New Release - Missy Elliot

[DudeAsInCool]

How to Be a Pop Star Using the Missy Method

November 30, 2003

By KELEFA SANNEH

When Missy Elliott released "Supa Dupa Fly," in 1997, it

seemed like a fluke: an unskinny woman from an unhip state

(Virginia) sang and rapped and giggled and whispered her

way through an hour of space-age hip-hop and R & B.

Six years later, Ms. Elliott has become a franchise: an

idiosyncratic star who also happens to be one of hip-hop's

most reliable hitmakers. After stumbling slightly with "Da

Real World," in 1999, she has released three dazzling CD's

in the last three years; the third, "This Is Not a Test!"

(Elektra), came out on Tuesday. Peers praise her and

critics adore her. And no cultural history of this (as yet

unnamed) decade would be complete if it didn't include at

least two of her hits, "Get Ur Freak On" and "Work It."

Yet it's easy to avoid taking Ms. Elliott seriously. She's

not a virtuoso. She doesn't make grand statements. Her

concerts are nothing special. She doesn't seem tormented by

her fame. She never broods, at least not publicly. In

short, she doesn't behave the way a serious pop musician is

supposed to. Ms. Elliott, 32, is a new kind of pop star,

and her counterintuitive approach is looking more and more

like the new conventional wisdom - a deceptively simple

five-point program that might be called the Missy Method.

STEP 1: GET HELP Forget about the do-it-yourself mythology

of rock 'n' roll: pop stars are by definition

collaborators, and no one collaborates as well as Ms.

Elliott. When she was still in high school, she befriended

the brilliant producer Timbaland, and they made "Supa Dupa

Fly" as a producer-songwriter team: he composed avant-garde

electronic beats, pairing glassy synthesizer beds with

jittery stutter-step rhythms, and she found ways to turn

them into songs, adding playful choruses, lazy raps and

giddy nonverbal interjections that echoed the sounds on the

tracks.

"This Is Not a Test!" finds the Missy-Timbaland partnership

stronger than ever. Some of the tracks clatter: "Pump It

Up" wittily recreates the rattling sound of a huge bass

line coming through a weak car stereo. And some of them

bump: on "Let Me Fix My Weave," he gives Ms. Elliott a

two-note bass line to play with, then adds precisely four

notes of flute. And Ms. Elliott is emerging as a great

producer herself: on "Dats What I'm Talkin About," she lays

down a languid, woozy thump, then invites R. Kelly to come

over and dish out delirious falsetto. Elsewhere, Nelly,

Monica and Mary J. Blige show up, but this doesn't feel

like stunt casting - it feels more like a group

celebration.

STEP 2: GET INTO THE GROOVES Albums are overrated. Maybe

the music industry is just figuring that out, but Ms.

Elliott has known it for years. Her CD's sound more like

mixtapes - there's no real theme or story line, just an

astonishing series of beats and jokes and hooks. She thinks

small, not big, delighting in the details: sounds, beats,

grooves. She raps a lot on this album, but what's just as

memorable is the way she multitracks her voice to create an

ever-changing backdrop of breaths and sighs and mumblings.

That said, "This Is Not a Test!" doesn't hit quite as hard

as her 2002 album, "Under Construction," in part because

this one takes a minute to warm up: the first two tracks

are defiantly melody-free, and they might have worked

better nearer the middle. But just about everything sounds

like a potential hit: it's no small compliment to say that

listening to this CD is a bit like listening to the radio.

STEP 3: GET NASTY Whoever said you couldn't build a

first-rate career on dirty jokes? Like a lot of female

stars, Ms. Elliott sees a link between independence and

sexual assertiveness. But she's also self-possessed enough

to send up her own come-hither posturing. "I'm Really Hot"

sounds as if it's going to be a seduction song, but it

turns out to be a rapper's boast, although she does find

time to flaunt what she's got: "Jiggle, jiggle, jangle/

Watch how my gluteus dangle."

She also seems more interested in satisfying her own

appetites than in whetting other people's. She makes this

abundantly clear during "Toyz," an exuberant (and,

fittingly, self-produced) disco track about a woman who

makes the happy discovery that her boyfriend is obsolete.

STEP 4: GET RIPPED OFF After "Supa Dupa Fly," Ms. Elliott

and Timbaland found that their herky-jerky style was

showing up all over the place. At first, they got angry: on

"Beat Biters," from Ms. Elliott's second album, they made

it clear that they didn't consider imitation to be a form

of flattery. But imitation soon gave way to more inventive

forms of theft: "Get Ur Freak On," in particular, lived on

in an endless series of unauthorized remixes from around

the world. People felt emboldened to treat Ms. Elliott's

songs as open-source musical code, making their own

adjustments and modifications.

By now, Ms. Elliott has learned to embrace the rip-off

artists. The new album's lead single, "Pass That Dutch," is

one of those melody-free tracks near the beginning. It's

not much more than a hard beat, some frantic hand claps and

a one-note bass line that sounds like someone hitting a

buzzer. In short, this is a track that's just begging to be

tinkered with; it won't really be finished until D.J.'s and

producers have built their own songs on top of it.

And it seems that Ms. Elliott has co-opted at least one of

her flatterers. A few months after "Get Ur Freak On," the

reggae screamer Elephant Man released a song based on a

suspiciously similar beat, with a chorus that went: "Bring

the war on! Bring the war on!" Elephant Man makes a

memorable appearance on the new album, adding a piratical

verse to a song called, "Keep It Movin."

STEP 5: GET OVER YOURSELF The fifth and final step is also

the hardest. Most hip-hop performers get increasingly

disenchanted with the hip-hop mainstream as they get older.

Eminem retreated into his own petulant world, André 3000

from OutKast took a sharp left turn toward jazz and funk

and Jay-Z says he's about to quit. But while Ms. Elliott

has always been an eccentric, she never lets her confidence

harden into self-righteousness. On "Wake Up," she sends a

friendly message to everyone living a lifestyle that might

be described as small pimpin': "And your rims don't spin?

It's alright/ Gotta wear them jeans again? It's alright."

Then she cheerfully lets Jay-Z butt in and brag about his

"thousand-dollar shirt," which only makes her own message

come through more clearly.

As usual, she ends her album with a gospel track, then

returns with Ms. Blige for a final send-off. Ms. Elliott

delivers a brief homily: "We accept the name `thug,' like

that's fly/ See how they covered our eyes?" But then she

does what rappers never do: she stops short, announces,

"I'm done talking," and hands the microphone to Ms. Blige,

who sings the final notes (a brief R & B version of

"Rapper's Delight") while Ms. Elliott heads offstage -

already plotting, no doubt, for next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/mus...8547f5ada5b3aac

[DudeAsInCool]

Pitchfork's review:

Missy Elliott

This Is Not a Test

[Elektra; 2003]

Rating: 8.5

This is a Brent DiCrescenzo exclusive.

Readers'd revolt if I began every review that way. Unfortunately, Missy Elliott did just that on last year's Under Construction, proclaiming the unnecessary before each track. It's nitpicking criticism, but enough reason to proclaim dark, dense This Is Not a Test as the new, and likely temporary, Best Missy Elliott Album. Time has come to examine the cultural idiosyncrasies of Virginia and discover how the region produced the core clique of pop innovators. With attention focused on New York, Manchester, Miami, and even Seattle, the notion sounded preposterous a decade ago. Now entrenched as the Ronnie and Phil of crunk, Missy and Timbaland need only compete against their past, and the occasional Neptunes track. As in any healthy muse/artist relationship, the producer reserves his next level work for the queen. The sparse scratch and siren driven "Let It Bump" hits speakers like a SWAT team on a motel door. The broken-cone bass buzz and snapping steel guitar string supersaturates "Pump It Up" with sickness. There's no way these beats were going to Kiley Dean or Magoo.

Nothing in the world rattles jeeps more than war and hip-hop. Surrounded by a Hummer, Black Panthers, bull terriers, and a burnt sky, Missy looks ready to meld the two. In this current climate, such imagery comes obviously loaded, yet she abstains from any referential iconography, such as Madonna's Che chic, or manifesto. Songs like "Let Me Fix My Weave" and the dildo ode "Toyz" throw no stones at administrations or pseudo-pundits (though I suspect Condi is quite familiar with both subjects). The imagery evokes Missy's unabashed forthrightness and Timbaland's accompanying steely, spiked clamor. A verse on "Weave" levels J.Lo's extensions with the common lady getting her hair "did," Missy's table at Madre's be damned. No veils of cute or coy or irony are pulled before her façade. Timbaland laces no trendy bhangra or dancehall into his minimal assaults, even those on which Elephant/Beenie Man guest. Video vixens may pant and rub themselves to stumps before approaching the true sexuality of a woman who's run out of patience for those refusing to dance, drop their posturing, or go down on her.

But it's the album's end-to-end strength that speaks the most-- against hip-hop artists who fail to make solid albums and those rock idiots who say it can't be done. 16 tracks clock in under 60 minutes with meaningful mini-skits, intro, and outros. Even the plethora of guests inconspicuously slip into the mix. There's no way the two stars could be outshined, though Nelly redeems his crassly commercial career with his "go go Gadget dick," while Jay-Z brilliantly rhymes "rectum" with "David Beckham" on "Wake Up".

As that track crushes like a submarine hull crunching over sonar pings, Missy says, "You ain't got a cellular phone/ It's all right/ If you gotta wear them jeans again/ It's all right." Even when backed up by the Kings of Bling, Missy continually cuts the crap. Everyone is invited to the party, even those getting dissed. Those familiar with Missy through the radio only need know this: even the skyscraping "Pass That Dutch", a masterwork of robot ropeskipping riding unbelievably deep bass that turns subwoofers into hair dryers, seems a mere hillock over its surroundings.

-Brent DiCrescenzo, December 4th, 2003