A hill I will die on (but more likely successfully defend indefinitely until the entire world sees it my way): Missy Elliott is the single best thing to come out of the 1990s. Everything else turned out to have diminishing returns or was actively destructive. It was a time that was singularly focused on a future that seemed not that far away. Remember the hope we had for the internet, that it would be an information superhighway? Well, your Google searches are now burning down a city block’s worth of rainforest to spit out an algorithm-written answer telling you eating rocks is good for digestion.
But Missy Elliott? Missy’s timeless. The one truly pioneering artist in hip-hop who hasn’t yet shared at least one problematic opinion on social media. A performer whose live show only continues to expand, 25 years after her initial, world-shaking breakout with the “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” and its eye-popping music video. Someone who names her tour Out Of This World and delivers on that promise. I go to a lot of shows, and every time I see something mind-bogglingly futuristic, or fantastical, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer‘s influence jumps off the stage. As it turns out, during her concert, so does Missy.
Thursday night (June 11), the Virginia producer-rapper-singer-songwriter transformed the Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles into her own personal spaceship, transporting concertgoers into her space-age imagination. From flying saucers to allusions to The Wiz, Missy crams so much into her set that it’s almost physically overwhelming. At 53, she’s at least as spry as some of the artists she’s inspired, like Doja Cat and Lil Nas X, and as innovative as anyone we routinely praise as genius for their creative direction — think Tyler The Creator or Childish Gambino.
Missy’s music, production, and performance has held up so well for so long because she still sounds like the future. Hip-hop, for as much credit as it gets for blasting culture forward by epochal increments over the past 50 years, has very much also been kind of a game of “Follow The Leader” ever since the first MCs picked up mics at the park jams. Whenever someone comes along who shifts the paradigm — let’s say Rakim, or Tupac, or Kanye, or Young Thug — there are nearly always a slew of imitators, duplicating what they did to the best of their abilities, at best advancing the craft and pushing the boundaries, but mostly just riding the wave to capitalize on a proven formula (just imagine how many trap beats there are on the radio RIGHT NOW).
Then there’s Missy, who arrived in 1997 crafting sounds and styles that hadn’t been invented yet, that no one has been able to imitate in the nearly 30 years since. Sure, she cracked open the door for rappers to play around visually in ways they hadn’t yet, so beholden were they to the “keep it real” ghetto tough-guy aesthetic. Her wild collaborations with video director Hype Williams were the precursor to even more outlandish excursions from the likes of Ludacris, Eminem, Travis Scott, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B and even Hollywood itself. And her deconstructed rhyme patterns were clear influences on future lyrical Dadaists like the aforementioned Thug, Kanye, and more — even if nobody has quite mastered the free-form thinking behind her best raps.
But for all her influence, nobody in the world sounds LIKE Missy. Not one artist who is capable of selling out arenas is equally capable of teleporting through so many different aesthetics and thematic concepts on stage — as illustrated by massive, cartoonish avatars representing her looks from different iconic music videos. Everyone else is still playing catch-up to where Missy WAS 20 years ago when she dropped “Gossip Folks,” “Pass That Dutch,” “Sock It 2 Me,” and “Work It.” Missy did what so few artists — hip-hop or otherwise — are capable of: breaking new ground, then breaking the mold. Her Out Of This World tour isn’t just a futuristic flight of fancy — it’s an overview of a one-of-a-kind career, one that couldn’t happen before she showed up and hasn’t happened since.