00:01:46.520That's why, here at There Are No Girls on the Internet,1.00
00:01:48.820we just launched a brand new newsletter1.00
00:01:51.240where I'll be taking your internet questions and conundrums.
00:01:54.200To subscribe and submit a question, just go to tangoti.com slash newsletter.
00:01:59.240And I can't wait to connect with you there.
00:02:05.400There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:02:13.520I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:02:18.640So I'm not going to lie, it's been a pretty rough few weeks.
00:02:23.540And usually I like to show up and grapple with whatever is going on on the podcast, you know, bring it to the pod.
00:02:29.620But honestly, I just don't have it in me.
00:02:33.740And that feeling, it really reminded me that, you know, sometimes it's okay to step back and step away and unplug when things just feel like too much.
00:02:44.480And I'm doing that by revisiting a joyful episode of There Are No Girls on the Internet about one of my favorite overlooked tech heroes, Missy Elliott.
00:02:52.180And I hope that wherever you're listening from, whatever you're carrying, that you're also making time to engage with things that bring you joy and comfort too.
00:03:01.140And I also wanted to thank y'all for deciding to spend a little bit of time listening to the show today.
00:03:05.200It really means a lot knowing that you're listening.
00:03:25.840When we think about the intersection of tech innovation and music, it's not difficult to think about men who fit the bill.
00:03:33.000But what about all the female digital visionaries and their impact on music?
00:03:37.540Enter Melissa Arnett Elliott, also known as Missy Elliott.
00:03:43.000Okay, 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.
00:03:53.100And you know what? You're not totally wrong.
00:03:56.120But Coral has not always gotten credit for the visionary that she is.
00:03:59.980Her work as a producer changed the landscape of music in ways that we can still hear today.
00:04:04.940And her innovative music videos blend science fiction and Afrofuturism
00:04:09.000to throw off outdated patriarchal chains of what it means to be a Black woman.
00:04:14.080Now, we talk a lot about girl squads and feminism in music,1.00
00:04:17.480but for Missy Elliott, that looks like working with other women in the music industry,0.99
00:04:22.300amplifying their voices, and acting as a creative collaborator with them.1.00
00:04:26.760Now, Missy is known for her technical production prowess,
00:04:29.240alongside her longtime creative collaborator, Timbaland.
00:04:33.120She's written and produced scores of songs for other artists, many of whom are women,
00:04:37.600whose work she helped find mainstream success.
00:04:40.300Here's just a little taste of the music she's helped produce.
00:08:50.940I'm the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University.
00:08:55.060I'm a scholar and I work mostly on science fiction and music videos.
00:08:59.200Dr. Chaviro says Missy's music just sounds like the future.
00:09:03.080And you can hear her influence in all different kinds of music today.
00:09:06.280The Chemical Brothers just came up with a new album and there's some videos for her interesting.
00:09:10.120But it sounded like this music could have been made in the 1980s.
00:09:14.160I mean, it's great music, but it could have easily been made in the 1980s because it's that kind of sound.
00:09:18.400With Missy Elliott, even though she's doing her own sound, which recognizes her own sound for the 90s and early 2000s,
00:09:24.100it seems contemporary at the same time.
00:09:26.120And that's partly because lots of other people are so influenced by her, I think.
00:09:31.740That is something I love about Missy Elliott's music, is that when you listen to it,
00:09:35.520It sounds like it could be written in 1980, 1990, and also it sounds like music that could come out today, and also it sounds like music from the future.
00:09:44.520You know, she's been quoted as talking about how her style and her music is so futuristic, and I hear that so much in her music.
00:09:52.980You know, it's timeless and futuristic all at once.
00:09:56.020She and Timbaland 20 years ago were experimenting with, you know, very odd rhythms and with things which push the edges of, I mean, it's still danceable, but it pushes the edges of what a groove is, I feel like it's the best way I can say it.
00:10:11.000I'm not sure that that's, I don't feel that that's adequate.
00:10:16.220In his article, Supadupafly, Black Women as Cyborgs in Hip-Hop Videos, Shavira argues that her song, The Rain, is about her using sci-fi-inspired cyborg visuals to subvert the patriarchy and what we think of as traditional Black femininity.
00:10:33.120The videos thus raise the question about identity and otherness, and about power and control.
00:10:38.500They ask us to think about how we're being transformed as a result of our encounters with the new digital and virtual technologies.
00:10:44.660Or better, they raise the question of who we are as beings whose very embodiment is tied up with technological change, as well as the descriptions of gender and race.
00:10:54.880Even the song's main sample, Anne Peeble's classic 1973 hit, I Can't Stand the Rain, is a kind of subversion.
00:11:02.300In the original song, Anne is post-breakup and heartbroken, plagued by the sound of the rain outside of her window.
00:11:15.980But in Missy's version, it's raining indoors.
00:11:19.220And she's broken up with some guy before he can dump her.
00:11:22.000i've been a missy elliott fan my whole life and this was something that weirdly had never occurred
00:11:32.760to me that yeah her use of ann peebles's sample of the rain actually subverts that because that0.97
00:11:39.060original song that she samples is about a woman who you know her man has left her and she's yeah
00:11:44.580the sound of the rain is just making her think about it and missy in that song uses the sample
00:11:50.760but completely subverts it and flips it on its head.
00:11:53.580You know, she's the one who's breaking up with the guy1.00
00:16:24.600But it's like that plastic thing is both, it's doing, it's both emphasizing and concealing0.99
00:16:30.140her body at the same time which is like i mean other people have noted how um some women musicians
00:16:36.680deliberately try to resist being you know hyper sexualized by like wearing loose or baggy clothes0.99
00:16:44.820and stuff like that and there's a whole i mean you can think about the 1990s early um tlc videos
00:16:50.940where they wore these baggy pants with like condoms on as decorations and stuff like that
00:16:55.240which was smart and funny i mean but today you see something like billy eilish you just said0.95
00:16:59.840And if you're the reason she wears these oversized clothes is because she doesn't want people to be completely objectifying her body.
00:17:05.560So Missy Elliott is, I mean, her career, for what I've read, 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.
00:17:16.260She wanted to perform herself, but was told by people in the industry that she wasn't attractive enough to be a star.
00:17:22.640And so she's always faced that kind of thing.
00:17:27.260And and the way she's so it's a way of affirming herself and it's sort of doing two things at once, because on the one hand, it is this kind of loose or literally it's baggy and seem to be made out of plastic bags.
00:17:38.280So it's rather saying, no, you can't just look at my curves and say and you objectify them.
00:17:43.480But at the same time, it's emphasizing her physicality, her presence there.
00:17:46.520It makes her bigger. So it makes her fill up the screen more.
00:17:49.100So it makes it force you. So it's sort of like doing these both things at the same time, I think.
00:17:53.960That makes so much sense. Here's how Missy described it on VH1's Behind the Music.
00:17:59.180We came up with this idea of being in a big plastic garbage bag, basically. I said, I'm going to show them. I'm going to make a record and it's going to be big. And I'm going to be big too. And I mean, literally, I'm going to stay my size and have a big record. And that's that.
00:18:16.840Now, this actually makes a lot of sense.1.00
00:18:18.820Missy was shut out of making a public-facing music video because of her looks.
00:18:23.200In 1993, Raven-Symoné, then the adorable child star of The Cosby Show,
00:18:28.520debuted her hit single, That's What Little Girls Are Made Of.
00:18:31.840It was written and produced by Missy, and Missy also performs a rap on it.0.89
00:18:36.120But in the music video, a thinner and lighter-skinned actress lip-syncs Missy's part.0.84
00:18:42.060Missy recalls that she was intentionally left out of the video shoot0.93
00:18:44.820because she didn't fit the image they were looking for.
00:18:48.240Nobody even told me they shot the video.
00:19:12.540She said the rejection was so painful, she almost gave up on being a star.
00:19:18.800But 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.0.97
00:19:27.820Missy really sets herself apart by playing with our understanding of race and gender.1.00
00:19:31.740It's a kind of hyper-stylization, but which doesn't fit in with, you know, traditional, stereotypical, sexist beauty norms.0.99
00:19:41.120So it's very much a form of individualist self-assertion against being stereotyped in traditional gender ways.1.00
00:19:48.940There's a real power when women claim our expertise and impact.
00:19:53.280Missy Elliott openly talks about the massive impact she's had on the music industry, an industry that hasn't always been quick to recognize her.0.97
00:20:22.620Do you think of Missy Elliott, just personally, do you think of Missy Elliott as a digital innovator?
00:20:27.480Yeah, I mean, definitely, because she, I mean, she's always been doing new things.
00:20:32.380And 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.
00:20:42.960But also, again, I agree. It 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.
00:20:52.520But, yeah, it always does feels feels futuristic. It always feels it has a kind of I mean, it's sort of like has an edge.
00:20:58.640It'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?
00:21:06.080And Lenin replied, the only trouble is it's really hard to be as, but we must be as radical as reality itself.
00:21:13.600So that's the kind of phrase I would apply to Missy Elliott.
00:21:16.460She's always, she's one of the few people who is trying to be as radical as reality itself.
00:29:12.060We were watching the, you know, midtime.0.60
00:29:14.260I forgot who the main headliner was, but Missy Ella came out and did.
00:29:17.540And my kids were just like, oh, she's amazing.
00:29:20.020They never heard of her, of course, because they were babies when her last album had come out.
00:29:25.820We're in this very kind of polarized time.
00:29:27.860At the same time, we have rising fascism in our government and in lots of governments around the world.0.71
00:29:33.960And yet, at the same time, we have a much bigger explosion of multicultural and multigender.
00:29:39.320I mean, you know, gay, lesbian, people, trans people, people of different races and ethnicities.
00:29:44.620You know, so you have this contradiction.
00:29:45.980On one hand, there's much more emphasis on the multiplicity at the same time that we have this kind of fascist backlash, which often seems to rule both the United States and other countries.
00:29:54.880So it's a very kind of weirdly fraught time, and I don't know how to interpret that.
00:29:58.240But it seems to me that we're pushing these two directions at the same time.
00:30:02.580Oh, that's kind of a hopeful way to put it.
00:30:06.280I mean, I'm not very I mean, you know, I'm more optimistic about what some pop culture can throw up than I am about what will happen on the political scene.
00:30:15.420but who knows i mean nobody can predict i mean and you know i mean but even pop culture we have
00:30:21.080more homogenization like a higher percentage of boxers that goes to marvel movies and everything
00:30:27.040else combined but on the other hand we have in all kinds of areas especially when they're low
00:30:30.660can be low origin we have much more wide varieties of expression i was talking the other day to a
00:30:36.300museum director and they're doing a museum show on afrofuturism and they said basically they could
00:30:41.580get the money for it because of black panther the hook is wakanda but of course afrofuturism
00:30:46.460has existed for a long time before black panther which was i mean it was obviously by far the best
00:30:52.880marvel movie but you know there's lots of other stuff going on but sometimes you don't get the
00:30:57.940publicity so i don't know i mean again it seems particularly schizophrenic between the kind of
00:31:03.340horrible things going on politically and the kind of cultural renaissance which seems to be going on
00:31:08.560despite that politics it's so interesting to talk about afrofuturism um this is just like a personal
00:31:15.240aside but um that was such a those were such my foundational through roads into so many broader
00:31:23.460conversations about black identity tech digital digital thinking you know science fiction when i
00:31:29.460was a kid my dad had this one specific earth wind and fire album and it had this really cool like
00:31:35.480cover i remember i was a kid i would stare at it for hours and run my fingers over trying to figure
00:31:40.880out what does it mean what does it mean come to find out i get older it's like oh well it doesn't
00:31:44.620really mean anything it's just like looks really cool i was thinking there was some sort of like
00:31:47.940secret mystical you know and i think like like artists who play with blackness and identity and
00:31:55.460and science fiction in the future you know i think for a long time it probably felt like
00:31:59.740when you when you as a as a black person or i think any person of color or a marginalized
00:32:04.720community, sometimes it can be fraught to imagine our futures.
00:32:09.860And I think creatives who can help us imagine in our wildest dreams what those futures look
00:32:15.240like and that they include us, I think is so important and powerful.
00:32:30.240It says there are black people in the future.
00:32:32.340Oh, that's the installation from artist Alicia Wormsley.
00:32:35.400She puts up billboards reminding everyone that there are Black people in the future.
00:32:38.880And I just saw it on Instagram this morning.
00:32:40.980I 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.