At 53 and after a protracted battle with Graves disease, the Northern Virginia native has gotten back together with three close collaborators — Ciara, Busta Rhymes, and Timbaland, who produced many of her biggest hits — for a nationwide arena tour. Early reviews of the Out of This World Tour, which comes to Amerant Bank Arena on Thursday, July 25, have been extremely positive, with Variety's Steven J. Horowitz calling it "a grand tour of excellence, one that not only plays to but accentuates her strengths."
One of those strengths has to be Elliott's impeccable visuals. Thanks to an immense amount of record label support, she and close collaborators such as Hype Williams and costume designer June Ambrose redefined the look of hip-hop, bringing a new level of visual inventiveness and sophistication to the streetwise genre. As she and her team enter the AAA concert space with plenty of callbacks to her original output, New Times is taking a look back at the visuals that made her such an icon in the first place.
Find five of Missy's most iconic visual moments below.
"The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)"
Few hip-hop stars have had a breakout moment quite like "Supa Dupa Fly." After years spent as a ghostwriter and featured artist as part of the Swing Mob collective, Elliott came out swinging as a solo artist with this bouncy, funky track, incorporating a sample from Anne Peebles' 1973 soul tune "I Can't Stand the Rain" and fun, clever pop-rap lyrics ("Beep-beep! Who got the keys to the Jeep?"). Yet it was the music video that truly lifted Elliott beyond anyone's expectations. The first collaboration between Elliott and Hype Williams, whose copious use of fisheye lens defined an era of hip-hop visuals, the video's real highlight was Elliott's billowing black-leather "garbage bag" jumpsuit, accessorized with a golden bicycle helmet. Critics argued that the costume was significant as a riposte to the sexism of '90s hip-hop when opportunities for female rappers were limited, and the ones that did make it had to have sex appeal. Elliott proved that you could make it simply by having creativity, swagger, and a wild fit."Sock It 2 Me"
"Supa Dupa Fly" may be Missy's only song to actually make it into outer space (just a few days ago NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory transmitted the song in the direction of Venus, making it the first hip-hop song to travel beyond the Earth), but the video for "Sock It 2 Me," directed once again by Hype Williams, was truly her most intergalactic moment. The joyously goofy sci-fi visual shows Elliott and featured rapper Da Brat travel to Mars and evade a troop of sinister robots while wearing Mega Man-inspired costumes. She also finds time to do the "Smooth Criminal" lean in a bright red dome. It's not the most conceptually sophisticated video Missy and Williams ever made, but it certainly is fun and unique."She's A Bitch"
You can tell Hype Williams was fully in his bag on this one. Fresh off his feature directorial debut Belly, a hip-hop gangster film with Nas and DMX now considered a cult classic, Williams made his most futuristic, budget-blowing video yet for Elliot's rollicking track "She's A Bitch." The whole thing cost $2 million to make (around $3.8 million today), and it definitely looks like it. Electro-luminescent panels were brought in from Germany to create the video's sets. One scene featured a hydraulic jack that lifted an M-shaped platform out of a pool of water. The video's aesthetics also mark it as a touchstone of Y2K design, with the shiny surfaces and futuristic details of the sets, Elliott's wild costumes (bug-eye shades and spiked leather suits), and slick cinematography switching between color and black-and-white. It's a masterpiece."Get Ur Freak On"
This worldly, bhangra-sampling track from 2001 was one of Elliott's biggest risks, with her and regular producer Timbaland dispensing with their usual boom-bap rhythms in favor of something completely different. The track earned praise for incorporating global music in a creative way that didn't cheapen or exoticize its source material and is even seen as a watershed for international sounds in pop music. For the video, Elliott decided to move in a similar direction. Straying from the high-gloss Hype Williams style, she and director Dave Meyers traded ideas after a showing of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, resulting in a clip that drew heavily from Chinese and Japanese cinema. It featured Elliott and a crew of camo-suited dancers in an abandoned concrete dungeon full of ghostly apparitions — at one point, Missy's neck even stretches like a yokai monster."Lose Control" at the 2005 BET Awards
A track as fiercely mechanical as "Lose Control," which famously samples Cybotron's Detroit techno classic "Clear," deserves an equally futuristic visual. While the song's music video, directed by Dave Meyers, is decent, we need to look back to Elliott's performance at the 2005 BET Awards to really see into the future. A space-themed intro and set give way to an energetic dance routine, where Missy descends from a spacecraft joined by featured artists Ciara and Fat Man Scoop. Then, midway through, we really go where no award show has gone before. The tempo speeds up, and suddenly, we're thrown into a Chicago juke remix with lightning-fast 808 beats and furious, fancy dance moves. Juke, also known as footwork, wouldn't begin to receive attention outside of Chicago for another few years, making this performance one of its earliest mainstream exposures. That's Misdemeanor for you; always ahead of the curve.Missy Elliott. With Ciara, Busta Rhymes, and Timbaland. 7 p.m. Thursday, July 25, at the Amerant Bank Arena, 1 Panther Pkwy., Sunrise; 954-835-7000; amerantbankarena.com. Tickets cost $75 to $399 via seatgeek.com.
