Missy Elliott: This Is Not A Test! : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Who else besides Missy Elliott makes records that keep everyone waiting all year for the new installment? Who else keeps us all glued to our radios to hear pop music updated one giant step at a time, in the style of Prince and Madonna in the Eighties or the Beatles and Motown in the Sixties? Only Elliott, the star who drops the bomb of the year, every damn year. Along with Timbaland, her partner in crimes against sonic conformity, Elliott rules everything around music. After seven years at the top, she still sounds as hungry and driven as ever, refusing to repeat past successes, pushing on to newer and weirder realms while everyone else is catching up to what she was doing five years ago.

By now, she has her recipe down. Elliott albums always have unbelievably sexy beats and vocals, Virginia-swamp-funk hip-hop production from Timbaland, plenty of filler, a couple of terrible slow jams and Elliott talking wild shit between songs. Her fifth album, This Is Not a Test!, hits new levels of bananas-osity. She jumps so far off the heezy, she lands right on another heezy. "Pass That Dutch" begins with the warning "Run for cover, motherfucker!" right before she and Tim set off car alarms, whistles, hand claps, kettledrums, neighing horses, heavy breathing and party people chanting "Hootie-hoo!" over a Code Orange bass line. There's also a five-second intermission to let you catch your breath. It's an all-nighter at the sweatiest club in town, compressed into three and a half minutes.

Elliott makes so much noise with her singles that people used to sleep on her albums, but by now you know better, right? This Is Not a Test! has a similar emotional tone to last year's Under Construction, reaching out to old-school Eighties hip-hop in a spirit of playful nostalgia. Elliott has the clout to line up the guest stars -- who else could get Jay-Z, R. Kelly, Beenie Man and Mary J. Blige on the same album? But Elliott and Tim are still the stars of the party, and it's touching that after all this time and all this money, they still save all their best stuff for each other.

Elliott tries a little of everything on This Is Not a Test! She sings a romantic love ballad for her vibrator in "Toyz." She gives it up to classic Eighties rappers such as Big Daddy Kane and Roxanne Shante in "Let It Bump." She teams up with Nelly for the bonus track "Pump It Up," a demented ode to full-figured Southern gals. She also sends a timely shout-out to the late, great Fred "Rerun" Berry: "Heavy-hitter rhymes, better call me Rerun/Hey, hey, hey, I'm what's happenin'." Best of all, there's "Let Me Fix My Weave," where Timbaland starts a party or two while Elliott rhymes "go down on me" with "cubic zirconi."

As always, Elliott's thank-you list is worth the price of the CD. She sends her hollas out to Timbaland ("We are the kick and snare of music"), Jay-Z ("Beyonce hit a home run, because you are a true gentleman"), "People Who Make Me Rich," "People Who Made My Visual Hot" and assorted friends ("Mona, I love you but you have got to put that hair up in a ponytail. You're blocking the sun right now"). Why anybody would choose to spend their life without a copy of This Is Not a Test! is a mystery. But don't be one of them, because life's too short for that shit.