Steven J. Horowitz Senior Music Writer “I’ve been a superstar since Daddy Kane was raw / I’m live on stage, c’mon, give me some applause,” Missy Elliott raps on her 2002 single “Bomb Intro / Pass That Dutch,” delivered with a steamrolling fervor.
Only then does she take a beat to accept her flowers in a moment of breath-catching respite: “Oh thank you, thank you, you all are so wonderful!” There isn’t a better summation of Elliott, who has consistently (and increasingly) expressed gratitude for, and perceived incredulity of, the adulation she receives the further she stretches away from her six studio albums.
The last of them, 2005’s “The Cookbook,” was an exclamation point on a career that defied any and all conventions of hip-hop.
Sometimes a singer, sometimes a rapper, Elliott has transmuted what we’d come to know about popular music — how it sounds, looks or feels — and defied the odds, whatever those were, by defining an aesthetic that spoke to what she had to say and express, no matter how weird it may have seemed.
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