Missy Elliott is a legend, the best-selling female rapper of all time and the first to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Born in 1971 in Virginia, Melissa Arnette Elliott began making music as a teenager, forming a girl group and drafting her friend Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley to produce their demos. DeVante Swing of the multi-platinum R&B group Jodeci was impressed with Elliott’s group when they sang for him backstage at a concert. And when he formed the label Swing Mob, he drafted Elliott and Mosley, along with other future stars like Ginuwine, Tweet, and Magoo, to make music in his basement studio in Rochester, New York, where they started to refine their unique sound.
Elliott’s group Sista released one unsuccessful album with Swing Mob in 1994, but she was beginning to get attention as a rapper and songwriter, penning hits for Aaliyah and SWV and stealing the spotlight with guest verses on singles by Gina Thompson and Raven-Symone. A bidding war ensued, and Elektra Records signed Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, as she was then known, with 1997’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” establishing her as one of the most playfully inventive rappers of the era. For nearly a decade, Elliott released hit after hit, most of them produced by Timbaland, shifting the sound of popular music with smashes like “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It.”
Missy Elliott released her sixth album, The Cookbook, on July 4, 2005, and in the years that followed she took a break from music, later revealing that a Graves’ disease diagnosis had required her to step back and focus on her health. Since then, she’s returned and released many singles, collaborations, and 2019’s Iconology EP, and launched her very first headlining tour in 2024, but we’ve yet to get a seventh album. On the 20th anniversary of The Cookbook, here’s a look back at Elliott’s innovative catalog.
6. This Is Not a Test! (2003)
Missy Elliott is one of those rare artists that’s arguably never made a bad album, but you might call This Is Not a Test! her “least good” album. Fatigue seemed to be setting in, not just creatively but commercially: it’s her only LP that missed the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 13. The problems begin with the lead single “Pass That Dutch,” which sounded like an energetic but clunky attempt at emulating the Diwali riddim, the infectious handclap-driven loop at the heart of all the biggest crossover hits coming out of Jamaica in 2003. Elliott engages with dancehall elsewhere on This Is Not a Test! with better results on “Keep It Movin’” featuring Elephant Man and “Don’t Be Cruel” featuring Beenie Man.
Even in the absence of the kind of classic single that every other Elliott album boasts, though, there’s plenty of fun to be found in the buzz and clank of “Pump It Up” featuring Nelly, and the disco bump of “Toyz,” a feisty ode to vibrators. “Elliott’s brains and personality drive a relentless barrage of observations, one-liners, pop-culture references and dashes of true-blue but not maudlin sentiment,” wrote Natalie Nichols in the Los Angeles Times review of This Is Not a Test!
5. The Cookbook (2005)
Perhaps it was clear even to Elliott and Timbaland after This Is Not a Test! that it was time to switch things up. The Cookbook opens with two unremarkable Timbo productions, but Elliott spends the rest of the album working with other beatmakers, including that other Virginia duo that revolutionized the sound of hip-hop radio, the Neptunes, on “On & On.” Elliott even self-produces a couple tracks, including the kinetic single “Lose Control” featuring Ciara and the late great Fatman Scoop. And “Can’t Stop,” featuring a bombastic breakbeat by Rich Harrison (Amerie, Beyonce), is one of the most explosive songs Elliott never released as a single.
It’s a shame that Elliott hasn’t released a full-length since The Cookbook, because it decisively settled the debate as to whether she could make great music without Timbaland, and felt like the potential start of a new chapter. “Her proven ability to work a good beat when she gets one, leads her naturally to a collection that ebbs and flows, peaks and dips, and pokes fun at any canon of taste you got,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of The Cookbook.
4. Under Construction (2002)
The deaths of friends and collaborators Aaliyah and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes left Missy Elliott in a reflective mood, and she decided to make an album that paid tribute to the ’80s hip-hop she fell in love with as a teenager. Elliott donned Kangols and Adidas tracksuits to play up Under Construction’s nostalgic angle, and stuffed the songs with beats and rhymes from classics by Run-DMC, MC Lyte, Slick Rick, the Beastie Boys, and UTFO. The beats are still creative and cutting edge on the album, though, and “Gossip Folks” featuring Ludacris may be the single weirdest banger she ever pushed into MTV rotation.
Under Construction became Elliott’s best-selling album off the strength of the massive lead single “Work It,” a song that memorably plays her vocals in reverse for part of the chorus. And she and her producer continued to draw heavily from old school hip-hop for the next few years, on her next two solo albums as well as on Timbaland & Magoo’s 2003 sequel Under Construction Part II. “Tempering futurism with retro-rap fare, they feed the old through the new and refresh both,” Jonah Weiner wrote in the Blender review of Under Construction.
3. Da Real World (1999)
By the late ’90s, Timbaland’s distinctive productions, with all of their 16th note hi-hats, thumping kick drums with triplet accents, and off-the-wall synths, had blanketed the charts. But only some of the hits bearing his signatures were actually produced by Timbaland, while many others were Timbo-influenced tracks by producers like She’kspere and Dallas Austin. So Elliott kicked off her second album with “Beat Biters,” taking dead aim at everyone who’d run off with the Virginia crew’s sound. “I’m sick of y’all fake Timbaland beat bitin’,” she said. “And I’m kinda sick of that ‘kack-kack-kack-kack, ficky-boom.’”
Da Real World isn’t a complete sonic reboot, but Timbaland packs the tracks with fresh drum and synth sounds to stay ahead of his imitators, sometimes even throwing in mid-song beat switches. It’s also the only time Eminem, Big Boi, or Juvenile has rapped on a Timbo beat, making the album an electrifying summit of the many different factions in mainstream hip-hop circa 1999. The lead single “She’s a Bitch” might have seemed a little too different or minimalist at the time, but eventually the world caught up; the track has been sampled on hits by Cardi B, BIA, and Ski Mask the Slump God in just the last decade. “Da Real World is that rare cast-of-thousands rap album that doesn’t sound like chaotic studio bum-rushing,” David Browne wrote in the Entertainment Weekly review of Da Real World.
2. Miss E… So Addictive (2001)
Missy Elliott and Timbaland had always been a little more plugged in to the sonics of electronic dance music than their contemporaries. But on her third album, Elliott drew more explicit links to rave culture, including lyrics about the pleasures of MDMA on “X-Tasy” and the four-on-the-floor house music banger “4 My People.”
Miss E… So Addictive is probably the most relentlessly fun album in an extremely danceable discography, from the busy Bhangra beats of “Get Ur Freak On” to the bass-heavy thumpers “Slap! Slap! Slap!” and “Lick Shots.” But there’s also moments of beauty like the Ginuwine duet “Take Away” and the closing hidden track “Higher Ground,” featuring an all-star lineup of gospel singers like Yolanda Adams and Kim Burrell. “The music is all alien percussion, working into every crevice of your body,” Rob Sheffield wrote in the Rolling Stone review of Miss E… So Addictive.
1. Supa Dupa Fly (1997)
Missy Elliott and Timbaland were in high demand in 1997, working in New York’s top studios with superstars. But when it was time for Elliott to record her debut album, they went back to a small studio in Virginia Beach to preserve their outsider sensibility, recording most of Supa Dupa Fly in just a week. Even Busta Rhymes, a kindred spirit among animated ’90s rap stars, sounds amused that he had to make a trip outside the five boroughs (“an hour and 25 minutes in one of them Gilligan’s Island shits from New York to Virginia”) to record the album’s intro and outro tracks.
Elliott sings a little more than she raps on her first album, much like Lauryn Hill on that other great late ’90s debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but Supa Dupa Fly is less a hip-hop soul record than the introduction of genre-agnostic style of sinuous robot funk. She even sings the words “I’m such a good rapper” on “I’m Talkin’.” But some of Elliott’s peers from the first generation of platinum female solo MCs, Lil Kim and Da Brat, show up to rhyme on the singles “Sock It 2 Me” and “Hit Em Wit Da Hee.” “At the risk of wandering into the realms of overstatement, Supa Dupa Fly is distinctive, cohesive, and innovative enough to wind up as the most influential pop record since Dr. Dre’s The Chronic,” Jonathan Bernstein wrote in the SPIN review of the album.
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