Missy Elliott: Da Real World : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The very idea of Missy Elliott is tantalizing: a daring young woman from the Dirty South -- currently hip-hop's most innovative region -- who can sing soulfully and rhyme forcefully, who can write and produce hit songs, who's smart enough to be sonically innovative and yet keep it mainstream, who's ambitious and original enough to create her own style of dancing and mix a sci-fi twinge into her aesthetic to invoke the feeling that she's a few ticks ahead of her time, which is probably the truth. And though she appeals to both sexes, wait till her girl fans hear the lead single from her second album, Da Real World: The song is a furiously celebratory, slyly feminist anthem that reclaims an oppressive word, shattering its power to offend while burning down the clubs with a blazing beat and her roaring flow. It's called "She's a Bitch."

Of course, a great artist without a great producer is like a young Anakin Skywalker without Obi-Wan Kenobi, so put her with one of the most imaginative producers of the day, Timbaland. He's a guy who builds tracks out of disparate little pieces, like De La Soul and Public Enemy used to do -- there's all sorts of little details and surprises buried in there that you might not catch without headphones. People whisper and police sirens wail; he spells out Missy's name with a Speak and Spell (on "Mr. DJ"). Following along with her sci-fi/Y3K trip, the beats of his high-paced hip-hop dance joints and slower, funk-soul-inspired pieces course with ominous sounds - it all comes off like a soundtrack for a dark future where humanoids escape the pressures of intergalactic war by unwinding to hip-hop funk.

Which is not to say that Missy is a construct or an executive's idea. No one in the record business could conceive of Missy except herself. But like The Phantom Menace, Da Real World is much-anticipated and futuristic, with a hype that outstrips the reality. The concept is more interesting than the execution.

She has invited a few elite MCs to guest rhyme -- OutKast's Big Boi, Redman ("My crew's deeper than Karl Kani pockets/We don't buy bullets/We ask, 'What size rockets?' ") and Eminem, who blows away "Busa Rhyme," rhyming at his sadomasochistic best in a win-over-the-haters performance -- "I'm homicidal/And suicidal/With no friends/Holdin' a gun with no handle/Just a barrel at both ends." (Finally, an MC who speaks for America's insanely disaffected white boy who hates himself even more than everyone else hates him.) Next to those MCs, Missy's rhymes sound trite. When singing with real vocalists like Aaliyah, Missy more than holds her own, but, whether singing or rhyming, her lyrics are so simplistic -- "I'm a have to bust you in ya lips/And your whips?/Better have a whole lotta chips/'Cause I ain't for no nigga given tips" ("She's a Bitch") -- that it's only her rare sense of rhythm, timbre and delivery that make a silk purse out of the sow's ear that are her words. How strange to find someone so innovative musically, so lucid rhythmically and so unfocused lyrically.

Missy is still an important artist. She is a necessary part of the Hip-hop Nation as a trailblazer, if a not always successful one. In many ways, on Da Real World she most recalls Queen Latifah -- someone so critical to the continued advancement of hip-hop that if she didn't exist she'd have to be invented, but also someone who's much more interesting and significant than the music she is selling.