The New Negro is an inventive amalgamation of past and future trends that are indigenous to black American style. Generally, the New Negro—who is “new” every decade or so—is female, a woman who considers her marginal status a form of freedom and a challenge: she takes the little she has been given and transforms it into something complex, outrageous, and, ultimately, fashionable. She is outrageous because no one cares what she does—until, that is, she begins to make money. Missy (Misdemeanor) Elliott, the twenty-five-year-old hip-hop performer who is energetically redefining the boundaries of rap music, is a singer, a songwriter, an arranger, a producer, and a talent scout. Six months ago, few people outside the music industry had heard of her; six months from now, it will be necessary to pretend that you’ve known about Missy Elliott for years. She is the biggest and blackest female rap star that Middle America has ever seen. She is the latest incarnation of the New Negro.
Ifirst met Missy Elliott last June, in the waiting room at WPGC-FM, a D.C. soul station. She was there to promote the release of her début solo album, “Supa Dupa Fly,” and, in characteristic Missy Elliott fashion, she had dressed for the occasion—in a red-and-yellow baseball jersey, bright-yellow vinyl overalls, a bright-yellow vinyl jacket, and brown Timberland boots. Her hair was styled in crisp finger waves close to her head, like tiny black ribbons, and her fingernails, two inches long, were varnished white. But there was no publicist or receptionist to greet her. On the wall above the reception desk were a number of shabby, poster-size black-and-white photographs of the station’s disk jockeys, their hair and teeth celebrity-bright, which did nothing to dispel the forlorn atmosphere. She looked around and reduced the dim room and the station’s lack of amenities to a weary expletive: “Damn.”
Missy had arrived with three people in tow: her cousin Malik, who is as tall and lanky as Missy is short and round; Rene McLean, a rap promoter from the Elektra Entertainment Group; and Keisha, a pretty young black woman who is a third of the girl group Total. As is often the case in Missy’s professional circle, exactly who was promoting whom wasn’t initially clear.
Published in the print edition of the October 20 & 27, 1997, issue.
WPGC was Missy’s final guest appearance that day; earlier, she had publicized her album at three record stores and another radio station in the Washington area, and she had been greeted in all those places with considerable fanfare. (“Yo, it was dope,” Keisha said, chewing gum as she smiled her most seductive girl-group smile.) In an effort to generate a little of that excitement at WPGC, Missy dispatched Rene to find Tigger, the host of the program she was supposed to appear on. Then she announced that Keisha would be interviewed on Tigger’s show, too: less airtime for “Supa Dupa Fly,” maybe, but more exposure for another Missy project: she had co-produced and co-written a number of tracks on Total’s yet-to-be-released album.
Malik returned with Tigger, and in short order Missy, sitting opposite Keisha in the control booth, was introducing her to WPGC’s listening audience. She then took calls from her fans—whom she addressed as Baby, Boo, or Go-Go Head—while autographing her way through a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies. Even four months ago—before she appeared on David Letterman, before the MTV Video Music Awards, before her record went gold—Missy’s unorthodox blend of personal confidence, professional generosity, and entrepreneurial spirit were in ample evidence. After signing off, Missy talked about the lyrics she’d written for her song “The Rain,” which was already on its way to becoming a hit: “One minute I’m talking about weed, the next minute I’m talking about a man—like that. Closer to life and closer to how my mind works.” She walked into a WPGC conference room and sat down, her oversized yellow overalls ballooning up around her. “I don’t want to be oh-so-brag-about-it, but ‘The Rain’ is hot,” she said with a shy laugh, her almond-shaped eyes closing up tight. Then she made the comment that would become her mantra in the coming weeks: “We give our music a futuristic feel. I don’t make music or videos for 1997—I do it for the year 2000.”
In the nineteen-sixties, when Diana Ross was with the Supremes, she was a superb New Negro. When she sang, she did so much more than just sing: she shrugged her shoulders, bugged her eyes, and bopped her big head on her skinny neck. When she sang “Where Did Our Love Go?” she looked as though she were having a very controlled, elegant freak-out. Then, in the seventies, the Pointer Sisters clunked around in Andrews Sisters wedgies and Ruby Keeler shorts, while waving little American flags and singing riffs from “Swanee” with a great deal of energy and irony. In the eighties, the disco diva Grace Jones not only intoned that she could feel like a woman while “looking like a man” but also, in her extended video “One Man Show,” resurrected Dietrich’s “Blonde Venus” ape suit, with its racist overtones. In 1997, Missy Elliott is the New Negro of hip-hop.
“Women in rap, it’s the same as it ever was—they come and go,” Sharee, a New York d.j., told me. “Back in the day, in the nineteen-eighties, they were cute and sexy. Now they’re cute and sexy and mad about something. They don’t last, because they work one gimmick—their sex appeal—and that doesn’t last long. Think Marilyn Monroe talking in rhyme, and you have a pretty good idea of the way most female rappers go.” But Missy Elliott has not only avoided the prevailing stereotypes of the music-video industry; she has spent the last few months bringing the industry around to her style of dance, costume, and song. “She slowed down rap—she took chances,” Jac Benson, a senior producer at MTV, says. “She opened the door for other sounds.” As for Missy’s lyrics, they are about her internal world—not the material world of money, jewels, and men—and in her video she has managed to catapult herself beyond the clichéd horny-boy images of girls in Jacuzzis chugalugging champagne. Instead, she has capitalized on the hip aesthetic that Sly Stone founded in the late nineteen-sixties, when he developed a persona that managed to retain a hard-edged black sound without making white listeners feel hopelessly unhip. Missy told me that she wants her work to show “where black folks are from, and where we’re going.”
In the video “The Rain,” her hair, which fits her like a cap, is reminiscent of the marcelled coiffure that Duke Ellington sported in the forties and fifties. In some shots, she wears an inflated black patent-leather suit and black sunglasses attached to a rhinestone headpiece—a look that the Whitney Museum curator Thelma Golden has described as “cyber mammy.” In another sequence, she moves toward the camera wearing a lime-green outfit and oversized yellow-framed glasses, jerking her arms up and down and proclaiming, “I’m supa dupa fly!” Missy’s little dance looks like an accelerated version of Walter Brennan’s “dead bee” hop-and-skip walk in “To Have and Have Not.” In another shot, her lips and eyes are “morphed,” or enlarged. Features once made grotesque by racist caricaturists are celebrated by this New Negro: exaggerations of physiognomy are an aspect of her style.
In another “Rain” clip, Missy is chanting—her warm, rich voice layered against the song’s background track, the soul classic “I Can’t Stand the Rain”—“I feel the wind / Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten / Nine, ten / Begin / I sit on hills like Lauryn until the rain starts comin’ down, pourin’.” Sitting on a near-psychedelic grassy knoll and running her fingers through a straight-haired wig she’s wearing, she’s a caricature of the Little Bo-Peep white girl. “We wanted to make fun of the ways record companies try to make black women look white,” Missy has said. “Fake hair, fake music.”
Missy conceived of “The Rain” video together with the black music-video director Hype Williams, who has also directed the rap stars Busta Rhymes and the late Tupac Shakur. Both Missy and Williams were aware that for many viewers the video would provide a way into her music. “Videos are the most valuable tool for selling songs,” says Gina Harrell, who heads Elektra’s video-production department. “Until they saw the video, radio programmers didn’t understand ‘The Rain.’ She taught people how to move to the track. And Hype was able to pull out the core of Missy—the performance artist.” It was only after radio programmers and the general public saw Missy dancing that her position as a New Negro icon was established. After all, the idea that “it’s a ten because you can dance to it” didn’t go out with “American Bandstand.” “The Rain” has inspired a score of imitations since its release—some of them directed by Hype Williams himself. “I wanted the video to look avant-garde, so white people could get into it, too,” Missy told me. “And if I lose cool points with other rappers ’cause I don’t want my sound and look to be about one thing, then I lose cool points.”
Melissa Elliott was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1971, two years before “I Can’t Stand the Rain” was first recorded and released. As an only child, Missy, as she was called by her family, amused herself by lining up her dolls—“Baby Alive, G.I. Joe, whatever”—and singing to them. Her parents’ marriage was an unhappy one, and when Missy was fourteen they separated. She and her mother have lived together in Portsmouth ever since.
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A solitary and industrious teen-ager, she helped form a singing group with three other neighborhood girls. The group’s first name was Fay Z; then it became Sista. “Missy always wanted to be up there,” her mother, who works as a dispatcher at an electric company, recalls. “As a little girl, she would ask me to bring home stamps, for all these letters she was writing. The letters would be returned, and I’d see that she’d written to Diana Ross, and whatnot.”
Sista began performing at local talent shows and local colleges, and in 1992 attracted the attention of Devante, a member of the popular singing group Jodeci, by waylaying him at a concert. When Devante signed Sista (“We had long-ass weaves, we was a mess,” Missy recalls), Missy was twenty. She and another neighborhood friend, Tim Mosley, who went by the name of Timbaland, had written many of the songs that the group performed. Sista eventually dissolved, but Timbaland and Missy are still partners.
Their songwriting process has been the same for years: first, they create the basic tracks (often incorporating samples from soul classics like “Pass the Dutchie”). “Then I’ll sit down,” Missy says. “He may go to the movies, the mall, or something. And I sing the whole song, background and all.” The work grows out of a variety of musical genres—reggae, rap, R. & B. ballads—but its basis and primary influence is soul music, ranging from Rick James’s “Super Freak” to black-exploitation-movie soundtracks like Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly.” By 1995, Missy and Timbaland were writing songs for the hottest acts in R. & B., from Aaliyah to Ginuwine, and were on their way to becoming a latter-day Ashford and Simpson.
“When people say the music business, they mean the producer business,” Jac Benson told me. “Producers, not artists, are the ones who really get to control an artist’s over-all sound and message.” And Missy recognized that very early. Unlike most performers, who first struggle to succeed as solo artists before they turn to producing, Missy did the reverse. Her experience with Devante turned out to be a bad one—Sista had made a record and then waited for years, in vain, for it to be released—and she was determined not to repeat it. “I didn’t want to just be an artist and let someone else have all that control over me,” she said. “I knew I would have to produce.”
In fact, Missy’s potential as a solo artist and video presence didn’t become evident until last year, when her now signature “hee haw” rap for Gina Thompson’s remix of “The Things You Do” was showcased in the video. “Gina’s song was the ice-cream sundae,” the hip-hop impresario Fab Five Freddy told me. “Missy’s rap was the cherry on top.” In contrast to the funky bubblegum ballads she’d written for groups like SWV and 702, Missy’s raps were sharp and strong: the woman was always saying what she wanted, and when and where she wanted it. And Missy’s visual impact proved to be as captivating as it was unexpected. “She’s a full-figured black woman,” Freddy continued, “and, let’s face it—a lot of black women look like her. She has Southern sophistication, a country elegance.” But there was also an iconic quality to Missy on video from the beginning; Freddy described her as “the twenty-first-century incarnation of Aunt Jemima; it feels like she’s putting the whole house in order.”
After the Thompson video came out, rap fans began asking for the “hee-hee haw-haw” girl. Missy says that she was approached by companies from Arista Records to Motown, but that they wanted to sign her only as an artist, and she refused. Merlin Bobb and Sylvia Rhone, two senior executives at Elektra, agreed to give her more. “We wanted to set her up in a small situation where she could develop her songwriting and producing abilities,” Bobb explains, “whereas other companies wanted to sign her as an artist and make some fast money.” He adds, “Missy was shocked when she understood that we were interested in her business sense.” In the summer of 1996, Elektra agreed to subsidize a small label called Gold Mind Records, which Missy now oversees. Bobb says that when Missy first joined Elektra she was writing songs for other artists, but that she soon grew confident enough to begin writing songs for herself. In the spring of 1997, she and Timbaland recorded the music and Missy’s vocals for “Supa Dupa Fly” in a week.
On July 22nd, the video of “The Rain” was nominated for three MTV Video Music Awards: Best Rap Video, Best Direction in a Video, and Breakthrough Video. The next day, “Supa Dupa Fly” went gold—No. 3 on Billboard’s pop chart, and No. 1 on its R. & B. chart—thereby reinforcing Elektra’s belief in Missy as a strong, marketable artist. By mid-August, articles had appeared in the Times, the Washington Post, and the business section of the Los Angeles Times. By August 20th, Missy had begun working on a new video of her second single, “Sock It 2 Me,” with Hype Williams.
When I saw Missy at the filming of the video, in a cavernous hangar in Long Island City, she was wearing red superhero boots, white tights, and red Pac-Man arms, and she had a big red “M” emblazoned on her chest: the inspiration for this video, which also featured Da Brat and Lil’ Kim, was Japanese superhero animation. This time, Missy was not only the video’s main attraction but also its co-producer. “Sock It 2 Me” had a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar budget, half of which Missy was personally responsible for—a budget that she hoped would make the video harder to rip off visually. (“If people gonna copy me this time, they gonna have to come out of their pockets,” Missy says.) She is unlike many performers in that her wit and her sense of character go hand in hand with her marketing savvy: her rap on SWV’s “Can We” begins, “Me and Timbaland / We got the sh— that hits from here / From here to overseas / Where SWV is.”
Throughout the day, Missy would look at the playbacks—alone, and then with whoever else wanted to watch. (At one point, the stylist for the shoot, June Ambrose, walked by. Glancing at Missy’s image on the flickering screen, she remarked, “She has lost her mind, and that’s a good thing.”) Missy consulted with Timbaland several times about her performance. She was not concerned with how she looked; rather, she wanted to know whether “Sock It 2 Me” was a suitable follow-up to what she had done before; she wondered out loud if people could “really understand where this Missy thing is going.”
Sylvia Rhone, for one, sees the “Sock It 2 Me” video going in the direction of television: “No one’s really used that Japanimation kind of thing, and I want to take this video and try to sell the concept of these characters—which are played by Missy, Lil’ Kim, and Brat—and do a real special cartoon. Black folks haven’t moved into that genre.”
Rhone was particularly pleased about the coverage that Missy received in the L.A. Times. “I want white America, which is scared of hip-hop artists, to see that some of us are real businesspeople, who command major dollars and a major consumer base, and have more vision than just doing a rap record.” Rhone thinks that Missy’s easygoing manner can be misleading. “If you ran into Missy, you would say, ‘This is a ghetto girl with ghetto curls,’ ” she told me. “Underneath the ‘hee-hee haw-haw,’ she’s one of the sharpest businesswomen I’ve ever come up against.”
And, if Missy wants greater longevity than is usually accorded a rap star, writing and producing under her own label, Gold Mind, may provide it. “I feel like, O.K., if I can make it as a singer, then let me try rapping,” Missy told me. “If I can make it as a rapper, then let me try writing. All right? If I make it as a rap singer and writer, then why not try to produce? I don’t feel limited in any way. There’s that saying ‘God gave you talent, and if you don’t use it He’ll take it away from you.’ And I always said, ‘I don’t want God to come down and take my talents away.’ So, by using all these talents and being successful in all of them, I’ve always got something to fall back on.”
On September 3rd, the night of the rehearsal for the MTV Video Music Awards, Missy Elliott arrived at Radio City Music Hall to perform her rap on Lil’ Kim’s single “Not Tonight,” along with the radio personality Angie Martinez; Left Eye, from TLC; and Da Brat. As usual, she was dressed to thrill, and, as usual, she looked like no one else there. In an industry where, as Missy says, “you either gotta be light-skinned or have long hair” to satisfy a teen-age boy’s video idea of a proper “vide-ho,” Missy Elliott has managed to be something else altogether. Before her “Supa Dupa Fly” success, she had the feeling that people “might not like me hopping around,” she recalls. “You wouldn’t see me in one of those model magazines unless it was, like, Healthy Woman. But I’m cool.”
Lil’ Kim’s number was to have an Egyptian theme: Lil’ Kim, Left Eye, and Angie would be dressed in Nefertiti-like costumes; Da Brat would be dressed as a Roman gladiator. They all assembled on the stage and, silhouetted against a big-screen projection of a pyramid, began working out various moves with the choreographer. Unlike the other participants, Missy would be entering the act from the audience, dressed as herself—as though her fellow-entertainers were her bitches. While the women gyrated and gestured onstage, Missy sat with her cousin Malik, drinking a large bottle of soda pop and looking apprehensive. This would be her first live television performance. It was a far cry from singing in hair extensions and Jordache jeans at the local high school in Portsmouth. Billy B., Missy’s makeup person, had been eavesdropping when her mother beeped her a few days earlier: “I could hear Missy say, ‘Now, Ma, please don’t come to the awards. I’ll be too nervous to perform—it’s the white people’s awards, Ma. Very important.’ ”
But when it came time for Missy to walk the length of the aisle doing her little Walter Brennan dance, her nervousness seemed to vanish. A number of MTV staff members, publicists, and managers representing other artists moved to seats at the front of the stage in order to have a clear view. Hop-skipping down the aisle toward her sister rappers, Missy carried a mike in one hand and made flapping gestures with her other, saying, “Yo, yo, Kim, you not gonna get me on this song just singing hooks. What I look like—Patti LaBelle or something?” Then Lil’ Kim giggled her peroxide giggle as Missy engulfed her in a tight embrace.
Each time they ran through Lil’ Kim’s number, Missy performed her part of the song differently. Sometimes she added an extra “yo,” or she made a little “tiki tiki” sound between the “yo”s, like an urban voodoo priest bent over a cauldron. One time when she said, “Oh, what a night,” at the song’s conclusion, she conveyed a certain flirtatiousness; another time she conveyed boredom. Unlike the majority of rappers, who try to approximate in their live performances the exact sounds and movements they’ve used in their videos for easy audience identification, Missy approaches rapping the way jazz musicians approach jazz—as an improvisational musical form. It was only after the rehearsal was over—when the others had wandered off and she stood alone on that vast and unfamiliar stage, blowing kisses and mouthing “Thank you”s to a nonexistent audience—that one remembered how astonishing it was that such a newcomer had performed there in the first place.
Aweek later, on September 10th, Missy was in a dressing room on the sixth floor of the Ed Sullivan Theatre, at Broadway and Fifty-third Street, getting ready to perform “The Rain” on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Missy had never been on a late-night show before, and, while the invitation was a welcome indication of her recent crossover success, she did not have a clear idea of who, precisely, Letterman was. “I never catch the show,” she said. “What does he do up there?”
That afternoon, during Missy’s pre-taping rehearsal, Letterman’s technical staff had been plagued by a similar question: What, exactly, were Missy and her entourage planning to do up there? She was singing with a seven-piece band, but there were also two dancers, two more rappers, and two backup singers in attendance. In addition, Ann Peebles, the woman who first made “I Can’t Stand the Rain” famous, was making a guest appearance with Missy. “They didn’t know where to put the camera,” Missy’s manager, Louise C. West, recalled later.
Fifteen minutes before Missy was to appear in front of a live studio audience, Anne Kristoff, her publicist, and Billy B. were waiting outside the performer’s dressing room. There was consternation over the fact that Missy hadn’t announced a final plan for her performance, and Billy B. was upset with his client for not giving him the time he needed to make her up. (“I was promised an hour to do her face,” he complained, to no one in particular. “Missy’s face is my face. I want to be proud of it.”)
Then Sylvia Rhone stepped off the elevator with Merlin Bobb, and Rhone asked how Missy was and what time she was going on. “Now,” replied a young woman who was passing by in the narrow hall. Right behind her was Missy herself, wearing outsized red leather trousers, a large white T-shirt, and a gold pendant depicting an Afro’d woman in silhouette. A sleeveless red leather basketball jersey had the word “Supa” written on the front and a big purple leather fly stitched on the back. She was trailed by Malik, two dancers in purple trousers and tops, and the singers Magoo and Timbaland. Everyone else stepped into line behind them, followed Missy into the elevator, and disappeared, like circus performers pouring into a tiny joke car.
Downstairs, the non-performing members of Missy’s entourage sat in the greenroom watching as Letterman introduced the number while holding Missy’s CD upside down. The camera closed in on the face of Ann Peebles singing, “Missy, you can’t stand the rain,” while Missy performed her distinctive shimmy and belted out the lyrics “Beep, beep, who got the keys to the jeep, vroom! ” Rhone was watching the monitor in the greenroom, and her eyes filled with tears. “She’s got it, she’s got it!” she chanted.
At the end of the song, David Letterman kissed Missy’s hand. Suddenly, the woman who only moments before had been skating from one side of the stage to the other and making cat’s eyes at the audience became modest and subdued. “You Missy people come back!” Letterman called after her as she and her fellow-performers left the stage. Minutes later, Missy was climbing into a black stretch limousine—with Magoo, Malik, and Louise in tow—that had been waiting outside the theatre. Clutching her cell phone, she called her mother: “Yo, Ma, watch me tonight on David Letterman. What channel is it on, y’all? Yeah, Ma, Channel 4.”
In the coming months, Missy will be a presenter at the 1997 MTV Europe Music Awards. She will tour England, France, Holland, and Germany to promote “Supa Dupa Fly.” But she will also be launching Nicole Ray, a young singer from her home town, on Gold Mind, and producing four songs on the Total album. At twenty-five, after less than two years as a producer with Elektra, she’s already sounding like an old hand (“I like young people—not to say that I block old people out. It’s just that you can develop young people”). It also may be time, Missy thinks, to break into the movies. “I don’t want big scenes at first,” she explained to me recently. “I want to work my way up. Sometimes, when you get a heavy role, you can’t deliver, and people are so jealous, they’d be like, ‘Yo, Missy can’t act.’ But if it’s something small people will say, ‘Yo, Missy is tight.’ ”
After the Letterman taping, as the limousine moved through the blue twilight, the driver asked Missy how the show had gone. When he heard that Letterman had kissed her hand, he observed that that was a sign of great respect—or props, as he called it. “That means Letterman’s a European,” he explained. “Those Europeans, they can give it up to a Negro; Missy, one day soon they gonna give you all your props.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the title and the lyrics of an SWV song.
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