“Work It”—Missy Elliott

Join us in a moment of 60 Songs history being made as Missy Elliott becomes the first artist with not one, but two songs in the 60 Songs hall of fame with “Work It” added to the mix. In celebration, Rob shares memories from his time at DJ camp as well as a list of some of his favorite songs of all time! Stay and hear Justin Charity join the mix and discuss Missy’s legacy and Virginia’s impact on hip-hop. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Justin Charity Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sayles Additional Production Support: Olivia Crerie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I'm Yasi Solak and I'm here to announce a brand new season of my Ringer original podcast, Bandsplain, the show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists to you and yours. This time, babe, we're going across the pond. That's right, I'm absolutely chuffed to be talking about the music scenes of 80s and 90s Britain. I'm talking Madchester, I'm talking baggy, I'm talking shoegaze, I'm talking Britpop, mate. So tune in every Thursday starting November 7th for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hello, just a quick note to say that we will be off next week, the week of Thanksgiving. There will be no episode on November 27th, but we will return on Wednesday, December 4th, and go from there. So we'll see you soon. Thanks a lot.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I ever tell you guys about the time I went to DJ school?

• 0:58Speaker 02

  You got to know when to hold.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Know when to fold down.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  DJs, DJs.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Know when to walk away.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Hip-hop, hip-hop.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Know when to run.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one time I went to DJ school at the NorCal DJ and Music Production Academy in San Francisco. This is 2004. Okay, I went to DJ camp. I went to a one-week daytime DJ camp for 12 to 16-year-olds. I was older than that physically in 2004, though I do maintain, even now, a 12-year-old's maturity level emotionally. DJ camp, there's me in the scratch room at DJ camp. Eight pairs of Techniques turntables in the scratch room, seven teenagers and me scratching in the scratch room. And now every teenager in the

• 1:54Speaker 01

  room is staring at me as I stare at my decks. And spinning there is Wyclef Jean's remake of The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. I'll say one thing for me, I know how to ingratiate myself with the youth.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Name a more iconic duo than Wyclef Jean and Kenny Rogers. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. Okay, okay. Name a more iconic trio than Wyclef Jean, Kenny Rogers, and Queens rap legend Pharoah Manch. The Fugees. The Fugees are a more iconic trio. Okay, okay. This song is from Wyclef's second post-Fugees solo album, released in 2000 and called "The Eclectic: Two Sides to a Book." That's the eclectic colon numeral two sides, Roman numeral to a book. Rolls right off the tongue. This song is called "Kenny Rogers and Pharoah Manch Dubplate",

• 3:10Speaker 01

  on account of the fact that it heavily samples Pharoah Manch's gargantuan 1999 jam, "Simon Says", which in turn heavily samples the soundtrack to Godzilla vs. Mothra. Guess what? We're playing a few bars from "Simon Says." Why, you ask? Because I'm the one on the decks. That's why.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  The most 1999 aspect of the Pharoah Manch song "Simon Says" is the line, "Control the game like Tomb Raider." A kid in my college freshman dorm in 1997 had a Playstation, a PS1, and like 12 dudes would cram into his dorm room just to watch him play Tomb Raider. This wasn't like a sexual thing. We were just bored. And one time he was playing Tomb Raider and a boulder fell on his head out of nowhere, and all the dudes in the room went, "Ooh, I gotta scratch over this song now, man." Yikes. I gotta perform at DJ camp. I gotta scratch over Wyclef Jean's Pharoah Manch sampling remake of "The Gambler." What am I doing?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  I got no chops. I got no skills on the decks. What do you want from me exactly? You want a baby scratch, a chirp scratch, an orbit scratch, a crab scratch, a hydroplane? Would you settle for a forward passive scratch? My teacher at DJ Kent told me that I excel at the forward passive scratch. It gets worse. I gotta beat match this remake of The Gambler into some other song now. Every teenager in this room heard Kenny Rogers's voice and instantly fell asleep. I gotta win the room back. Anybody got any ideas?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Great idea. Thank you. Okay, the good news is all the teenagers woke up when I played "Right Thur" by Chingy, St. Louis, Missouri rap legend Chingy, because this song kicks ass. "Right Thur" from 2003, that's "thur" spelled T-H-U-R-R. The bad news, as you may have noticed, is that "Right Thur" is slower than the Wyclef song. Not tremendously disastrously slower, but it's slower enough that my attempt to beat match these two songs into each other is indeed disastrous. No amount of competent forward passive scratching can disguise the tempo issue here.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  My DJ name was DJ Alouf, by the way. I gave myself that name. Everyone liked it. Quick, DJ Alouf, play something else.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Oh, now you're just pandering, DJ Alouf. All the teenagers roll their eyes at my transparent attempt to further ingratiate myself by playing 50 Cent's "In the Club." Too obvious. I have nothing else to say about this song. I'm sorry, the topic is exhausted. You know what my goal was at DJ Camp though? You know what I very specifically wanted to learn how to do? I wanted to learn how to scratch one specific 50 cent line into various other songs. That was gonna be my thing. That was gonna be DJ Aloof's signature move. I'd be on the decks, right? I'd be rocking the house and I'd be playing Chingy or whatever.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  And I just expertly constantly drop in one 50 cent line. Guess the line. Guess which 50 cent line I fixated on? It's from the song 21 Questions, but you knew that already, didn't you?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Also too obvious, and the good news is that I did not learn to do that. DJ Camp did not teach me how to scratch 50 Cent going, "I love you like a fat kid love cake" into other songs. And I am grateful to DJ Camp for not teaching me that. And the teenagers are grateful also. Society is grateful. The assignment here at DJ Camp was to pick four songs and mix them together, beat match them into each other and thus create a little DJ mix with which to delight my fellow campers. I do not remember the exact order of my four-song mix. I just remember that I botched the whole thing horribly.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Although, and I mean no offense to Wyclef or Chingy or 50 Cent, I will say that the highlight of this whole botched mix was when DJ Aloof dropped this.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  And all the teenagers' ears perk up and they're like, "Ooh, DJ Aloof, who is this?" And I'm like, "It's Jesse Jackson in 1972 at Watts Stacks, the huge famous soul music concert in LA commemorating the 7th anniversary of the Watts riots. It's Jesse Jackson introducing a song called "I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To" by The Soul Children. And all the teenagers are like, "Ooh, that's fascinating." Tell us more DJ Loof. And I'm like, well, Public Enemy sampled this on the song Rebel Without A Pause from their Seminole 1988 album, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. And the teenagers are like, ooh. So you're spinning Public Enemy? You're pretty cool DJ Loof.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And then I hit him with something even cooler.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Brothers and sisters, I don't know what this world is coming to. What's up, Missy? Timbo.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And everyone in the scratch room at DJ Camp bursts into applause as I hit him with another Missy Elliott exclusive. I hit him with Back In The Day featuring Jay-Z, a joyous and buoyant and gently heartbreaking Missy Elliott song from 2002 about how much better, or at least how much simpler, how much more peaceful hip hop was back in the day, back in the eighties, back when Missy Elliott was a teenager, back when Public Enemy first amassed A Nation Of Millions. Here at DJ Camp, I do not beat match this song competently into anything. I do not chirp scratch or crab scratch or even passive forward scratch over this song.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  I just let this song play and everyone loves it because of course they do. It's her.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  This is my one concrete memory of DJ Camp. My hands trembling over two spinning turntables as I try to mentally lock into the groove of Back In The Day.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So I can mix this song seamlessly into some other song. And this does not occur. No seamless mixing occurs, and this will be both the beginning and the end of DJ Aloof. I do not, in fact, rock the house. No houses were rocked in the making of this anecdote. I will never be on the decks again. I know better. I know when to walk away and when to run, but I loved it. I loved just trying to hone in on this song back in the day because it meant, I got to put on headphones and spend a solid hour listening to it while I tried.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And hip hop had changed tremendously by this point, by 2004, when a 26-year-old white dude from Ohio is spinning what is functionally a Wyclef Jean, Kenny Rogers, Pharoah Monch mashup at a San Francisco DJ camp for teenagers. What happened to hip hop? Man, can we really say hip hop has changed for the better, given this grim scenario? We can say hip hop is better in 2004, actually, if only because of her. I may stop gushing about her eventually, though maybe I can't stop, and I won't stop.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  My goal here today is to figure out precisely why I am so galactically enamored with this person, why Missy Elliott is one of my favorite musicians, my favorite artists, my favorite humans of all time. And I suppose we can start with how she says, "I'm stupid fresh." Here's another question, though. Why did I pick this song? To spin at DJ Camp, as much as I love back in the day, I don't know that it makes my top five, top 10, top 20 all-time favorite Missy Elliott songs. So why did DJ Alouf alight on this particular song of hers? I can answer that, actually, though the answer is super boring. At DJ Camp, they gave us a pile of like 20 records, tops, and said, "Here, pick one

• 13:26Speaker 01

  of these and mix them together and don't let me hear it." And so I picked Wyclef, Chingy, 50, and the one available Missy song. That's the real answer. But another hypothetical, more narratively compelling answer to that question is I didn't pick one of my all-time favorite Missy songs because I didn't want to desecrate one of my all-time favorite Missy songs with my feeble beat matching and wayward crab scratches and whatnot. I am certainly not going to desecrate one of my top five favorite songs of all time by anyone ever.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the eighth episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Cole and the 2000s, and this week we are discussing "Work It" by Missy Elliott, also from her 2002 album, Under Construction. We try and avoid hyperbole around here, and inevitably, we fail to avoid hyperbole, right? I am constantly going, "This is the best blah, blah, blah, blah, blah of all time." But I mean it this time. "Work It" by Missy Elliott is top five, top three, top two. This is very arguably my single favorite song, my favorite composition, my favorite piece of recorded music ever. Let's figure out why I love this song so much.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Theory number one, the elephant.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I do really dig the elephant. The elephant is crucial. The elephant is very necessary. The elephant line is highlighted in the genius.com entry on Workit, the lyrics and interpretation and annotation website genius.com. And if you click on the elephant line, the annotation reads, quote, "In both the clean and dirty versions of the song, a trumpeting elephant appears. The noise is an aural reinforcement of Missy's line about a man having a big dick," end quote. And then there's a picture of an elephant. And that's why, not to be hyperbolic, but that's why genius.com is the best website on the internet.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  All right. We're in uncharted waters, my friends. Missy Elliott is officially the first artist in 60 Songs history to get two episodes, two songs. She is our first two-time inductee. The fourth ever episode of this show, formerly known as 60 Songs That Explained the 90s, was devoted to Missy Elliott's 1997 solo debut single, "The Rain Supa Dupa Fly." Fun fact about that episode, my script was less than 3,000 words and the whole episode, including two interviews, clocked in at just over a half hour. Pretty much every episode of this show now is three times as long. Dude, I once wrote 10,000 words about Pantera.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  What happened to this program? Don't answer that. Let's do a quick ad break so you forget I asked that. I have mastered the ad break. I will say that. I have mastered the forward passive aggressive ad break. Okay, great, it's the second Missy Elliott episode. But how do we further honor someone we've already honored? Do we lean into the inherent wanton hyperbole of this situation? Or do we make a feeble attempt to suppress that hyperbole? Given that we're on round two with her, are we therefore freed from the usual chronological,

• 17:33Speaker 01

  coherent, quote unquote, explanatory, here's who this person is and why you should care approach? Can the second Missy Elliott episode just be all digressions? What are my all time top five favorite songs? Let's give this a shot. Real quick, hit the deck.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Kiss by Prince. My top five favorite songs of all time are in no particular order. If I were a pro baseball player, Kiss would 100% be my walk up music. I will say that. The Prince estate will probably give me shit about the rights, but I will gladly forfeit my entire salary to secure the rights to Kiss. Now batting number 60, first baseman, Rob Wills Harvilla.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  And then I hit 12 grand slams per game. Wham, a homer. Wham, another homer. My top five favorite songs of all time are not exactly going to be obscure. Okay, I'm not trying to impress you here, all right? Why start now?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Couldn't you be any more obvious than that, Rob? How about, I don't know, The Beatles? How about fucking, fucking Beethoven? Let It Be by The Beatles is in there for sure. I still instinctively start crying if Let It Be comes on the radio. Same deal with this one, actually.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  When I Think of You by Janet Jackson is also in my top five favorite songs of all time. DJ Aluf would have spun When I Think of You all the time and DJ Aluf would not have desecrated When I Think of You by dropping 50 Cent rapping, "I love you like a fat kid love cake" into it. DJ Aluf would have known better. The joy, the silliness, the undercurrent of exquisite melancholy. Janet is important. Janet is necessary. Quick question for you. Be honest, do you think Janet Jackson would like this song if she ever heard it?

• 20:37Speaker 05

  Looking around in the eye by the light switch, who watches over you? Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  I personally think Janet Jackson would really like "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants, which makes no sense here thematically, but it's still on the list. Those four songs and Missy Elliott's work it. That's the list. That's my top five favorite songs of all time. I am at peace with it. Okay, that was fun. That wasn't embarrassing at all. You ready for digression number two? Look out. Top three Missy Elliott songs with animal noises. For some reason, these are in a particular order. Here we go. Number three.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  You know how you got me. I never been as open as I be. I'm the one who's holding out to be. Giving up the easy.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  That was a cat. There is no genius.com annotation explaining the cat. Oh, well. That's from the song Play That Beat, also on Missy's Under Construction album from 2002. Pretty great, but I wonder if we can find something subtler. Number two.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  I'm free, Kim, free, co, whatever your choice. Didn't come to judge, I came to get your voice. Spring, my voice is lost.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Nope, not subtler. Also, pretty great, though. That was a horse. Uh, this song is called "Pass That Dutch", from Missy's 2003 album, "This Is Not A Test", exclamation point. There is a Genius.com annotation explaining the horse, but it's pretty long, and I don't feel like reading all of it. More importantly, according to the second-best website on the internet, WhoSampled.com, which compiles all the samples in a particular song, the specific horse sampled on Missy Elliott's "Pass That Dutch", this horse can be found on a 1992 sound effects CD. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present,

• 22:40Speaker 01

  "Horse Interior Winnie Animal 02", that's the name of this track. That's horse-interior-winnie-animal-numeral-02. Hit it!

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yep, that's him. Or her. That's the horse. Great. The best Missy Elliott song with an animal noise is "Work It", obviously, but WhoSampled.com has not yet identified the "Work It" elephant.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Oh, well. Uh, this is all a little frivolous for my tastes. All digressions ain't gonna work. Enough with the lists. Okay, let's back up. Let's do this person justice. Let's quickly recap. Here's some of what we talked about last time. In the first Missy Elliott episode from four years ago, that was one-third as long. Her name is Melissa Arnett Elliott. She is born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1971. She is a singer, a songwriter, a rapper, a producer, a fashion icon, and a world historical maker of sounds. For example, in 1993, she makes these sounds.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Here we have "That's What Little Girls Are Made Of", the 1993 debut single from the singer, rapper and actress Raven Simone, who is seven years old at the time. Missy co-wrote and co-produced this song. In addition to taking an electrifying guest verse that includes the sounds dang diggily dang dang dang dang shablang, and also cuckoo. It doesn't count as a song with an animal noise if it's just her making the animal noise. There is an immediate tension between the onomatopoeic whimsy, the confounding delight of Missy Elliott, and the harshness of her childhood. In 2001, she talked to The Guardian at length

• 24:51Speaker 01

  about growing up in an abusive home, about how Missy and her mother, Patricia Elliott, eventually fled from Missy's abusive father. Missy says, quote, "I lived in constant fear. I had friends, but I never stayed at anyone's house because I was scared that I would come home and find my mother dead. I remember seeing my mother crouched in the corner with her arm out of its socket. There isn't a day goes by that I don't think about it all." End quote. Young Missy sits on trash cans and sings Jackson 5 songs for passersby. She says, quote, "I used to put all my doll babies on my bed with their hands up, and I would do full shows for them. I'd even do the screaming and clapping.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I was bugging to be a singer." End quote. Missy also says that she mailed letters and tapes to both Michael and Janet Jackson in the hopes that Michael and/or Janet Jackson would recognize young Missy's musical genius and come save her and her mother from their life of poverty and abuse. Now, in 2001, Missy says, "I would check my mailbox every day, come rain, sleet or snow. They never wrote back. I cried every night about that. Now I'm friends with Janet. I write songs for her. Sometimes, though, we'll be in a club together, and I'll find myself thinking, but you never wrote me back when I needed you."

• 26:20Speaker 01

  End quote.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  This is all very hard to even read about, but I don't mention it here to undercut her silliness, her lewdness, her flamboyance, her palpable joy. To my mind, it always sharpens and deepens the musical joy of Missy Elliott to learn how hard she had to fight for it. In high school, she takes an IQ test, which says she's a genius, but her school doesn't quite believe it. So they make her take the test again, and the test says she's a genius again. And so the school makes her skip two grades. But Missy doesn't want to leave her friends behind, so she hatches a plan to flunk all her classes, so she'll get demoted two grades, though she leaves that school before that happens. Missy tells The Guardian, quote, "I didn't want to be a genius. That ain't cool.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  I wanted to goof around. They wanted to mount me in the trophy cabinet. I was not that kind of kid. I was a joker," end quote. And like all great jokers, Missy Elliott took being a joker very, very, very seriously.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  I think all of that is fairly self-explanatory. I don't think you want me repeating any of that. That song is called Sweat You Down. See, you didn't even want me saying what the song was called. Sweat You Down, sorry, I just said it again, sorry. This song is brought to you by Missy's girl group, which is originally called Fayze, F-A-Y-Z-E. Missy finagles a backstage audition for Devonte Swing, a member of super porny, early 90s R&B superstars Jodezzy. Devonte's got a loose musical collective of rappers and singers and songwriters and producers and whatnot called Swing Mob. Devonte signs Fayze to a lousy contract and renames the group Sista,

• 28:27Speaker 01

  and eventually moves pretty much the whole Swing Mob up to a two-story house in That I don't think you personally, or I personally, would have enjoyed hanging out at, from what I've read. Sista's hoping to release their debut album called For All The Sisters Around The World in 1994, but it gets pretty much instantly shelved after the single flops. That single is called "Brand New," and it deserved better. No offense to the other three members of Sista, but it's pretty clear who's already running the show here.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  It sounds like Missy Elliott is already floating off into space, is what it sounds like. Missy Elliott already sounds like the lady who in a few years is gonna pull off her own head while rapping in the One Minute Man video. Pretty rad beats, also. The beatboxing, the breathiness, that's Timbaland. Oh, right, Timbaland. In Virginia, Missy befriends a young fellow genius super producer named Timothy Mosley, aka Timbaland, and they form an immediate spiritual and musical bond. In his 2015 memoir, The Emperor Of Sound, co-written with Veronica Chambers, Timbaland describes the day he met Missy Elliott

• 29:56Speaker 01

  as "the day that changed the course of my entire life." He played her some beats, and he writes, quote, "For 10 minutes, with the exception of an occasional head nod, she was silent, but I could tell she was taking it all in, every instrument, every layer of sound. She was pulling the music apart and putting it back together in her head the same way I did." And finally, he says, "Missy was different from any of the other girls I'd ever met before. Musical chops, impeccable, gifted, focused, confident, and she made me want to be all of those things, too," end quote. Timbaland hooks up with Devante Swing as well, and joins the ill-fated Swing

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Mob up in New York and Timbaland describes in his memoir crashing on a mattress on the floor in a filthy crowded room and getting yelled at by random jerks in Devante's crew and doing weird demeaning toilet cleaning type errands and scraping discarded Chinese food off other people's plates when he got too hungry and making tons of music and making absolutely no money off any of it. For the record, the best line, the single best sentence in Timbaland's memoir is, quote, "Who gets shot in a Red Lobster?" end quote, because one time he got shot in a Red Lobster. Meanwhile, Missy gets out of the whole swing mob situation

• 31:23Speaker 01

  first and she gets to work. Specifically, Missy gets to work making a whole bunch of rad wild sounds.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Missy Elliott makes these sounds. She makes the sounds hee hee hee hee how, hee hee hee hee hee hee how on the 1996 Bad Boy remix of the Gina Thompson song, "The Things That You Do." All right, here's a song called "Ooh, Ooh, Baby" from an R&B singer and actress named Terrell. Came out in 1996. Here's the first 10 seconds of "Ooh, Ooh, Baby." Terrell has a lovely voice, but this is not her.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  "I'm hot like six big women in a sauna, ya'ana. Unbelievable." We're not doing any more lists, but Missy's got a bunch of candidates for top five opening lines. For example, here's a song called "Stilo" from the Las Vegas R&B group 702. 702 is the Las Vegas area code. This song came out in 96 and the song's been going for a while by the time Missy finally shows up, but I'm still quite fond of the opening line. "This track gets nasty like pornography."

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I like Joe, but he's sloppy. Unbelievable. I am growing impatient. I am blowing this opportunity to discuss one of my top five favorite songs of all time at gratuitous length. Speed it up, DJ Aloof. Yeah, in the mid 90s, Missy Elliott writes and/or produces a bunch of rad songs for other people. And meanwhile, Timbaland also extricates himself from the whole swing mob fiasco. And finally, Missy and Timbaland bunker down and crank out Missy Elliott's debut solo album, 1997's Super Dupa Fly in two weeks. Name a more iconic duo, but I mean it this time.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Verily, the fourth episode of this podcast was devoted to the song "The Rain," parentheses, "Super Dupa Fly" by Missy Elliott. And what did we discuss in a mere half hour? We discussed how the rain sounds like the future. Missy sounds like the future. Missy sounds like the future in the present tense. Missy from back then still sounds like the future now. We have not yet caught up to Missy Elliott. And that goes double for the video. Yes, we discussed the video for "The Rain" at length. We discussed the director, Hype Williams, and his fisheye lens, his luxurious superhero framing. We discussed Missy's stylist, June

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Ambrose, who crafted Missy's black blow-up vinyl suit. Not a garbage bag, but Missy did need to walk from the soundstage, from the video set to a nearby gas station in Brooklyn to blow up her vinyl suit.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  And that is still my single favorite Missy Elliott image. Missy at a gas station getting blown up like a tire and then rumbling back to the set in her black blow up vinyl suit to change hip hop forever. The porous border between the real world and Missy Elliott's fantastical transformative era defining alternate universe. And we talked about how even without the video, the rain already sounds like its own universe with its own micro climates, its own fauna, its own wildlife. The crickets, man. The weird, awesome shudder of the wind right here before Missy makes the sounds beep beep.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Who got the keys to the Jeep? Vroom.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Beep beep. Who got the keys to the Jeep?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  The bookend there in just that seven seconds between the production going and Missy going room. The physical impact of that, those literal breaths of fresh air. We were gasping for breath in 1997. Tupac dies in September 96. Biggie dies in March 97. Missy's Super Dupa Fly album comes out in July 97. That's the other thing we talked about last time. Hip hop was in mourning. Hip hop was experiencing a power vacuum. Rap needed new stars. Going forward, Missy Elliott won't sell the most records or rack up the most billboard hits.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Counting features, she's got 10 top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, but she never hit number one. But I don't think we make it without her. I understand that sounds hyperbolic and melodramatic. When I say we don't make it, I don't know exactly what I mean by we. And I don't know exactly what I mean by make it. It's simply that I do not want to imagine rap music without her and specifically without her singing about how good she is at rapping.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  This is the song on Super Duper Fly that's really doing it for me lately. It's called "I'm Talkin'." You have to be a pretty good rapper to make the line "I'm such a good rapper work" in your chorus. That's my observation. Anything else you want to hear off this record? Every song off this record? Yeah, me too. But I've grown even more impatient. Just one more, one more song to underscore the point that Missy Elliott is a great rapper, even when she sounds like she's rapping from a dentist's chair.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Just a phenomenal collection of sounds here. Especially blizzy, blizzy, blase, blase, blase. All right. Missy wanted to call her second album "She's a Bitch", but her label talked her out of it. Probably Best Buy would not have agreed to sell that one. Nobody talked her out of the song, though.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  So instead, Missy Elliott's second album, released in June 1999, is called "The Real World", and just the single is called "She's a Bitch." That's a little something called compromise. "The Real World" makes very explicit references to The Matrix, which had come out in spring 1999. Timbaland literally says "I am Morpheus" in the intro, which makes Missy neo. And so in her version of The Matrix, neo raps stuff like this.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I can't think of a line from either of the two Matrix sequels more compelling than "Yippee-ya-oh, yippee-ya-ay-ay." "The Real World" is somewhat overlooked, as Missy Elliott albums go. Here in the midst of what turns out to be a truly spectacular six album run, this one's got no eternal mega hits on the order of, say, "Work It." But the great critic and author Clover Hope just wrote a great pitchfork Sunday review of "The Real World," and Clover says, quote, "This album is where Missy honed her Afro-futurist vision and world-building skills while advocating for women to seize control of the language used to define them," end quote. And that ties directly back to Missy's mother.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Clover quotes Missy from a 2000 interview with Essence magazine, where Missy says, "Watching my mother move from being totally dependent on my father to getting out there and working and doing whatever she had to do to survive and keep me happy makes me realize how strong she was," end quote. And so "The Real World" is a celebration of strength in all its forms, including the Matrix-type, super-violent forms of strength. This song is called "Dangerous Mouths."

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Bonus points if you realize that Missy is interpolating. She is singing "Would You Still Be In Love, Baby," like Lisa Lisa. You know, Lisa Lisa in "Cult Jam" with full force, their big hit, "I Wonder If I Take You Home" from 1985. I got that song stuck in my head now.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I'm gonna end up playing it for you, aren't I? Yep, here it comes. Notice that there is no throat-cutting in the original Lisa Lisa version. Hip-hop really has changed.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Goodness gracious, I keep gassing on about how impatient I am to get back to work it. And I'm over here playing Lisa Lisa. Yo, DJ Aluf, drop Get Your Freak On already.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  If we're talking about Missy Elliott as the future, as someone who permanently sounds like the future, as someone whose songs still sound like a best case scenario future that still hasn't arrived and at this point may never arrive, Get Your Freak On is the one, right? Get You Are Freak On from Missy's third album, Missy...so addictive. This song, man, this song is basically my sole positive memory of the year 2001. The spare but gargantuan Bangra instrumentation, the relentless forward propulsion, but also the three dimensional space, the whiplash pauses, the split second silences, the caught

• 42:46Speaker 01

  breaths, very simple gestures, very simple words have just this concussive cataclysmic effect on Get Your Freak On. The way she says yes five times in 10 seconds, the way she says holla once.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I totally get it if Get Your Freak On is your favorite, your favorite Missy, your favorite Timbaland, your favorite rap song. Maybe it makes your top five favorite songs of all time by anyone ever. I just assume Get Your Freak On is everyone else's favorite. I am disinclined to argue with everyone else. My beloved colleague at The Ringer, the critic and podcaster and saxophonist Justin Charity, in 2021, he wrote about the 20th anniversary of the Missy So Addictive album and he says, quote, "It's easy to recall the long-gone months when 'Get Your Freak On' was the biggest song in the world. In the moment, it was much harder to summarize the profound newness in every bit of her sound and persona.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  It wasn't just the music videos with the glossy costumes and fisheye lenses. There was a certain boundlessness in her music, unmistakable in its hip-hop signatures, but otherwise unrelated to any contemporary agonizing about regions, genres, and technique. 'Get Your Freak On' wasn't just big, and it wasn't just mind-blowing. It was exactly the sort of ridiculous song that was never gonna get made by the so-called best rappers alive at the time." End quote. And the ridiculousness, the essential defiant, gargantuan, pure-oxygen ridiculousness of

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Missy Elliott manifests most often in her videos. Yes, in her electrifying 23rd-century fashion sense. It is a shocking and unforgettable moment during 'Get Your Freak On', the first time you hear Missy Elliott spit out the words, "Is that yo' chick?" But the shock is multiplied a hundredfold when you watch the video and Missy's head pops off her body again and stretches out on her suddenly 10-foot-long neck and she's very casually spitting out the words, "Is that yo' chick?", right in your face.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And right there in the Get Your Freak On video, it cuts to Timbaland and he's just dancing, just a normal jovial human guy surrounded by ladies and dancing normally in a world famously outrageous music video. The eternal fascination for me is the way that both Missy and Timbaland, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously, can toggle between human and superhuman, frail and invulnerable. Sometimes Missy Elliott looks and sounds and acts like she's 1,200 feet tall and sometimes she sounds like she's five foot two. Let me do one last thing real quick. I've been working on a theory

• 46:20Speaker 01

  that Missy Elliott as both a solo artist and a songwriter, Missy has a signature vocal phrase, a signature melodic phrase, and it's a very simple melodic phrase, but I hear anybody sing it and I can picture Missy so vividly. So I've spent the last week straight listening to Missy Elliott exclusively. And so naturally, the algorithm starts tossing me jams from the Missy Elliott Extended Universe. And so I hear this.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  I hear the 2002 jam Oops, Oh My, Oops parentheses, Oh My, by the singer Tweet. How mad was Tweet when Twitter launched? Pretty mad, I bet. Yes. Oops, Oh My, a song you don't want me explaining or even reciting in any way in the grand tradition of Sweat You Down. Oops was written by Tweet and Missy Elliott, produced by Timbaland and features Missy Elliott, but you just heard Missy's voice, didn't you, without actually hearing her voice? My theory is that you just very clearly heard Missy. ...voice through Tweet's voice on the phrase "around a quarter to three."

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Just that simple ascending line. Do, do, do, do, do, do. That line just hit me like a thunderbolt. And that is one mark of greatness to me, that I hear Missy's physical voice so clearly, even through her writing voice. And then it happens again.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  It happens to me again with Aaliyah. Aaliyah, very possibly Missy and Timbaland's most famous and most beloved collaborator. One in a million four-page letter, "If Your Girl Only Knew." Once again, I am disinclined to argue if any or all of those are your personal favorite Aaliyah songs, but for me, it's this one. It's "Heartbroken," from 1996. And there's that phrase again. There's Missy's voice so perfectly conveyed by Aaliyah's voice. "One thing I'd ask of you, if this is true." That simple ascending line. Do, do, do, do. It just kills me. I can't explain it. And now I hear this one Missy Elliott phrase everywhere.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I hear it, for example, in a big hit from back in my DJ era, my DJ week. I hear that phrase in the Missy Elliott song "Back in the Day," when Missy herself sings the words "if we did our homework."

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Just a theory I've been working on. I'll keep you updated. She's always bouncing around in my head and always finding new, strange, delightful ways to bounce around in my head. Now, if you don't mind, DJ Loof, it's time.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  And all the teenagers' ears perk up and they're like, "Ooh, DJ Loof, who is this?" And I'm like, "Well, it's rock master Scott and the Dynamic Three from the Bronx, from their beloved and oft-sampled 1984 single, 'Request Line.'" And the teenagers are like, "That was sarcasm. We know who it is. We were joking. Please just play the song." And I'm like, "Oh, okay. Sorry."

• 50:35Speaker 01

  So, "Work It" is the lead single off Missy Elliott's fourth album, "Under Construction", released in the fall of 2002. "Work It" is Missy Elliott's biggest hit. It peaks at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, beaten only by Eminem's "Lose Yourself." "Oh, Eminem. Oh, I'll get you for this." "Work It" is perfect. "Work It" is perfect right here. "Work It" is perfect already in the first 20 seconds, before anything really happens, on account of everything that is already happening while relatively nothing much is happening. At its simplest and quietest,

• 51:17Speaker 01

  "Work It" still sounds like at least three songs playing simultaneously. One of those songs, yes, is "Heart of Glass." Blondie's 1979 smash, "Heart of Glass," is prominently sampled here. The fizzy, bubbling, percolating cha-cha Jason undercurrent of "Heart of Glass." Run DMC's Peter Piper from 1986 is all over "Work It." Four separate elements of Peter Piper showing up in four separate places. It's not so much that "Work It" samples Peter Piper as Peter Piper haunts "Work It," or repeatedly goads "Work It" on to new pinnacles of greatness.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  My personal favorite Peter Piper sample on this song is the little Pac-Man chirp right here,

• 52:07Speaker 01

  right before Missy suggests you get a manicure.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  But we're jumping around already and we just blew right by it, didn't we? We blew right by the series of letters that reads phonetically as "Tis served in yak nag pumuf." It's the phrase "I put my thing down, flip it in, reverse it," reversed. Don't worry, I'm playing this part again. I'm playing this part and the elephant part again. You're welcome.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  As Missy will never get tired of telling people, or maybe she gets tired of telling people. She doesn't seem to love interviews, but anyway, I never get tired of hearing her tell people. Missy has explained often how this song happened accidentally. In 2018, she told the Associated Press, quote, "The reverse thing, that was a mistake. The engineer happened to hit something and it just went backward. And I was like, oh, that's kind of crazy because it went backward on the beat. So after that happened, I said, yo, keep that in there and I'm going to write around it." End quote. Do you want to hear the reverse part unreversed? Have you ever heard the backward part of "Work It" played forward?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  We can provide that experience. We have the technology. I personally am a DJ. I can do it. No, I can't. Kirm will do it for us. And now, thanks to our intrepid producer Jonathan Kermah, here is that one part of "Work It" unreversed.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  You're welcome. Thank you, Kirm. And it amuses Missy that of course, people assume that the reversed thing she was saying was super dirty, or at least far dirtier than "I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it." Missy says, quote, "They thought I was saying all kinds of nasty stuff. No, actually, I'm not this time," end quote. Well, okay, but this does not preclude her from saying nasty stuff elsewhere on this song, the old-fashioned forward way.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  I just thought of another reason why I'm glad I didn't try to play "Work It" for a bunch of 14-year-olds at DJ camp. I think I would just now be getting out of prison if I had done that. Still, one of the greatest first verses in rap history. A top-five all-time first verse, in fact.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Speaking of prison, I am legally not allowed to just play this whole song for you. Did you know that? I didn't. Initially, when we started this podcast 30 years ago, it's not an exact science. It's not a hard percentage cap or anything, but my finely honed professional instincts are telling me I got one more clip from "Work It" before the feds come down my chimney. Better make it a good one.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  It was between that and "Love the Way My Ass Goes" a wump, a wump, a wump. I stand by my decision. And here's the dichotomy, right? In addition to the 15 to 20 Missy Elliott songs I meant to bring up here, but I don't have time for now, "Lose Control," "Funky Fresh Dressed," "We Run This," "Beat Me 911," "Let It Bump," "WTF, Where They From," "Hot Boys," "Dog in Heat," "Old School Joint," we also don't have time to do justice to the undercurrent of grief that radiates through the whole Under Construction album. For all the outlandishness of the "Work It" video, the way Missy literally slides into the frame, the headstand, the bees, for all that, the most striking moment of the "Work

• 56:57Speaker 01

  It" video for me is when Missy turns around and Aaliyah's face is airbrushed onto her jacket. Aaliyah had died in a plane crash on August 25th, 2001, and so now Missy, in the Under Construction intro, lists all the people we've lost, all the people she's lost. Aaliyah, Left Eye from TLC, Tupac, Biggie, Big Pun, the World Trade Family, she says. "Work It" debuts as a single five days after the first anniversary of 9/11. "Work It" is among my very few positive memories of the year 2002. And you can play Under Construction and hear all that. The loss, the paralyzing sadness, the push to rebuild.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Or you can just luxuriate in the way the phrase "black, white, Puerto Rican, Chinese boys" glides right by you. The joy, the silliness, the undercurrent of exquisite melancholy. Two more Missy albums after this one and that's it. This is not a test in 2003, the cookbook in 2005. She pops up now and again. She puts out the occasional monster single. Shout out WTF, where they from? A very positive memory from 2015. Or she gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the Songwriters Hall of Fame, or MTV gives her the Video Vanguard Award. But Missy also struggles with Graves' disease,

• 58:27Speaker 01

  an autoimmune disorder, and she struggles with anxiety. And she finally does her first headlining tour this year, in 2024, and it's phenomenal. It's life-changing. I didn't go and I'll never forgive myself. But that triumphant headlining tour is a quarter-century overdue, and we could have 20 classic Missy Elliott albums, not just six. Though maybe we can barely handle everything Missy Elliott has already given us. If she shows us too much of the future, we'll keel over and never get to actually live it. And I hope she puts out a new album someday, and then 10 new albums after that. But under construction alone will keep me enthralled for the rest of my life.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Near the end of this album comes a song called "Can You Hear Me", featuring TLC. And this song is heartbreaking. And the loss of Left Eye and Olya is a physical presence. But there's that voice again. There's Missy's voice. There's that arresting melodic phrase that's keeping me afloat lately.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  I really don't think we make it without her. Or at least, I don't.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  We are thrilled to welcome back Justin Charity, senior staff writer at The Ringer, and the only reason I have threads downloaded on my phone. Justin, thank you so much for coming back. It's true.

• 1:00:06Speaker 06

  Thank you. That's an honor. You don't even know this week. That's an honor.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  I go to a social media site only to see your thoughts, Justin. That's the highest compliment I can pay anybody.

• 1:00:18Speaker 06

  Wow, you gotta talk to a psychiatrist about that. I don't know. I don't know, man.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  As a matter of fact, I do. Justin, you did a piece back in 2021 about the 20th anniversary of the Missy So Addictive record, and you talked about Get Your Freak On, and you said it was exactly the sort of ridiculous song that was never gonna get made by the so-called best rappers alive at the time. How important is the ridiculousness of Missy Elliott? Like, is anyone else on her level just purely ridiculousness-wise?

• 1:00:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's funny. You say ridiculousness, and I guess in retrospect, I worry that that term maybe sounds dismissive, and it's definitely not what I mean, but it's like you kind of have to, you have to transport yourself back, right, to when rap was Missy, but it was also Trina, but it was also Trick Daddy, but it was also Ludacris. And think about the tone. It was like Da Brat, right? That tone, think of that tone where it's this mix of vulgar and zany, but also righteous and kind of like working class. I don't know, there was bougie but working class. Like, there was a, there was a real lane that all

• 1:01:30Speaker 06

  these guys kind of occupied. And that, that, I guess the ridiculous, it's like playfulness.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  I think ridiculous is an insult for a lot of people.

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it's playfulness, I think is really what it was.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  How did she fit into the early 2000s landscape for you? Like, the biggest, you know, like Jay-Z, Eminem, 50 Cent, Kanye, OutKast? Like, did she fit in with like the biggest stars? Or is the whole point that she didn't?

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  I mean, right, it's like technically she did, right? Like technically she did all these collaborations. She did that. She had the remixes with 50, right? She had Jay.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Had she had Jay on the album, you know, like she would do versus for Jay like technically. Yeah, she fit technically. She was part of that sort of like early to mid 2000s pantheon. Right? And yet, at the same time, I feel like you it's it's easy now in retrospect to take for granted. This idea of someone doing something that's a little bit rap, but a little bit R and B, but a little bit pop.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  But at the time it felt so new and the fact that she had this kind of effortless fluidness to what she was even doing and why she even belonged on the radio. That really wasn't the same thing as like what Jay or 50 were doing at the time, right? It's like those were rappers who were trying to make like kind of high production value hip hop. Whereas Missy was making everything all at once in a weird way, in a kind of unprecedented way at the time.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to find any analog for Get Your Freak On or Work It, you know, at that time, you know? Those were huge songs. Those were pop songs, but as you say, you know, they're they're the weird combination of things and they don't fit into any one place, but that somehow makes them fit everywhere. Um, how do you think about her like regionally like she's a southern rapper definitionally? But like I I'm actually really excited to talk about the Virginia of it all, right? Like, is there a quality to her music, to her rapping, even her accent that you identify as inherently Virginian?

• 1:03:44Speaker 06

  I mean, I guess one of my favorite things about rap, right? Is when you get into regionality of rap, especially in different eras, right? It's like it's not even that helpful to talk about southern rap, right? In I mean, in general, right? Like sometimes it's like you need to talk about Houston, right? It's not even enough to talk about Texas. Sometimes you're talking about Houston rap. You're not talking about Louisiana. You're talking about Baton Rouge, talking about New Orleans, right? And with the South, I guess around this time, there's like a lot of stuff happening in the South that I think you kind of have to break, you're gonna have to like break Missy off and talk about kind of the mid Atlantic thing. Cause she's got like Virginia and North Carolina going on and the whole like Devonte and Timberland and like.

• 1:04:25Speaker 06

  Pharrell, like that whole ecosystem that kinda revolved around like the Virginia Beach guys, right? Like Pusha T comes out of that. Um, yeah, there's something about it that's like you would never mistake it for the stuff that was going on in like Atlanta or Houston or New Orleans or Baton Rouge, right? In 2003 or whatever, right? Um, but yeah, there is that. And again, I do think it's the Virginia Beach. I think it's the production of it that makes it feel like this kind of super polished, like hype Williams era hip hop, right? That that does feel super specific to. And it's also the vernacular, man. Like Missy Elliott, she's

• 1:05:10Speaker 06

  not just somebody who made songs and had a musical style. She had a kind of vernacular. She had these tropes to the way that she speaks that do honestly like remind me a lot of people. Like I'm from, I'm from like outside of Richmond, right? And it's like, the way she talks is actually quite, it is quite Virginia. Um, like there's a twang in her voice. That's not, a lot of people wouldn't even identify it as like a southern twang, but that twang, it's like, yeah, if you, it's like the DMV twang. It's not as strong as a Baltimore twang or something like that, right? But yeah, there. And it's such a, it's such an essential part of her voice.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  As an Ohio and as an outsider, like, you know, I'm not a New York guy. I'm not a southern guy. I, it felt like exactly half of each, right? You know, like she sounded, you know, she, she sounded like she belonged on the East Coast, you know, with Puff or whoever, but like she was also inherently southern, you know, was she exactly half of each? Or was she like a third, you know, incredible new thing?

• 1:06:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, also, I like, think about, you mentioned Puff, right? And it's, it's at that point, uh, like the hip hop R and B thing, right? Like people forgetting that we're so far away from it. There was a time when R and B had cooties, right? Like rappers really kind of went kind of grudgingly into the R and B crossover. And a lot of rappers early on kind of got clowned for the R and B crossover, right? Then you have people like Biggie and then I would say Mace, right? Mace is like really sort of good at that, right? Um, but Missy, I, I feel like Missy kind of emerged, Missy and Similin emerged with that. The alternate to the Bad Boy style of it, which felt like it was a super sample

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  heavy thing. I don't know. It immediately, it's almost like the Bad Boy stuff felt immediately old school. Once you had the Missy approach to compare it to, because the Missy Elliott approach to hip hop slash R and B slash pop was just so, it was so futuristic, right? It sounded like a new century. It sounded like what we would now even identify as just like modern production.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, because like in an earlier phase of the Drake wars, right? Like the argument was did Drake invent combining hip hop and R and B? And you know, you had to, I can't decide who won or lost that phase of the Drake wars. I guess we all lost, we've all lost every Drake war in our own way in the end.

• 1:07:45Speaker 06

  But in a way, it's like, I don't know, you, you, you bring up Drake, right? And Drake in a way does, you know, I guess we'll get into talking about her influence, right? Later in this, deeper in this conversation. I don't know. I, I do think on some level, Drake music feels like a response in some level to Missy Elliott music generationally, right? Like there is something about the fact that it's not, it's not, Missy wasn't just fusing like R and B and hip hop in some formal sense. It's also the sort of sexiness, right? Like the, the sweatiness of the Missy records is the thing that, you know, I think someone like Drake is going for certainly, right? The sultriness. It's not just about,

• 1:08:30Speaker 06

  oh, sometimes Drake sings on records. Oh, sometimes, you know, Missy has these sung cadences. It's about the mood and the vibe and the tone these, these people are setting. And I think Missy actually did a lot to like advance that part of the. The fusion, I guess.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Obviously, she's an all time great music video artist, but like I thinking about the phases of MTV. Like I came up in the eighties, right? You know, Michael Jackson, Madonna, like Duran Duran, Guns N' Roses, like that's the golden age. And I think of Missy, you know, late nineties, early two thousands. That's T R L time, right? Which feels like an entirely different universe, you know, and sort of the last great age of music videos, you know, pre YouTube also. Like, is she up there with MJ, Madonna, whoever, you know, in terms of the influence, you know, in terms of just the greatness of her music videos? Or is that sort of overstating it? Or is that not overstating?

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Well, it's only, it's only because you bring up Duran Duran. I'm like, whoa, that's going too far.

• 1:09:33Speaker 06

  That's really comparison. I don't know.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  The Rio, the boat, the yacht. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Might have to give it up for Duran Duran.

• 1:09:42Speaker 06

  You know, I'll say from the, I'll say from that, that millennial or even like the late Gen X perspective, I'll put it like this, Rob. Missy Elliott is one of the, like, I just remember when YouTube felt like this really entrenched cultural force by like, let's say the early 2010s, right? And I'd say artists in general and rappers definitely started to put less emphasis on making a big to do about even having music videos, right? Outside of like maybe a big Taylor Swift size, shake it off type thing. It just felt like, you know, singles meant singles. It didn't mean like, oh, okay, everyone's waiting for the music video to drop.

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  And I just felt like around that time, Missy was like one of the first artists that came to mind of like, man, when people would be like, man, remember when music videos meant something? People were thinking about Missy, like that, that's to answer your question. Yeah, I think Missy is that kind of artist, the kind of artist who in retrospect makes you miss the art of the hip hop music video for sure.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Right, like hearing Beyonce on the earliest Missy albums makes me think of like the Beyonce self-titled, you know, surprise release. Like, I remember being shocked and like delighted in an old school way that there was a video for every one of those songs. That felt like, I don't want to say unnecessary, but very surprising that a pop star would give a shit about that. And whenever that was 2013.

• 1:11:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  You wrote something else that really struck me. You said, Missy made the most of rap stardom without doing the most, as others did, to turn rap stardom into the central obsession of her music. You know, in your mind, was she like the least self-aggrandizing, you know, self-mythologizing rapper around, you know, like, did she brag in a different, you know, new, fresh way?

• 1:11:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, especially when you remember that, I feel like the other, so for instance, one of the other big success stories at the same time as Missy is 50. And 50 was like self-aggrandizing, like, you know, 50, you know, I blame 50 for a lot of things generational in terms of like how hip hop stardom has transformed. But, but 50 is the counter example to Missy, right? Where a lot of 50s music is about 50 telling you, I'm going to be the biggest thing in the world commercially, you know, and on, on top of being a great rapper who will dish your favorite rapper or whatever. And Missy, Missy just wasn't about any of that. Like, I don't think she was the only one. Like, I certainly don't,

• 1:12:16Speaker 06

  I think Ludacris is somebody who wasn't playing the 50s that came. But people like Jay and 50 were. And I think, in contrast with that, when you think of Missy Elliott being braggadocious, it's about sex, or it's about, like, on her records, her records just feel personal, right? Like, her records don't even really very frequently entertain the idea of acknowledging her own stature. And instead, I don't know, you listen to those Missy records, and you're just in this woman's brain space, if that makes sense. You're just in her brain space. You're just in her libido. You're just engaging with those things on this kind of super personal level. And there is no, there isn't this sort of abundance of self-mythologizing that

• 1:13:01Speaker 06

  I think you get in a lot of other corners, certainly like mainstream, like, charting rap at that point.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  One thing, listening to her records that feels singular about her is like, there's a lot of "stop copying me" songs. Like, there's a song called "Beef Fighters", you know, like, if there's any way in which she's confrontational, it's about everyone is trying to copy me and I've had it. Like, that's, that's what I get from a lot of Missy at her angriest, you know, or her most self-aggrandizing. In terms of Missy as a songwriter, like, when I listen to a song that Missy Elliott wrote, you know, if that's Ciara, or it's Tweet, or it's Beyonce, or it's even Lizzo, I can still hear Missy's voice, like, her physical voice so clearly. I can just immediately imagine her singing it. Like, she's in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, like, she's renowned for her songwriting,

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  but she's still underrated. It's just a pure songwriter.

• 1:13:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, wow, okay, I think there are two parts to that, right? The voice, the voice part is just because of what I was saying earlier, right? Which is, there is this sort of unmistakable Missy vernacular, um, that, and I think even Missy, it's, even Missy is never gonna scrub that out of Missy Elliott lyrics, right? Like, it's sort of, like, I guess there's a Nicki Minaj way of saying, "Get to know ya", but like, that's, that's just Missy. That's like, Missy, you know what I mean? Um,

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  That was really good.

• 1:14:30Speaker 06

  Part of that, yeah, part of that's the vernacular. And I guess, if, I guess if you were to, to judge someone as a songwriter, a lot of it is about, like, how singular is this person's lyricism, right? And I, I just don't know, I, I can, it's, Missy's one of those people where it's like, very easy to trace her influence in a lot of other, uh, later artists. And yet, it's, no one's gonna fully assimilate the voice and the songwriting style of Missy Elliott, because you just can't, right? It's, it's, there are too many idiosyncrasies, too many delightful idiosyncrasies to, for somebody even to want to, you know, bite her in that way, even though, though lots of people have tried, you know, to, to her

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  own way.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the Tweet song, "Oops, Oh My", came up, and it's like, I, even if I had no idea who had written this, it's like, there's no one else on the planet Earth who could have come up with this. And I think that's down to the vernacular as well.

• 1:15:31Speaker 06

  That's like the world's worst police lineup of, yeah.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, in terms of her influence, like, okay, like you mentioned Nikki, you know, I don't know, like Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, like Tierra Whack, you know, when she came out, you know, that first record, like Whack World, when it was only 15 minutes, you know, and then with the costume change every minute, like, that's the closest I think I've gotten to thinking, like, you know, here's someone with a lot of Missy Elliott, you know, who's sort of living up to having a lot of Missy Elliott. Like, where do you hear her or see her now?

• 1:16:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Missy is one of those rappers, one of those artists where

• 1:16:14Speaker 06

  Missy Elliott kind of influenced you whether you like it or not. You know what I mean? Like, I, I, I don't know if you interviewed, you know, Cardi, right, or Nikki, if they would say, yes, like, I was inspired to rap, I miss. I don't know that they would say that. Uh, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know that they would say that to you, but I do know that if you a fly gal, get your nails done, get a pedicure, get your hair did. Like, I know that that's like, I know Nicki Minaj is, I, you know what I mean? The primordial soup of Nicki Minaj exists in a, in a, in four bars like that. You, you get it? You feel what I'm

• 1:16:59Speaker 06

  saying? You get what I'm putting out? Like, it's there. It's there. Whether they know it or not, they were born of, you know, they were fish before they walked on land, you know? It's that kind of thing.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  That was a really good impression of Nicki Minaj doing Missy Elliott. It's a very complicated voice that you now, only a Virginian could have pulled that off, I guess.

• 1:17:25Speaker 06

  Only a Virginian who's now lived in the Midwest for a few years.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, yeah. You can't wash off the Virginian-ness.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  I guess, I, I guess we haven't talked enough about Timbaland, right? You know, and just like the connection between the two of them, you know? I, I, I try to avoid hyperbole, but I sort of immediately struggle to think of a rapper and a producer, you know, more in sync, you know, than the two of them. Like, is, is that a Virginian thing that they had together? Like a sound, you know, that was inherently theirs that could have only come from Virginia? Or is it just the two of them, you know, were just on their own planet from the very beginning?

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  No, I, I agree with the, the regional thing, right? Like Virginia, like, I'll put it to you like this. Timbaland obviously did stuff with Timberlake, right? And to me, it's just totally different. It's like, and I like that stuff. It's stuff from my childhood, but to me, to me, Missy was always super local. I'll put it to you like that. Like, Missy was always super local to me. And even Timbaland, when Timbaland was legit, felt like the biggest producer in the world. The Timbaland records always, until, until you get to the Justin Timberlake stuff where it's like, okay, this is kind of a universal, like, pop thing that's going on right now.

• 1:18:46Speaker 06

  But, but Timbaland and Missy and that whole, like, the Timbaland and Magoo and, and that sphere at the time, nah, that was, that was Virginia. Like, that was the mid-Atlantic sound.

• 1:19:01Speaker 06

  And you would, you would, you would hear it from like a hundred miles away. You'd be like, yeah, I know that. And it, it's sort of, it's preserved. Again, it's like now, I guess a lot of those songs are so successful that they're just part of general hip hop history. But they also, in my mind, they just, again, it's because I grew up with that stuff, right? It's like, it, it preserved the sound to me also of like the, the mid-Atlantic, right? Like the post nine 11 mid-Atlantic, the, you know, the 2000s.

• 1:19:30Speaker 06

  Like that, yeah, if somebody asked me, like, I'll put it to you like this. I used to have far more of a regional accent than I do today. And I kind of lost my accent in college, right? So I don't have that anymore. I don't have that thing as a reminder of like where I'm from. But, you know, a good consolation prize is having those sounds, right? The sort of Timbaland, Missy, Aliyah, Timbaland and Magoo. Like, that sound is the sound that I still have.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Missy Elliott did a headlining tour this year in 2024. You know, she hasn't put out a new full album in nearly 20 years. You know, we have six full-length records from her total, you know, across 30 years. Like, does that scarcity work for or against her? Like, would we appreciate her more if she was more visible and putting out more stuff? Or is like the scarcity like part of the mystique at this point?

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  Man, I'm curious what you would think about this too. Because I feel like there have been a lot of rounds of conversation, sort of like in criticism and online, about sort of the blackout period of Missy. Where it just felt like a lot of time went by and we didn't have new Missy Elliott music, really. And it felt kind of like she would make, you know, she had like this very slow, I would say, like comeback. And people were sort of like, is there a spot for Missy?

• 1:20:56Speaker 06

  Sort of in like the, I guess, the contemporary rap zeitgeist or something like that.

• 1:21:05Speaker 06

  And I don't, I don't know. Like, to me, I don't even think of Missy in terms of having nostalgia, right? Like, when you talk about, like, does she benefit from there being a long time? Like, I don't know, I don't have nostalgia for Missy because it feels kind of like there isn't a, I don't know, if you took someone like 50, right? And you compared them to Um, I don't know, the third most popular rapper of 2024, there's like a huge stylistic daylight, right? Like, there's just sort of like what street rappers were doing when 50 Cent is the future was on the streets and what street rappers are doing now, or even where street rappers are coming from now, like totally, totally different, right? Whereas if you look

• 1:21:48Speaker 06

  at this sort of like this peak era of just dominant female rapper after dominant female rapper, there isn't nearly as much daylight between what they're doing now and what Missy was doing. And that's kind of, that gets to the influence question too, right? So it's like, in a way, I, to me, it's less about, does she, like, does she benefit from like the passage of time or the scarcity? And it's more like, I have a harder time knowing what to make of, does she benefit from there being so, so many sort of descendants of Missy in the marketplace right now? Like, in a way, she's kind of competing with her own influence. But in another way,

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  Um, that kind of like bolsters her legacy in a lot of obvious ways. So I don't know, I actually don't know.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember really loving that song. It's 2015, that WTF, Where They From, with Pharrell. You know, I got really excited about that song and the idea of a comeback from her, because I think we jumped like straight to, you know, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you know, and like she, she shows up at the Super Bowl, you know, work it is at the Super Bowl with Katy Perry, you know, as a way to sort of put Katy Perry over, you know, the VMAs, you know, she's, she's in like her lifetime achievement award era right now, you know, and everyone's thrilled to see her when we see her. But, you know, I, I just wonder, you know, the music she would have made, you know, in these 20 years, you know, and how far, much farther into the future she would have gotten, you know, if she hadn't stopped where she stopped.

• 1:23:21Speaker 06

  You also skipped, uh, J. Cole, Nobody's Perfect. Uh, everybody skips J. Cole in every conversation about rap and I

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  I regret the error.

• 1:23:29Speaker 06

  I plead fairness and I will say like, Missy, yeah, Missy popped up on that. That's like, no, I say it because like from that era of J. Cole, I actually think that's one of the sort of

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:23:38Speaker 06

  Uh, best longevity songs is Nobody's Perfect with Missy. But yes, otherwise. And that's a regional connection. Yeah, J. Cole, North Carolina, Missy, you know.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  There we go, Jake. Of course, of course.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Um, Justin, why is Work It the best Missy Elliott song?

• 1:23:54Speaker 06

  It's probably the most potent and the most viral encapsulation, right, of her whole vernacular, of the, of the whole Missy Elliott proposition, right? Like, those verses, right, that, even that chorus, it has, it just is like a taste of everything about her. They kind of made her super interesting and that made her feel really bold and really funky and really odd,

• 1:24:26Speaker 06

  but also really catchy and kind of seductive. It's like all there on that song. You know what I mean? And I think that the Missy albums are decent, they're complex, right? And there's, she has a lot of different strengths, but Work It is like, there's a reason it was the hit that it was, right? Like, that song just is efficient. It's so efficiently Missy.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Do you go back to the Under Construction record itself a lot? Like, it always strikes me, like, I want to hear Work It, and I put that on, and I'm sort of struck anew by how, like, sad that record is. Like, that's the Post Alea record. That's the Post, you know, 9/11 record. Uh, you know, there's such a weird mixture of celebration and mourning to it. Like, do you go back to full, do you listen to full Missy records? I guess is another way to put it. And like, is there one Missy record that works for you as a full record?

• 1:25:16Speaker 06

  I'd say there's a couple of years ago where I spent a lot of time, I think, going back to, I would say, both the Missy albums, but also to a lot of, you also listening to, like, Monica, right? Like, you know, in a, in a sort of more nostalgic mindset. And, yeah, that's, it's almost like Missy, Missy, I think, exists in two different ways. I think, and maybe this is true of a lot of artists, right? Like, there's Missy, the singles artist, right? Which I think a lot of people think of Missy as, right? They think of her as like, damn, she had like, a bunch of hit records, like, in this, like, she had a streak, right? She was a woman on a streak. Um, but I think to get a lot of this stuff about what I'm saying about the sound of the mid-Atlantic and the 2000s and stuff like that, like, you really do kind of have to sit with the

• 1:26:00Speaker 06

  albums, and you really do have to sit, I think, with the, the sort of, even like, the mixtape cuts and the deep cuts from, from that whole scene. Um, and yeah, when I want to, when I, when I want to go back to that scene, for sure, I sit with the Missy records.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Can you do, can you do the Nicki Minaj thing again?

• 1:26:21Speaker 06

  I can't. No, that ain't, no, you asking for it.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Okay, it's fine. No, that's not fair to Ash. I'll just, I'll just go back. I'll just rewind it.

• 1:26:29Speaker 06

  You gotta play it in reverse. You have to.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  That's it. That is exactly what we'll do.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  We'll flip it and reverse it. Thank you so much for talking.

• 1:26:41Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me, Rob.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Thanks very much to our guest this week, Justin Charity. Thanks as always to our producers, Justin Sayles and Jonathan Kerma. Thanks to Olivia Creary for additional production help. Thanks to Juliana Ress for fact checking, and thanks very much to you for listening. And now, please, let's all go listen to Work It by Missy Elliott.