00:02:02.620When we think about the intersection of tech innovation and music, it's not difficult to think about men who fit the bill.
00:02:09.520But what about all the female digital visionaries and their impact on music?
00:02:13.800Enter Melissa Arnett Elliott, also known as Missy Elliott.
00:02:19.320Okay, so some of y'all might be thinking that maybe this whole episode is just an excuse for me to take a little break from the depressing news cycle and talk about my love of Missy Elliott.
00:02:29.420And you know what? You're not totally wrong.
00:02:32.760But Coral has not always gotten credit for the visionary that she is.
00:02:36.660Her work as a producer changed the landscape of music in ways that we can still hear today.
00:02:41.560And her innovative music videos blend science fiction and Afrofuturism to throw off outdated patriarchal chains of what it means to be a Black woman.0.79
00:02:50.720Now, we talk a lot about girl squads and feminism in music, but for Missy Elliott, that looks like working with other women in the music industry, amplifying their voices, and acting as a creative collaborator with them.
00:03:03.000Now, Missy is known for her technical production prowess alongside her longtime creative collaborator, Timbaland.
00:03:09.680She's written and produced scores of songs for other artists, many of whom are women,
00:03:14.220whose work she helped find mainstream success.
00:03:16.920Here's just a little taste of the music she's helped produce.
00:07:27.580I'm the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University.
00:07:31.700I'm a scholar and I work mostly on science fiction and music videos.
00:07:35.820Dr. Chaviro says Missy's music just sounds like the future.
00:07:39.720And you can hear her influence in all different kinds of music today.
00:07:42.920The Chemical Brothers just came up with a new album and there's some videos for her interesting.
00:07:46.740But it sounded like if this music could have been made in the 1980s, I mean, it's great music, but it could have easily been made in the 1980s because it's that kind of sound.
00:07:55.020With Missy Elliott, even though she's doing her own sound, which recognizes her own sound for the 90s and early 2000s, it seems contemporary at the same time.
00:08:02.760And that's partly because lots of other people are so influenced by her, I think.
00:08:08.360That is something I love about Missy Elliott's music is that when you listen to it, it sounds
00:08:12.600like it could be written in 1980, 1990, and also it sounds like music that could come
00:08:18.120out today, and also it sounds like music from the future.
00:08:21.140You know, she's been quoted as talking about how her style and her music is so futuristic,
00:14:07.800You probably already know that Missy Elliott is synonymous with iconic music videos.0.78
00:14:13.180I probably spent hours in my room watching her trippy visuals.
00:14:17.400When I was growing up, an iconic music video could make an artist.
00:14:21.520But these days, artists can get big without having a video at all.
00:14:24.820So labels don't really spend the money to produce them like they used to.
00:14:28.540And it's kind of a shame we don't even get to see them as an expression of an artist's vision anymore.
00:14:32.280Missy's visuals were all about being subversive0.99
00:14:36.120you know how she rocks that iconic black inflatable suit and helmet in the rain video0.66
00:14:40.760Shaviro says it's a futuristic response to her being shut out of the music industry0.99
00:14:45.540for daring to be a black woman who wasn't a size four
00:14:48.280this whole emphasis on women's standards of women beauty for a bit for the male gaze being1.00
00:14:54.740you know you know slender and things like that and she's violating that but it's like0.94
00:15:02.060that that plastic thing is both it's doing it's both emphasizing and concealing her body at the1.00
00:15:07.280same time which is like i mean other people have noted how um some women musicians deliberately1.00
00:15:14.400try to resist being you know hyper sexualized by like wearing loose or baggy clothes and stuff like0.91
00:15:21.940that and there's a whole this i mean you can think about the 1990s early um tlc videos where
00:15:27.720They wore these baggy pants with, like, condoms on as decorations and stuff like that, which was smart and funny.0.56
00:15:33.500I mean, but today, you know, someone like Billie Eilish, you just said in the interview, the reason she wears these oversized clothes is because she doesn't want people to be completely objectifying her body.
00:15:42.200So Missy Elliott is, I mean, her career, for want of rev, is that she wanted to, you know, she was doing production work for Aaliyah and many other artists and writing songs and stuff like that.0.71
00:15:52.840She wanted to perform herself, but was told by people in the industry that she wasn't attractive enough to be a star.
00:15:59.200And so she's always faced that kind of thing.
00:16:04.100And the way she's – so it's a way of affirming herself, and it's sort of doing two things at once.
00:16:09.060Because on the one hand, it is this kind of looser – literally, it's baggy, and it seems to be made out of plastic bags.
00:16:15.040So it's rather saying, no, you can't just look at my curves and say – and, you know, objectify them.
00:16:20.020but at the same time, it's emphasizing her physicality and her presence there.
00:16:23.280It makes her bigger, so it makes her fill up the screen more,
00:16:43.200I'm going to make a record, and it's going to be big.
00:16:45.820And I'm going to be big, too, and I mean literally.
00:16:48.240I'm going to stay my size and have a big record, and that's that.
00:16:53.420Now, this actually makes a lot of sense.1.00
00:16:55.400Missy was shut out of making a public-facing music video because of her looks.
00:16:59.780In 1993, Raven-Symoné, then the adorable child star of The Cosby Show,
00:17:05.100debuted her hit single, That's What Little Girls Are Made Of.
00:17:08.440It was written and produced by Missy, and Missy also performs a rap on it.0.89
00:17:12.720But in the music video, a thinner and lighter-skinned actress lip-syncs Missy's part.0.84
00:17:18.640Missy recalls that she was intentionally left out of the video shoot0.93
00:17:21.400because she didn't fit the image they were looking for.
00:17:24.820Nobody even told me they shot the video.
00:17:27.380I heard later it was like, you didn't quite fit the image that we were looking for.
00:17:33.460I was like, oh, they're trying to say I'm fat.
00:17:38.100Immediately, I'm like, oh, they ain't on the big girls.
00:17:42.860I said every curse word. I was distraught.
00:17:46.460In Elle magazine in 2017, she said the rejection was so painful, she almost gave up on being a star.
00:17:55.400But now she's embraced having her own brand of Black femininity, telling the New York Daily News what a blessing it is to be known for being different.
00:18:04.400Missy really sets herself apart by playing with our understanding of race and gender.1.00
00:18:07.940It's a kind of hyper-stylization, but which doesn't fit in with, you know, traditional, stereotypical, sexist beauty norms.0.99
00:18:18.600So it's very much a form of individualist self-assertion against being stereotyped in traditional gender ways.1.00
00:18:25.540There's a real power when women claim our expertise and impact.
00:18:29.840Missy Elliott openly talks about the massive impact she's had on the music industry,0.95
00:18:34.220an industry that hasn't always been quick to recognize her.
00:18:59.160Do you think of Missy Elliott, just personally, do you think of Missy Elliott as a digital innovator?
00:19:03.280Yeah, I mean, definitely, because she I mean, she's always been doing new things. And it's partly, again, being a woman and presenting herself in a way that, you know, only men were privileged to or they were refusing the roles that women were relegated to.
00:19:21.720It does seem, again, it's very hard to quantify this or it's very hard for me especially to put my finger on how – what it is which is doing this.
00:19:29.020But yeah, it always does feel futuristic.
00:19:31.860It always feels it has a kind of – I mean it's sort of like – it has an edge.
00:19:35.420It's sort of like – there's a famous statement by Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, when somebody said, are you sure you're not being too radical?
00:19:42.680And Lenin replied, the only trouble is it's really hard to be as – but we must be as radical as the reality itself.
00:19:50.160So that's the kind of phrase I would apply to Missy Elliott.
00:19:53.040She's always, she's one of the few people who is trying to be as radical as reality itself.
00:23:35.340They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:23:39.800But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:23:43.240They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:23:46.860Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:23:55.320If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:24:01.260This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:24:13.720I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:24:20.840I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:27:00.800I mean, part of the problem, I think, is that she's been ill
00:27:03.620for, you know, for much of the last decade.
00:27:06.340So she couldn't, I mean, her last full-length album was, I think, in 2005.
00:27:09.840and since then she's released a few singles and you know i maybe i so i mean it may be partly
00:27:16.580just that she's now in better health and more able to do stuff i mean i don't know it's like
00:27:21.820four or five years i mean she's she's made partial comebacks that people forget about you if you
00:27:26.200don't have a new album out but i mean i was we were this is like she was at she she performed
00:27:32.260in the super bowl mid you know halftime show like four or five years ago i can't remember the exact
00:27:37.500year and my kids who are well they're now seven my I have two daughters they're 17 and 14 now so
00:27:44.420this was like they were a few years younger they were like tweens they weren't quite teenagers yet
00:27:48.140we were watching the you know mid-time I forgot who the main headliner was but Miss Yella came
00:27:53.400out and did and my kids were just like oh she's amazing like she they never heard of her of course
00:27:58.140because they were they were babies when her last album had come out we're in this very kind of
00:28:03.340polarized time we're on at the same time we have like rising fascism in our government and in lots
00:28:09.380of governments around the world and yet at the same time we have a much bigger explosion of
00:28:14.000multicultural and multi-gender i mean you know gay and lesbian people trans people people of
00:28:18.800different races and ethnicities you know so you have this contradiction one hand there's much more
00:28:23.540emphasis on the multiplicity at the same time that we have this kind of fascist backlash which
00:28:28.060often seems to rule both the united states and other countries so it's a very kind of weirdly
00:28:32.540for a time and i don't know how to interpret that but it seems to me that we're pushing these two
00:28:37.000directions at the same time oh that's kind of a hopeful way to put it okay when well i hope so i
00:28:42.940mean i'm not very i mean you know i'm more optimistic about what some pop culture can
00:28:49.000throw up than i am about what will happen on the political scene but who knows i mean nobody can
00:28:53.660predict i mean and you know i mean but even pop culture we have more homogenization like
00:28:58.980a higher percentage of box goes to marvel movies and everything else combined but on the other
00:29:04.720hand we have in all kinds of areas especially when they're low it can be lower rigid we have
00:29:08.220much more wide varieties of expression i was talking the other day to a museum director and
00:29:13.700they're doing a museum show on afrofuturism and they said basically they could get the money for
00:29:18.660it because of black panther they the hook is wakanda but of course afrofuturism has existed
00:29:23.860for a long time before Black Panther, which was, I mean, it was obviously by far the best Marvel
00:29:29.700movie. But, you know, there's lots of other stuff going on, but sometimes you don't get the
00:29:34.460publicity. So I don't know. I mean, again, it seems particularly schizophrenic between
00:29:39.140the kind of horrible things going on politically and the kind of cultural renaissance which seems
00:29:44.380to be going on despite that politics. It's so interesting to talk about Afrofuturism.
00:29:50.060um this is just like a personal aside but um that was such a those were such my foundational
00:29:56.520through roads into so many broader conversations about black identity tech digital digital thinking
00:30:03.840you know science fiction when i was a kid my dad had this one specific earth wind and fire album
00:30:09.880and it had this really cool like cover i remember i was a kid i would stare at it for hours and run
00:30:16.100my fingers over trying to figure out what does it mean what does it mean come to find out again
00:30:20.040older is like oh well it doesn't really mean anything it's just like looks really cool i was
00:30:23.380thinking there was some sort of like secret mystical you know and i think like like artists
00:30:28.480who play with blackness and identity and and science fiction in the future you know i think
00:30:34.540for a long time it probably felt like when you when you as a as a black person or i think any
00:30:39.640person of color or a marginalized community sometimes it can be fraught to imagine our
00:30:45.560futures. And I think creatives who can help us imagine in our wildest dreams what those futures
00:30:51.560look like and that they include us, I think is so important and powerful. There's a show,
00:30:56.460I live in Detroit, and there's a show at an art gallery downtown of Afrofuturist art. And one of
00:31:02.580the items in the show is that it's not actually in the gallery, it's on a billboard outside. It says
00:31:07.160there are Black people in the future. Oh, that's the installation from artist Alicia Wormsley.
00:31:11.860She puts up billboards reminding everyone that there are Black people in the future.
00:31:15.420And I just saw it on Instagram this morning.
00:31:17.440I thought it was so wild because, of course, you know, on one hand, it shouldn't be a controversial statement to remind folks that, yes, there are Black people in the future.
00:32:41.000I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive
00:32:50.160what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. Every
00:32:56.180week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,
00:33:01.560and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:33:06.760Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:33:15.140If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:33:20.900Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:33:29.220Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture
00:33:32.680with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.