Despite the honk of rush-hour Manhattan, mindless of the rap crashing from the speakers of her car-service Lincoln, Missy Elliott has been dozing in the back seat -- through Harlem, over the George Washington Bridge, past the tatty strip malls that announce suburban New Jersey. It is only 6 p.m., but she has been going full-tilt Missy since 6 a.m., owing to the burdens of being hip-hop's It Girl. She stirs when the car rolls to a stop in the impeccably trimmed drive of her rented mansionette. As her security guard punches in the alarm code, she looks momentarily surprised to find herself in this Tudor-y, custom-chateau-y nabe of moneyed orthodontists and fund managers. "A lot of the time," she says, "I don't feel like I really live here."

Missy is wide-awake now and smiling -- a trifle lopsidedly, due to this morning's root-canal work -- as we walk into the dark, echoing house. "You want to get to the heart of the mess?" she says. "Well, come on -- if you think you can stand it." Missy leads the way up the grand front staircase, down the hall, through her master suite with the huge black-and-white deco-style bed and its yin-yang motif, past a marble bath that could float Cleopatra's barge. She turns us toward "the Matrix" -- her closet.

Understand, this is no ordinary clotheshorse: This is Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, who first blew a crater in cliched hip-hop video by becoming supa dupa fly in an inflatable vinyl suit and goo-goo glasses -- an effect so eye-popping, the suit has already been boxed and sent to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And then there's her latest video incarnation, for the debut single off her new album, Da Real World. Meet Missy "She's a Bitch" Elliott, two sizes and six waistline inches leaner and meaner, spray-painted blacker, bald, stomping, snarling and vacuum-packed into a bodysuit accessorized with a spiked G-string that signifies this: Any unauthorized entry will leave male intruders fit to replace Bob Dole in those erectile-dysfunction ads. This is mondo Missy, so resolutely not off-the-rack that she had to get Marilyn Manson's tailor of terror to whipstitch the "Bitch" dominatrix togs.

"You sure you wanna do this?" Missy asks. The big door creaks, and finally we're in. The walk-in closet is brightly lit and neat as a drill sergeant's, double-hung with racks of leather, suede, satin and nylon shirts, jackets and pants. No dresses. And against every wall, in quadruple rows, is evidence of Missy's deepest and most persistent addiction: sneakers. Spider-webbed and swooshed, pumped, bubbled, hologrammed, iridescent, fluorescent, waffle-treaded, fancy-laced and Velcroed. Vietnamese sneakers brought back from Hong Kong by Sylvia Rhone, the head of Elektra records and Missy's champion. Prada sneakers. Missy admits to a serious Foot Locker habit; she has been known to sidle away from a photo shoot or a studio session for "a little air." As in Nike Air. "Wait a minute," she says, "I know I've got some hard soles. Some real shoes."We find three pairs of clunky boots with hard soles that look virtually unscuffed. This is a woman who wore sneakers -- albeit dressy white ones -- to the Grammys when her 1997 debut album, Supa Dupa Fly, snagged three nominations. "This is just Missy," she says, waving her arm at the rows of comfy casuals. And just Missy, she'll point out more than once, is "a sweet person," shy, deeply religious, a mama's girl and, if you must know the truth, not at all crazy about performing her hallucinatory hip-hop live.

"She's a studio rat," says Rhone, who is still trying to pry Missy out for a full tour, with little success. "She lives in the studio. She's not a big social person. Her home is her music, her safe place is her music. That's the way she rolls." This Missy is very skittish about touring, appalled by the strangeness of the road, the unfamiliar food. Out to dinner recently at the China Grill in Miami with Rhone and Elektra label mate Busta Rhymes, Missy drew hoots by recoiling from the platters of fancy Asian chews, wondering, "Where the pork chops at?" -- and stopping by Wendy's afterward for a carbo fix.

So who is that loud, larger-than-life Missy cracking incendiary bitch raps like bullwhips? What pop-cult seer flew through her "Sock It 2 Me" video as a Japanimated pocket monster nearly two years before American youth went mad for Pokemon? How to explain the powerhouse Missy, that queen-size meteor who has so impacted the Hot 100 landscape as a writer and producer that Whitney, Janet and Scary Spice made her cell phone jump with urgent pleas for her infectious songs, her off-the-hook remixes? Who is this self-possessed, self-sufficient Missy, a woman so I'll-get-my-own that Puffy couldn't sign her (he tried) and mighty Sony, with its heaps of "mad, mad money" on the table, couldn't land her? (She held out for her own label, the Gold Mind, as part of her deal with Elektra.) And who, at twenty-seven, has become such an industry player that they're calling her Puff Mommy?

"Aw, that's MISSY."

Even the woman at the center of the conundrum speaks her own name in two distinct ways when she refers to herself in the third person. And she does that often. "Just Missy" is spoken in a soft, quiet voice. MISSY, all caps, italicized and with a slight hiss, is her handle for "the character Missy, the funny Missy," she says as we settle down in her large media room. "And in every one of my videos, I think every director has captured that side of Missy." Those cartoony manifestations get boxed up with the suits and archived. And just Missy -- single, looking, but in no mad rush -- stays home a lot "with my cousins" (one of whom is her assistant).

Talk to Missy -- for five minutes, or for hours -- and the conversation never lags on her end. Like her music, her thoughts hop, leap and take odd turns but always come back to the beat. Her talk is punctuated with a deep, easy laugh and signature Missy-isms -- like replacing blah, blah, blah with blase blah. Whenever you are with her, and wherever, there is a sense of anticipation: What next? There is always peripheral activity; a cousin, a pal, a publicist, a stylist stands waiting. Just now it's Missy's hairdresser Marsha, who has arrived on yet another emergency call: Puffy party tonight! Girl, fix this head! Pull-eze.

Sitting beneath a framed gold record for her friend Lil' Kim's "Not Tonight" - featuring one of Missy's standout guest appearances -- Missy explains that the two Missys are a reasonable way of coping with all these mad commitments and her own entrenched insecurities about her size, her sexuality, her "way different" self. MISSY can big-foot through scary landscapes, using humor and futuristic burlesque to get the job done. MISSY -- big, off the wall and uncompromisingly black -- is a genius piece of outsider art. MISSY was just the answer for that debut solo video, "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)." "I felt, I'm not that skinny girl that makes guys run to the TV and be like, 'Whoa, you see her? She looks hot!'" she says. "I wanted something that was going to catch their attention and be fun. But totally different."

[Excerpt From Issue 816/817 — July 8, 1999]