Believe it or not, Missy Elliott has been in the music industry for over 20 years, releasing
addictive jams that make us throw it back, get our freak on, and lose control.
Still, life hasn't always been easy for the rapper.
This is the tragic, real-life story of Missy Elliott.
Missy Elliott always knew that she wanted to be a hip-hop artist.
As she once told Entertainment Weekly:
"I used to write song lyrics all over the walls of my room.
At first, my mother was like, 'You ain't going nowhere this weekend if I see another song
on that wall."
And how early did this lyricism obsession start?
In a 2019 interview with Marie Claire, Elliott revealed that she knew she wanted to be a
rapper back when she was in kindergarten...and she would repeatedly tell her classmates that
she wanted to be a "superstar."
She claims that:
"The whole class would bust out laughing."
Still, Elliott kept pushing towards her goal, even when her family told her to give up.
She matter-of-factly told Marie Claire,
"Trust me, I was broke.
And my family would be like, 'You better find something to do.'
They told me to go in the Army.
I'm like, 'I'm too fat to go in the Army.
Where [am I] running to?'"
She goes on to explain,
"Everything just seemed so impossible at the time because we didn't have the technology
to be able to reach out and put your stuff online and people get a chance to see it.
So you have to be at the right place at the right time."
Nevertheless, she was determined:
"I said, 'I'm gonna show them.
I'm gonna make a record and it's gonna be big.'"
Missy Elliott had a rough time growing up.
In 2011, her mom Patricia Elliott explained to VH1's Behind the Music:
"We didn't have running water.
We were going in a pot that sat by her bed, 'cause we didn't have a bathroom."
It sounds shocking, but that was the norm for Missy.
And to make matters worse, her dad Ronnie Elliott was unpredictable, both personally
and professionally.
In Tracy Brown Collins' biography Missy Elliott, we learn that Ronnie was a United States Marine
when his daughter was born.
That meant the family had to relocate often, even spending time living in a trailer park
in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Ultimately, Ronnie quit the Marines while Missy was a teenager and decided to relocate
the family back to Virginia, where Missy was born.
As The Guardian reports,
"They lived in Portsmouth in a propane-heated rented shack.
It was so cold and unsanitary in there that at night Ronnie would wrap his wife and daughter
in his military blankets."
Even when Patricia packed her things up, daughter in tow, and left her husband, poverty still
followed them.
As it turned out, Missy's only salvation came from forming a band, Sista, with three of
her close friends and her neighbor Tim Moseley, who would later come to be known as Timbaland.
Missy Elliott reportedly had a tough time in school, too.
As it turns out, she had an extremely high IQ, which evidently worked against her while
growing up.
As Patricia Elliott told Rolling Stone:
"When she was in elementary school they took tests.
Her IQ was so high...it was like a genius IQ.
Then they skipped her two grades, from the second to the fourth."
Unfortunately for Missy, once she jumped grades, her studies suffered.
As the biography Missy Elliott claims, that's because,
"[She] felt out of place with the older children."
Around that time, Elliott began sending letters to her musical idols like Michael and Janet
Jackson, begging them to help her out.
As she told The Guardian:
"I would check my mailbox every day, come rain, sleet or snow.
They never wrote back.
I cried every night about that.
Now, I'm friends with Janet.
I write songs for her."
Missy Elliott headed to New York with Timbaland in the mid-'90s with high hopes of becoming
a star.
According to The Guardian, she was quickly shot down, with the music industry telling
her that she was too overweight to be a singer.
As she explains it,
"They'd broken my heart.
They said I could sing, I could write, but that I looked wrong."
Talking to the New York Daily News, she explained:
"It was hard, because at the time it was all about females who were half-clothed.
I would look like a mess if I did that."
So Elliott focused on one of her other talents: Songwriting.
As The Guardian reports, Elliott and Timbaland began selling songs to various artists and
they eventually hit the jackpot, landing a huge hit with Aaliyah's "If Your Girl Only
Knew."
Eventually, Elliott lost some weight, but she did it on her own terms.
As she told the New York Daily News,
"Missy is always going to be Missy."
Aaliyah Dana Haughton was a musical legend.
Missy Elliott first crossed paths with her in the mid-'90s while working with Timbaland,
and the pair were approached to produce an album for her.
They hit it off immediately, forming a strong and enduring friendship.
The three artists gelled both musically and personally, and Aaliyah's album One in a Million
became a sensation.
"Her vocals, her dancing ability as an artist, I'm like, 'She's gonna be the one to pull
this sound off.'"
With her A-list pals by her side, Elliott was finally considered an "It" girl in hip-hop.
By the time Elliott's third album Miss E...So Addictive came out in 2001, her career was
flourishing.
But meanwhile, her personal life was crumbling.
On August 25th, 2001, news broke that Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash in the Bahamas.
A friend of Elliott's told Behind the Music:
"Missy was devastated.
It was literally losing a family member for her."
Years later, Missy still hasn't forgotten about her close friend.
In 2017, she took to Twitter and posted a video in which she writes this brief, heartfelt
letter to the late artist:
"Aaliyah: We miss you so much, but your legacy will live on forever and ever!"
Missy Elliott's star was rising in the early aughts, but then she seemed to disappear after
her 2005 album, The Cookbook.
So what happened?
In 2011, the rapper revealed to the public that she was suffering from Graves' disease,
an incurable autoimmune disorder.
As Elliott told People, she was first diagnosed with the disease back in 2008 after a terrifying
incident while driving.
She recalls:
"I was trying to put my foot on the brake, but my leg was jumping.
I couldn't keep the brake down and almost crashed."
Meanwhile, the publication reports that
"[The disease] first began affecting her motor skills, followed by a string of symptoms:
dizzy spells, lumps in her throat, mood swings, hair loss, a fast heart rate and bulging eyes."
As she told Sway in the Morning in 2012,
"I was scared.
Anybody that has Graves' disease, like, you feel like you finna be out of here."
Elliott was both physically and mentally drained after enduring radiation and taking lots of
medication.
As the years went on, though, she revealed even more about her battle.
At Essence magazine's 9th annual "Black Women in Music" event in 2018, she took the stage
and declared:
"I was sick and I couldn't even lift a pen.
My nervous system had broken all the way down.
I didn't come up in here in a wheelchair.
Nobody helped me get up here.
I'm walking."
To find success, Missy Elliott had to fight her way in a male-dominated rap industry.
As she told Ebony in 2001,
"The hardest thing about being a female rapper is proving yourself."
And in 2011, she told the Los Angeles Times:
"It's funny, because for females in general, not just in music, but the corporate ladder
as well, anything we do has always been harder for us.
When it comes to music, the industry wants you to conform, to look like this and to sound
like this and do this or that."
So, how did Elliott battle the naysayers?
By just being Missy, of course.
Pharrell Williams told Elle in 2017:
"We came up in a time where we were always told no.
Where we were always placed in a box.
And she defied it.
Over and over again.
She defied the physics that were dictated to us.
She ignored the gravity of standards and prejudices and stereotypes."
As Elliott released music videos that were dramatically different from her female hip-hop
peers, the world watched...and listened.
As she told Fuse in 2019,
"I come from a generation where videos really mattered."
To this day, Elliott continues to inspire a new batch of artists.
In 2016, Tyler the Creator told GQ,
"Missy always looked cool in her videos...Just the swag that she had in her videos.
She made a f---ing plastic bag look awesome.
I always thought that was really, really cool."
After Missy Elliott was diagnosed with Graves' disease, she retreated from the spotlight.
As she told i-D in 2015,
"I needed a break...I never stopped recording, but I went through a period where...the one
thing that a lot of people don't know is that for as long as I've been an artist, I've been
a writer and a producer."
She added:
"So I've had to write and produce for other artists and then maintain my sound and myself
as an artist.
So all that time, I was doing Missy and also making sure I was giving all of these other
artists a different sound too.
That was hard for me."
In 2017, Elle reported that,
"[Elliott] has written more than 500 songs, produced music for Ciara, Janet Jackson, Mariah
Carey, and Whitney Houston, and taken just three vacations in her entire lifetime."
Her lasting legacy was finally honored in 2019 when Elliott took home the Video Vanguard
Award at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards.
"To be recognized for the hard work means more than anybody could know."
After retreating from the spotlight in the early 2000s, Missy Elliott suddenly made a
triumphant return in 2015, taking the stage with Katy Perry during the Super Bowl Halftime
Show.
As Elliott recalled to i-D,
"My manager called me and said 'Would you like to do the Super Bowl'?
I was sat there looking at the phone like 'Did she just say the Super Bowl?'
I felt like, who turns down the Super Bowl but then, why would I be doing the Super Bowl
at this point?"
Of course, the comeback felt daunting, especially considering that she hadn't released any new
music since 2005's The Cookbook.
As she told i-D,
"I've performed for some of the biggest crowds but the Super Bowl has to be the scariest
moment.
It was a time where I felt like 'Do I still have it?'
Especially when you see a whole new slew, a whole new generation of kids."
As it turned out, she did still "have it"…and she wound up winning over a whole new generation
of fans.
After the performance, Pharrell Williams, Elliott's childhood friend from Virginia,
convinced her to release new music.
She revealed to i-D,
"He said 'I'm not trying to push you, but people miss you.
Do you see what happened out there?'...He was like 'I want to get in the studio with
you.'
Who turns down Pharrell?"
Elliott's perseverance certainly paid off.
In 2019, she told MTV News:
"Just keep going.
If I had stopped, I wouldn't be sitting here right now."
Even though Missy Elliott has been a star for over two decades, she still suffers from
serious anxiety about performing onstage.
As the rapper explained to The Guardian, she was completely terrified at the prospect of
performing at the Super Bowl in 2015:
"I ended up in the hospital for having an anxiety attack.
I think any artist who has had a break such as that one would be anxious."
Thankfully, Katy Perry evidently pushed the hitmaker in the right direction.
Elliott told The Guardian:
"I remember Katy saying: 'This is the perfect time to perform your new record.
It's the biggest platform.'
I was like: 'I don't even know if they remember the old ones so I most definitely don't want
to do a new one!'"
Perry was right.
In the twenty-four hours after the Super Bowl, the three songs Elliott performed that night,
'Get Ur Freak On,' 'Work It,' and 'Lose Control', took turns at the number one slot for downloads
on iTunes.
And just like that, Missy Elliott was officially back.
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