more about me doing it and knowing that people think it and I’m just their voice. Like ‘Let Missy say it – she’ll say it!’ Females are supposed to not say certain things because we’re taught it’s not ‘ladylike,’” she points out. “So it’s more that I’m gradually making females more verbal. I know with Toys that all the females is gonna be like ‘What? Oh we got someone speaking for us right now.’” A proud laugh.
Missy’s good at not quite answering questions, though she is well practised after all. She shrugs off the age-old rumours she’s a lesbian saying ‘oh, one minute I’m marrying Tim, then I’m having Michael Jackson’s baby but Janet Jackson’s real mad cause she found out I was having an affair with (Miami rapper) Trina,” eyebrows raised, next question please. If one wonders how come she didn’t join in with the menage-a-trois tonsil tennis of Britney-Madonna-Christina at this years MYV/VMA’s, a sigh and ‘hip hop could never do that. Never, ever, ever.”
She will admit to being resolutely single and you wonder will she ever trust men having witnessed such an ugly relationship as a child? “No, I feel like I can trust a man but my passion is music and the studio,” she insists. She must surely yearn for some company though, someone to buy trainers for, drive about in the eight flash cars and share her multi-multi-millions with? “You know, to be honest I don’t. I think all my life I had to kinda like be on my own and it might be crazy to say, but I almost feel like as long as I got my mother I got my sanity. Half the female friends I’ve got are in the worst relationships I ever seen in my whole life - they’re like the most unhappiest. Besides,” she continues. “I can’t afford a distraction cause when you in a relationship you can’t just say, ‘Well, this is my job, this is what I do.’ You have to take time out for that person and I know that the studio is all I love.”
As the trainers have increased (“my maid’s like ‘please no more, there’s no room”), the houses have become plusher (“my main one’s in Miami”) and the jewellery heavier (“Money? I’m comfortable chuh huh”), two things have remained constant in Missy’s life. Producer and “left side of my brain” Timbaland and mother and “saviour” Patricia Elliott. “Oh, with Timberland, he has to take a two week vacation after we’ve done an album cause he know I give him hell every hour,” she chuckles of her long-term, long-suffering producer who also composes for Justin Timberlake and Eminem. “I guess the thing is that we’ve been working together for so long that we kind of know each other, and know if this is somewhere where we both think it’s hot for us to go.”
As for her mum, as the conversation has already indicated, Missy and she are as close as, well, a needle on a record. Indeed, Patricia is the reason every time she releases another album we meet a thinner Missy. Still, bigger women of the world may not be as happy with her weight loss as Missy clearly is. “They may be upset because I know I had a lot of heavier woman come to me and it was like ‘we never was accepted and you made it okay, people look beyond your weight and listen for your music’” she concurs. “But at the same token we have health issues and if I could stay big and please everybody I would but I wanna be here for as long as I possibly can be here.” Following the tragic death of her close friend Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash in 2001, Missy has dropped over six stone in weight. “For one I got high blood pressure and the doctors advised me I needed to really take care of that by watching my diet. After Aaliyah died I realised my life is very important to me,” she says fiddling with her bracelets. “Watching Aaliyah’s mother have to deal with her not being here - I didn’t want my mother to have to deal with me not being here,” she says simply in her deep Southern timbre adding she rarely even drinks her beloved Pina Coladas these days in order to aid her diet. “I think that I been through so much in my life to get here that it’s almost like my trophy and I ain’t letting it go. This is what I won,” she says softly.
Throughout all of her albums and the accompanying videos Missy Elliott has surely earned her prize, proving her mettle by putting her neck on the line at every juncture. In 2001 she released third album, the super-sexy …So Addictive where she berated ‘one minute men’ and hung from chandeliers in the magically mercurial video to Get Ya Freak On. She’s worn Elvis-inspired rhinestone jumpsuits and accepted awards dressed in bright green tartan, caring not for the whims of fashion. This time round while the video is still under wraps, musically we hear Missy experimenting with line dancing (well, hip hop has outsold the former market leader Country in the last three years) on the thunderously toe-tapping new single Pass That Dutch. It’s fair to say that Missy has innovated, box broken, envelope pushed and boundary smashed throughout her six short years as both leader of the female rap pack and one of the most exciting females in pop music.
Alongside the hit albums, the $150,000 per track she receives as one of the few female producers in music, coupled with awards coming out of her heavily diamond-studded ears, the numerous collaborations with the likes of Eminem, Busta Rhymes and Outkast, Missy has helped flog jewellery for Asprey & Gerrard, Vanilla Coke, and more recently Gap alongside Madonna. The Queen of hip hop met with the Queen of pop as Missy and Madonna teamed up after filming the Gap commercial to appear together at the VMA Awards (Missy was the one not seen snogging Madge, remember?).
“She bought her spiritual advisor along and she gave me the red (Kabbalah) string…”she remembers proudly. “And I went to her house to talk about what we was gonna wear.”
With records that innovate, videos that shock, and a look so distinctly, well, Missy, some may be tempted to say she’s reached the iconic status of her new-found friend Madonna? “Oh, no, no, no” she interrupts immediately looking somewhat displeased. “ I think icons are people who have been around for a long time and they have proven theyself. You look at a Madonna who’s been around a long time- she’s proven she can go sexual, she can go regular, do whatever it is, and she still around and still matter to people today. Even down to a Michael Jackson who’s been around since he was five years old – those are icons to me.”
But, surely, there’s no quite like Missy Elliott? “Ahhh, no, there’s someone,” she says bashfully. “I just look at it like I have so much further to go till I can get the respect of an icon. An icon is a huge, huge word and I don’t want to say icon but hopefully its Gods willing that I can keep going to get there …but I ain’t nowhere near there yet.”
Missy may feel like she’s a branch or two short of the ultimate accolade but if we remember the looks on those star-struck superstars at that Miami studio the final prize is not far off for the taking.
This Is Not A Test is released on November 24th 2003 on EastWest Records
A version of this article appeared in the Glasgow Herald
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