Happy 25th Anniversary to Missy Elliott’s debut album Supa Dupa Fly, originally released July 15, 1997.
Twelve rowdy bars on Gina Thompson’s “The Things That You Do” (Remix) started a furor in 1996. Something about Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott’s signature “hee-hee-hee-hee-how” turned heads. It was so satisfying. It shook radio awake like Busta Rhymes on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario.” The timing, delivery, inflection, energy in his growl of “Rawr! Rawr! Like a dungeon dragon” set off alarms. It was the same with Missy.
Everybody wanted the “hee haw” girl. Her confidence, swagger, Southern slant, and impish humor made her a red-hot commodity. Soon she was popping up everywhere: MC Lyte’s “Cold Rock a Party” (Remix), 702’s “Steelo,” New Edition’s “You Don’t Have To Worry” (Remix) and SWV’s megabanger “Can We.” Meanwhile, Missy and producer-rapper Timbaland were responsible for the hottest tracks on teen R&B forerunner Aaliyah’s double-platinum One in a Million (1996).
Demand was high. Contract offers came in from Arista, Motown, and other labels. She signed with Elektra Entertainment who agreed to furnish her with her own label The Gold Mind, Inc.—in exchange, she would be the first artist recording for it. After spending all of 1996 sniffing radio for Missy Snacks, she finally gave us a box full of her goodies. Supa Dupa Fly is a playground that lets you swing from the monkey bars of a creative mind that revolutionized R&B, hip-hop, and the lines between them.
The disc’s delightfully alien lead single “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” created a world of weird that was so wonderful, we elected it the new normal. Founded on a sample of Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand The Rain,” Missy flows stream of consciousness style (“I feel the wind / 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 / Begin / I sit on hills like Lauryn / Until the rain starts / Comin’ down pourin’”). It’s as renowned for its idiosyncratic sound as for its fish-eyed, kooky-cool Hype Williams music video.
Massive promotion was pumped into “The Rain,” but a commercial single wasn’t released in the US so that people had to buy the album to get that song. That rendered it ineligible for certain charts, but Supa Dupa Fly in turn jumped to #1 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and #3 on the Billboard 200.
Gloating was in order. Previously, Missy was on Elektra as one quarter of Jodeci-linked girl group Sista, but Elektra shelved their 4 All the Sistas Around da World (1994) album and dropped them from the label. Execs told Missy she would never be a star because of her weight. “They'd broken my heart,” she confessed to The Guardian. “They said I could sing, I could write, but that I looked wrong.” It wasn’t the first time hearing this either.
In 1993, she penned Raven-Symoné’s supercute “That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of” with a patois-inflected verse for herself. We heard Missy on it, but we didn’t see her in the video. They had someone thinner lip-synch the verse. So she made sure her Elektra contract included a proviso granting full control of her image. No one was going to sweep this big-bodied Black woman out of frame again.
And where would her lusty, trunk-thumping next single “Sock It 2 Me” have been without it? Brash and shameless, it thunders in on the back of The Delfonics’ majestic “Ready or Not Here I Come.” Then Missy hands her libido the mic (“Ooh ahh / Sock it 2 me like you want to / Ooh, I can take it like a pro / You know / Do a long throw with the back stroke / My hormones jumpin’ like a disco!”). A message like this from a woman like Missy was radical.
We lust for big butts now, but America was specifically unkind to curvy women in the ‘90s. A potential smash tanked for Paula Abdul in 1991, as she was thought to be too plump in back. Not until circa 2001 was there support for a “Bootylicious” Destiny’s Child—which is to say, Missy Elliott not hiding herself in 1997 was inherently a countercultural act.
Rather than slim down for the camera, she played up her size, donning an inflatable trash bag in the video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” The surrealist clip introduced us to her atypical glamour, the invitation of her full lips, finger-waved hair glistening. Her madcap lyrics came to life on screen with the help of cameos from Total, SWV, Lil Cease, Yo-Yo, Puff Daddy, and more. “Sock It 2 Me,” another Hype Williams short film, crossed sci-fi and hip-hop, casting Missy, Lil’ Kim, and Da Brat as badass fighting androids…and possibly gave Gmail its “M” logo.
By spring of 1998, Missy Elliott was not just a recording artist, but also a visual one. The video for her third single “Beep Me 911,” lensed by Earle Sebastian, featured rapper Magoo as a gaudy Vegas showman, and R&B trio 702 as demented, herky-jerky Barbie girls. The song itself is a quizzical, lovelorn uptempo full of sonic question marks, and warped, Willy Wonka-like details. Following close behind, a dark Paul Hunter clip for her remixed fourth single “Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee” committed Missy to full choreography in a macabre, medieval setting.
“I think it's so important to see a project from beginning to end,” Missy emphasized. “You have to be a part of everything from the writing to the visual. If you a real entertainer or a real artist, you wanna be involved with all of that. Nobody can see your vision like you can see your own.” Others saw her vision too, and Missy had a lot to say about it.
Calling out imitators is a prominent theme on Supa Dupa Fly. The brief “Bite Our Style” lets Missy indulge in tongue-out taunting over a transcendent Jamiroquai loop. She trumpets, “There’s too many producers givin’ out these fraud beats!” on “Pass Da Blunt.” And “I’m Talkin’” wraps it in deadpan humor (“Ladies and gents / Dogs, cats, and babies / Whoever bit my style / I hope you croak from the rabies”).
“On Supa, there's none of those tik-kat-tik-kat-tik-katkat beats like on Aaliyah's One in a Million,” she explained to SPIN. “Because Tim noticed that people were starting to do that. It's all good though. People know where it came from.”
When their sound hit radio in 1996, it spread like food coloring in water. Listen to Montell Jordan’s “Let’s Ride,” Brian McKnight’s “Anytime,” Mariah Carey’s “Breakdown,” or Whitney Houston’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and you’ll hear the reverberations of Missy and Tim’s unique rhythm and vocal arrangements. There’s no shame in it either. They were weaving fabric; everyone else was sewing clothes.
“We didn’t know that it would be big across the world,” Timbaland confessed. “What really stands out to me about recording Supa Dupa Fly now is how much fun we were having. It wasn’t about radio, it wasn’t about ‘Is this a hit?’ It was just ‘Ooh this feels good.’”
Like an LP-length cypher, the fresh, extemporaneous quality of Supa Dupa Fly speaks for itself. Missy’s lyrics take liberty with internal rhyme. She can be hyperbolic (“Why You Hurt Me”), explicit (“I’m Talkin’”), punctuated with onomatopoeia (“The Rain,” “Izzy Izzy Ahh”), or like Slick Rick, she’s never too shy to break into song—and that took courage. Queen Latifah fought hard for license to slide smoothly between hard bars and supple crooning on Nature of a Sista (1991). This cleared an easier path for Lauryn Hill by the mid ‘90s. Missy Elliott was next to stack onto their shoulders—and she was altogether different.
“What I look like? Patti LaBelle or somebody?” Missy laughs before her headlining verse on Lil’ Kim’s “Not Tonight” (Remix). She knows she’s not a Patti LaBelle, but has a savory, confident alto that makes her versatile as a vocalist. Her tone is smooth, but with enough rasp to be memorable, and enough sweetness that you enjoy columns of harmony by herself on “Sock It 2 Me,” or maybe you like her with comrades.
The techno-sexual tone of Ginuwine’s “Pony” gets broken down into “Friendly Skies,” his blue-lights-in-the-basement duet with Missy. The Aaliyah feature “Best Friends” extends the sound of One in a Million to let this twosome stand back-to-back to support each other after a relationship goes sour. Of course, Timbaland and Missy have to tag team on “They Don’t Wanna F**k Wit Me” and “Pass Da Blunt.” Both sparse, vibey tracks exemplify the production touches that made their tandem sound phenomenal.
The guest list doesn’t stop with the Supafriends listed above. Missy takes a back seat on “Gettaway” to let upstart femcees Space Nine and Nicole (aka St. Nick) shine. Lil’ Kim hits us with her sassy, nasty “unhhhh” on “Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee,” and Busta Rhymes appropriately bookends the album with his raucous foreword and benediction. Supa Dupa Fly unites all of their powers like a Marvel Avenger movie and somehow the main artist never gets upstaged.
“I consider Supa Dupa Fly a great album because...you hadn't heard it before,” Missy reflected. “You hadn't heard that sound. Even the rap flows was different. I think it was 10 years ahead, 15 years ahead. It's funny. We did that album in 2 weeks... I'm probably more in awe with it now than I was then.”
Despite its impact, Supa Dupa Fly didn’t collect trophies for Missy’s initial visit to the GRAMMYs. That year was a hip-hop nexus where all heavy-hitters were vying for top honors in rap categories: Missy, Busta, LL Cool J, The Notorious B.I.G., Will Smith, Wyclef Jean, and Wu-Tang Clan. There wasn’t a nominee who didn’t deserve a win. No worries. She had an RIAA platinum certification to console her.
Like Eddie Murphy discontinued his trademark ‘80s movie laugh, after Supa Dupa Fly, Elliott retired “hee-hee-hee-hee-haw” indefinitely (though she brought it back one time for Janet Jackson’s Unbreakable in 2015). She also dropped her Misdemeanor tag after Miss E… So Addictive (2001). The Gold Mind, Inc., however, continued releasing her records, and those of protégés Nicole Wray and Tweet, and the soundtrack of Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1998).
If Missy were just a Black girl who put funny sounds in her raps, Supa Dupa Fly would have been a novelty. Instead, it was a careful synthesis of cutting-edge R&B and hip-hop. Her unconventional creativity cleared a path to make the way easier for Eminem, Ludacris, Nicki Minaj, Lizzo, and any newcomers can write their names at the end of the list. She birthed her own cool. The era encapsulated by Supa Dupa Fly started a game of follow-the-leader and 25 years later, Missy is still in front.
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