Missy Elliott - Queen of rap

She has experience as an actress and voice actress. She is active as an advocate for the rights of the Black community, women and animals. She has won more than 200 awards, including 15 MTV Video Music Awards, 9 BET Awards and 7 Grammys. She was the first female rapper to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In August 2017, a petition was even launched to dedicate a statue to her in her native Portsmouth, but for now she'll have to settle for a street named after her, “Missy Elliott Boulevard.” And for this profile.

From the church choir to Supa Dupa Fly

Born in 1971, Elliott grew up in Portsmouth, the same Virginia that gave us Pharrell Williams and the Clipse, effectively helping to put on the hip-hop and r'n'b map a state otherwise firmly tied to the country tradition of Patsy Cline, the Carter Family and the Golden Gate Quartet, but also to the blues and jazz tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Robert Cray. She grew up singing in the church choir and nurturing the dream of performing in front of others, starting with her own family. School was never her strong suit, and the family she grew up in was crushed by poverty and scarred by her father's domestic violence against her mother. Elliott herself was marked by this difficult childhood, as well as by sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a cousin.

The situation became so unbearable that, at 14, mother and daughter decided to run away in search of a better life. Melissa Elliott finished school in 1990 and burst onto the Black music scene in 1991, when she founded the all-female rap collective Fayze, later renamed Sista. In those first frantic years of activity, Missy Elliott met DeVanté Swing, for whose label Swing Mob—a hip-hop subsidiary of Elektra—her early work with the crew would be released, but above all she met producer and future superstar Timbaland, who was also active at the label and destined to become one of the leading names in r'n'b and hip-hop between the two millennia, thanks to collaborations with, among others, Usher, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Nas, Solange, Justin Timberlake, LL Cool J, Ludacris, Jennifer Lopez and Nelly Furtado.

That meeting between Missy Elliott and Timbaland would change her career and her life forever. Not only did Timbaland produce the vast majority of Missy Elliott's work, he also supported her as a producer for other artists, and for a long stretch he was her life partner—though today Missy Elliott is openly bisexual and prefers female partners.

In these early years, Missy Elliott did everything she could to break through, appearing, sometimes uncredited, on other artists' songs and albums. Timbaland and DeVanté were ready to release Sista's debut, “4 All The Sistas Around Da World” (1994), but promotion didn't go as hoped and the album was shelved, only to be released many years later, in 2017. In hindsight, its mix of r'n'b, hip-hop and soul says a lot about the context in which Missy Elliott's solo career would take root: a musical world where boundaries are blurred and cross-pollination is the rule. “Sweat You Down” and “Brand New” had hit potential, and some of the other tracks already contain points of interest, especially in the eclectic productions and the alternation between singing and rapping, even though the record as a whole doesn't quite come together, bogged down by many interludes and tracks that feel stuck at the demo stage. Some songs, like “I Wanna Be Wit U”, stick to r'n'b formulas that were already well-worn even by the standards of the time.

Supa Dupa Fly (1997), on the other hand, seems to arrive from the future, starting with its frantic intro courtesy of Busta Rhymes. This sonic storm, all crowded rhythms and digital sounds, is the terrain on which Missy Elliott moves as nimbly as a panther on “Hit Em Wit Da Hee” (featuring Lil' Kim), a fusion of sensuality and fun that runs through the whole album, and when, in the outro, the beat breathes, you can savor its funk undertones.

“Sock It 2 Me” (feat. Da Brat) is a hormonal bomb gone wild, with lush horns set against a pounding beat; underlining Missy Elliott's showmanship—here closer to singing than rapping—the sharpest, fastest verses are left to her guest. Closing out a sensational run is one of the masterpieces of her career, the alien, futuristic hip-hop of “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”, crowded with real sounds of rain and thunder and packed with rhythmic elements layered in the background; its circular structure, dazed with echoes and filtered voices, pairs perfectly with the hypnotic video in which the rapper wears an oversized jacket that, aided by a fish-eye lens, transforms her into a kind of sensual extraterrestrial jellyfish.

Alongside this original stylistic synthesis, Missy Elliott also plays with hip-hop clichés, for instance subverting the most obvious reading of “Don't Be Comin' (In My Face)” or mimicking, to the point of caricature, the ego-trips of her male peers (“I'm Talkin'”).

Hailed by critics of the time as a breath of fresh air amid the East Coast/West Coast feud, as well as the aesthetic manifesto of a new kind of female rapper, Supa Dupa Fly went platinum and established Missy Elliott and Timbaland as one of the most important duos steering American music into the new millennium. Such a synthesis - so wide-ranging and daring, deep yet fun - has few parallels, one being the histrionic OutKast, who, tellingly, also hailed from Georgia.

Addictive Rhymes: Da Real World and the Masterpiece

For her second album the guest list is long, including Beyoncé, Eminem, Big Boi from the aforementioned Outkast, French rap star MC Solaar and Redman. Da Real World (1999) was originally meant to be titled "She's A Bitch", after its lead single: a track in which Missy Elliott flips the negative connotations of the word bitch, proudly claiming it for herself.

The duet with Eminem, at the time at the very top of the pop world, is a first-rate show of mutual respect, even if the track itself isn't particularly memorable or well remembered.

All too often the guests cause the tracks to stretch out just enough to give the big names their due space, as with the yowling funk-soul-rap of "All N My Grill" featuring Big Boi and Nicole Wray, or "Dangerous Mouths", where Redman is the real star, bringing along a rap style far less colourful and eccentric than Missy Elliott's own. The side effect is an album in which the star's histrionic personality has fewer chances to shine, a shift made even more obvious by a reduction in the production's inventiveness. She can show off her sensual side on "You Don't Know" with Lil' Mo and still prove herself a talented rapper, as on the aggressive, hoarsely filtered "Beat Biters", but overall the overwhelming impact of the debut isn't replicated: if that was an earthquake, this is at best an aftershock.

A little of the thrilling electro-futurist pastiche of the debut lives on in the cross-pollinations of "Mr. Dj" (feat. Lady Saw) and in the more immediate "Smooth Chick", with its punchy brass riff.

Regardless, audiences embraced this second album enthusiastically, rewarding it with a platinum certification for selling over a million copies, and critics too, while occasionally noting a dip in inspiration, nonetheless confirmed their substantial and broad support for Missy Elliott.

That support is handsomely repaid by the masterpiece of her career, Miss E... So Addictive (2001), a concentrate of ideas that brings the intuitions of her debut to full fruition, now enriched by the possibilities afforded by a well-established career. Timbaland seems to have recharged his batteries, and Missy Elliott is more confident than ever in her own abilities as a writer, singer and rapper. If Supa Dupa Fly introduced her personality to the public, this third album is foundational to a way of understanding female rap as something fundamentally different from what so many male peers had done before. Placed by the Guardian among the 100 best albums of the 21st century and by Pitchfork among those of the Noughties, as well as named by Rolling Stone among the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, Miss E... So Addictive is Missy Elliott's definitive work, the one that would also become the benchmark for the rest of her career.

Commercial success followed too, both with the platinum certification awarded to the album for selling over a million copies, and with a string of hugely successful singles. Surprisingly, this result wasn't achieved by cutting back on guest features but simply by weaving them more organically into the songs: Missy Elliott remains the star when she sings sensually on "Dog In Heat" (feat. Method Man & Redman), a digital funk track that updates Dr. Dre's ideas with a more dirty south and electronic sensibility, and also on the single "One Minute Man", where she raps alongside Ludacris over a hypnotic, synth-packed production that would have made fellow Virginian Pharrell proud.

The star slips perfectly into the role of the most elegant of singers on the r'n'b ballad "Take Away", with Ginuwine providing soulful support and a surprising vocoder intervention, but she's just as at ease in the frenetic beat of the dancefloor hit "4 My People", with Eve, where the kick drum pounds hard in 4/4 amid claps, synth-bass and plucked strings. On "Watcha Gonna Do", the collaboration with Timbaland, here also on vocals, is almost a self-tribute from a duo that helped rethink hip-hop at the turn of the century.

When she's alone at the mic, Missy Elliott is if anything even more histrionic: she roars and screams on "Lick Shots", generously varying her delivery and flow, and rides the futuristic, Indian-tinged beat of the double-platinum "Get Ur Freak On", one of Timbaland's crown jewels and the vehicle in which she can showcase her eclectic take on what it means to be a singer and rapper; she sighs swooningly and screams possessed on "Scream a.k.a. Itchin'", yet settles easily into the souped-up g-funk of "Old School Joint", an orgy of chirping synths and Eighties-style basslines; she softens her style, letting her voice dissolve into the psych-funk hallucination of "X-tasy". Not even Jay-Z, on the remix of One Minute Man, manages to steal much of the spotlight from her, which is no small feat given the personality the Brooklyn rapper brings to the mic.