African American

JHan

(10,173 posts) Fri Nov 30, 2018, 10:11 AM Nov 2018

Missy Elliott's "Supa Dupa Fly" The 1997 album that defined a new hip-hop

So much this. Great write up with a lot of insight.

Missy Elliott on Songwriters Hall nod: ‘I feel so blessed’

By the time of “The Things That You Do,” Elliott, born Melissa Arnette Elliott, and her creative partner Timbaland, a childhood friend from Virginia, had left the Swing Mob collective (a label started by Jodeci’s Devante Swing), and made a name for themselves writing and producing for R. & B. acts such as 702, SWV, Ginuwine, and Aaliyah. They had been shaped by the lush moodiness of Quiet Storm, the style that defined the genre from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, and the clubby energy of New Jack Swing, from the late eighties and early nineties. Hunting for the next phase of R. & B., Elliott and Timbaland imagined a sound that was guttural, spare, sticky, proto-electronic, and post-funk.

Crafting a new R&B sound

It seemed for a while that Elliott was fine with being the behind-the-scenes industry player, but everything changed when, in July of 1997, she released her solo début, “Supa Dupa Fly.” With this album, Elliott was thinking beyond impulses like realism, which defined the rap of the eighties and the gangsta rap of the early nineties, and materialism, which preoccupied the new black conglomerate class. To borrow from Audre Lorde, “Supa Dupa Fly” is a kind of biomythography. Most interviews from the time linger on Elliott’s shyness, which didn’t seem to square with Missy Elliott the performer, imperious on her album cover, about to casually stomp us with the sole of her crisp-white sneaker.

I was too young to witness Elliott’s rise as it happened. I fell into her catalogue a few years later, at age ten. A local radio station was offering a prize to whomever could figure out the meaning of the gibberish chorus to her massive hit “Work It,” on her fourth album, “Under Construction.” The contest inspired a minor crisis within my group of friends. Elliott was somehow both intimidating and enticing, like a stranger speaking in friendly tongues. At recess, we brought pilfered loose-leaf to the concrete yard, and wrote out the verses, searching for some embedded code. We never figured it out, but we did end up learning every lyric, which we shouted together like a shared incantation.

Reverse It

The “words” turned out to be meaningfully meaningless. A recording error caused the vocal for “I put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it” to play backward. Rather than trash it, Elliott made it the next line. The adaptation perfectly captures her understanding of making music as an act of free association, recombination, collaboration, and, more than anything else, extreme openness to the idea that any noise has potential. This omnivorous approach is all over “Supa Dupa Fly.” Sometimes Elliott would eschew words altogether, preferring a rawer form of expression, such as scatting, as we hear on the aptly titled “Izzy Izzy Ahh.”

Timbaland and Elliott developed a grammar, collecting extra-musical noises—sighs, women giggling, coughs, babies gurgling—and stacking them so that they became instruments in and of themselves. They weren’t afraid to experiment with sounds that were nearer to the grotesque than the beautiful. One of the most well known is the burping bass on Ginuwine’s sex romp “Pony.” As if a sort of family crest, it recurs on Elliott and Ginuwine’s carnal duet “Friendly Skies.”

Hip-hop artists are musicologists, and sampling is one way histories are folded into the present. The production of “Supa Dupa Fly” is visionary in how it obscures recognizable samples, bending their internal structures to fit the album’s unconventional tempos. “Sock It 2 Me,” for instance, samples the menacing beginning of a horn progression from the Delfonics’ “Ready or Not,” but not its resolution, drawing out its flitting darkness to anchor the entire song. This is especially forward-looking when we consider that another influential producer of that era, Sean Combs, a.k.a. P. Diddy, was using samples as patina, to elicit an atmosphere of nostalgia. Elliott and Timbaland envisioned a futuristic sound in which the organic and the synthetic were complementary.

The feminist sexual positivity of the nineties varied wildly. Some artists decided to get as explicit as possible, as a way of preëmpting the male gaze. Growing up, I had some elementary notion that the hypersexual fantasy of an artist like Foxy Brown was radical, but I was also hugely intimidated by it. It was Elliott’s theatrical approach that appealed to me. As a girl, cycling through her archive, I became obsessed with her obliqueness.

Elliott fashioned a vision of black female sexuality that decentered the body. She was often cloaked in costumes, in slabs of makeup, frolicking in fantasy worlds. She embodied the “ghetto fabulous,” the impossible reconciliation of opposed fashions. Sometimes she wasn’t even human. Elliott seemed plugged into the cyberfeminist premonition that the Internet would usher in a post-gender age. On “Supa Dupa Fly,” Crisco oil is erotic, and unrequited love can be the sound of rain against the window. Elliott’s approach to sex and female pleasure was empowering because of its thickness—because it was coded, available only to those willing to do the work of unscrambling.