“I didn’t want to just be an artist and let someone else have all that control over me,” a 25-year-old Missy Elliott said, in 1997. “I knew I would have to produce.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their songwriting process has been the same for years: first, they create the basic tracks . “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.
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