Less than two minutes into Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, Ashlee Haze’s voice comes to the fore as she recites her poem, “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliott Poem).” Her voice quivers with barely-contained emotion as she reaches the line: “I hear the sweet voice of Missy singing to me/ ‘Pop that pop that, jiggle that fat’/…I will tell you that right now there are a million black girls just waiting to see someone who looks like them.”
While Missy disappeared for the better part of a decade, now these millions of black girls can see her clearly, can see someone who looks like them. Look around in the last year and a half and Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott is unmissable: Missy supa dupa fly in your bodega’s cold case and supa dupa fly at the Super Bowl last year; Missy on the ACE train alongside artist renditions of other legendary MCs like Tupac and uh, J. Cole; Missy popping with Dan Marino; Missy not quite saving the new Ghostbusters theme; Missy kicking it on Alec Baldwin’s leather couch and jiggling with his marionette; Missy and Michelle Obama onstage together at SXSW; Missy shouting out Salt-N-Pepa at VH1’s “Hip Hop Honors.” And that was all before Missy manifested in the backseat of FLOTUS and James Corden’s SUV two weeks ago to drop “Get Ur Freak On” for “Carpool Karaoke.”
But the big [elephant sound] in the room is that despite Missy being seen, she can barely be heard. Sure, many of the above instances are tied in to Missy’s long-promised return, in the form of “WTF (Where They From)” and “Pep Rally,” touted as the first new Missy Elliott music in years. But they’re like giving Saltines to someone crawling across the Sahara.
It may be hard to impart to the new generation of Missy fans—or even music critics—that have arisen in the 11 years since Missy dropped The Cookbook, but Elliott’s early millennial run was a one-woman (+Timbaland) zeitgeist. Four albums in five years (three of them platinum), with pop paradigm-shifting singles “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It” being both smash hits while also topping the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop singles poll among critics two years in a row (a feat that P&J mainstays like Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Dylan, and the Boss never managed), while “Pass the Dutch” and “Lose Control” also placed in the Top 20. From 2000 to 2005, each Missy single was in contest not against the field of popular music at large, but simply her last joint. It’s hard to conceive of a parallel in pop music, an artist—if not at the zenith of her game but two singles removed—suddenly went silent. What if there was no more music from Rihanna after “FourFiveSeconds” or if Beyoncé never dropped an album after “Run the World (Girls)”?
To be fair, it was an exhaustive pace for any artist, especially one that was ultimately suffering from Graves’ Disease. When 20 months passed between 2003’s This Is Not a Test And 2005’s The Cookbook, it seemed overlong for Missy fans. But it’s been nothing compared to the decade since, where Missy’s fallen all but silent, where the singles that have appeared barely made a dent in pop culture—as Missy so consistently used to—and no album’s been announced.
Making that silence all the more surreal is that I actually heard and reviewed Missy’s “new” album. It was April Fool’s Day 2008 and I was brought into the offices at Atlantic Records in Midtown Manhattan to hear the new Missy Elliott album, title TBD. An executive ushered me into his office and set me up on a leather couch as he loaded in an eight-song CD-R, complete with a recorded apology from Missy saying that the album was almost done and would include four extra tracks. (There were also two Missy tracks released in early 2008, “Shake Your Pom Pom” and “Ching-a-Ling,” from the Step Up 2: The Streets soundtrack, which were supposed to appear on her new LP as well; they weren't included on the version I heard, despite both already having been released.) Though it was still untitled at the time, Missy's album was going to be named by a special contest on the carbon-dating ancientness of her MySpace page. It was ultimately given the title of FANomenal, then later changed to Block Party.
Pumped as I was to hear new Missy music, I was then subjected to the album at an ear-bleeding volume as the executive stared me down, as intimidating a listening experience as I’ve ever had as a critic. The album was played exactly once and I then had to take my scratched-out notes and spin it into an 800-word review, which Paste Magazine then published many months later. Eight years later, still no Missy Elliott album, and now there’s no trace of the review on Paste’s website. So does it even exist?
Outside of the Danja-produced “Best Best” (little trace of which exists on the internet now), none of the other tracks I heard that day have surfaced again. Three of the eight tracks were produced by Timbaland, still in the afterglow of his Futuresex/“Promiscuous” renaissance, which was newsworthy in that Cookbook was the first Missy album that he hadn’t produced. The two Timbo-produced tracks that Missy subsequently released in 2012, “Triple Threat” and “9th Inning,” weren’t played for me that day, and they barely made a dent in hip-hop radio.
But it’s not like Missy has drawn into seclusion musically. In fact, she's guested on any number of tracks for the likes of Ciara, Demi Lovato, Eve, and K-pop artist G-Dragon (though maybe nothing was as baffling as being in a hotel room in London and seeing Missy on the blower for Little Mix’s UK Top 20 hit “How Ya Doin’?”); as well as produced hits for Keyshia Cole, Monica, Jazmine Sullivan, and more. But Missy’s own music seems to still be tantalizingly out of reach.
Reaching out to ask if the Missy album might see a release this year (even as it was rumored to drop last year, in the wake of her Super Bowl bump), the reply from her Atlantic Records rep read as follows: “Thank you for your email. I don't have an update at this time.” Will we ever get a new Missy Elliott album?
Near the end of my original review, I cite a line from a song called “Love,” wherein Missy and producer Timbaland lament the changing nature of hip-hop. Hip-hop changed, but it wasn’t alone. MySpace plunged from social network principality to punchline status. The music industry spasmed and contracted as well. And even as Missy suddenly vanished from the radio, through the latter half of the ’00s, Missy’s spirit carried on in some manner. Hip-hop brought in more dynamic women, from M.I.A. to Nicki Minaj, even as it pivoted away from Missy herself. And it’s easy to hear Missy’s love of earplay and playful gibberish in the likes of Lil Wayne and Young Thug. There’s glints of the old Missy on “WTF (Where They From)” and “Pep Rally,” but fun and perky as they are, they still feel like approximations. It’s telling that the buzz on these singles was that she was working with Pharrell, who when the Neptunes were brought aboard on The Cookbook, signaled that perhaps the Missy-Tim run was done.
And let’s not forget Missy’s partner in crime, Timbaland, who has had his fortunes fluctuate: From a post-Missy career pinnacle and pop ubiquity to two disastrous volumes of Shock Value, Timbaland has struck a strange balance between ubiquity (beefing up “The Daily Show” theme) and pop wallpaper (rehashing numerous urban trends each week on “Empire”). Musically, Timbo may have hit the nadir with his last self-released album King Stays King, which—in the words of Pitchfork’s kris ex—unfathomably finds the producer “making a play for relevancy.” But in the end, Missy didn’t need Pharrell or Tim to make hits. Her second-highest-charting single (after “Work It”) remains “Lose Control,” which she produced herself. Whether it’s a matter of convincing her label or even herself of her worth as a musical visionary outside of her go-to collaborators, or something else entirely that’s leaving the album formerly known as Block Party in limbo, we’re still holding out hope that in addition to seeing Missy all over pop culture in 2016, we can just hear more of her, too.