She Ain't Heavy

Image credit: Missy Elliott Photograph by Anton Corbijn

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Not all of the Portsmouth, Va., native's childhood memories are so positive. When Elliott was in junior high, her parents split up, and it came as a relief. According to Missy, her father -- who had a military background but was working as a shipyard welder at the time -- was horrifically abusive toward her mother. ''Basically, [their relationship] just was rocky the whole time,'' says Missy, an only child whose mother, Patricia, worked for the local power company. ''I never wanted to go stay at my friends' houses because I always thought my father would beat my mother up or kill her or something. I spent too much time running to my aunt and uncle's house when my father would go into one of those rages. Two times I had to run in the snow with no shoes on.''

Eventually, Patricia Elliott had had enough. ''One day she just said we were gonna have to get out of here,'' Missy recalls. ''She was like, 'You're gonna act like you're going to school, [but] gradually pack your stuff up; put it in bags, not in boxes, and put them in the closet.' When my father went to work, my mother and aunt and uncle took everything out of the house with a U-Haul. We just left. By the time he came home that afternoon, there was a fork, a spoon, a plate, and a blanket left. Everything was gone.... I don't talk about it [in my music], but that's something you never, never forget.''

Newly established in digs across town, Missy, a self-described class clown who played a lot of hooky, rarely got into real trouble at school or at home. ''I used to write song lyrics all over the walls of my room,'' Elliott remembers. ''At first my mother was like, 'You ain't going nowhere this weekend if I see another song on this wall.' But after a while she just said, 'You know what...' My mother didn't want to fuss about too much. She just wanted me to be happy, because I'd been through so much. From 3 years old I remember my father stomping my mother in the face with combat boots, so it was like, she wanted to make sure that I was okay. She just was like, 'Okay, put another song up there. Who cares?'''

It wasn't long before that songwriting impulse started to pay off. In 1991, Sista, a vocal quartet featuring Elliott, wangled an impromptu audition with DeVante Swing of Jodeci (at the time one of R&B's hottest acts) following their Virginia concert. Swing signed them to a deal, a huge break for an unknown act. Although a Sista album never saw the light of day, Elliott used her newfound industry connections to forge a career as a songwriter, penning hits for Ginuwine, 702, and, most notably, Aaliyah, who became a close friend (Construction's ''Can You Hear Me'' is a tribute to Aaliyah and Lisa Lopes). In 1996, Elektra chairman-CEO Sylvia Rhone signed Elliott as a solo act after being wowed by her guest appearance on a remix of Gina Thompson's ''The Things That You Do.'' ''The moment I heard her on that single, I knew she was a solo artist,'' says Rhone. ''You just see it, you hear it, and you know that it says 'superstar.' It wasn't like we had to nurture or push. She could sing, she could rhyme, she could write, and she had a sense of what she wanted imagewise even back then.'' Rhone was right: Driven by the hit ''The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),'' Elliott's 1997 debut, Supa Dupa Fly, sold more than 1.1 million copies. Follow-ups Da Real World (1999) and Miss E...So Addictive (2001) also performed well, moving 1 million and 1.6 million units, respectively. Addictive's Middle Eastern-flavored top 10 hit ''Get Ur Freak On,'' a creative highlight for both her and producer Timbaland, won Elliott a Grammy this year for Best Rap Solo Performance.

Despite that success, and the vividness and sonic innovation that make her body of work so undeniable, Elliott is dogged by a lingering perception among serious hip-hop connoisseurs that she's a lightweight, somebody without much to say. This is, after all, a woman whose current single contains the less-than-Keatsian lyric ''This the kind of beat that go Bah tah tah/Ra-ta-ta-ta Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta/Sex me so good I say blah, blah, blah/Work it -- I need a glass of wa-tah.''

''I don't sit and say I'm the best MC,'' she says, while a studio engineer fiddles with a track in the background. ''I'm not a political junkie or nothing like that. The only thing that concerns me politically is if we're going to war and who the next President is.'' (Sure enough, today is Election Day, and Elliott isn't planning to vote.)

But as anyone who's spent an afternoon reminiscing with a stack of classic rap records knows, not every dope track has to have deep meaning. ''I don't have these lyrics where you be like, 'Wow,''' Elliott says. ''But music is music, and as long as I make people want to dance, make them happy, then I don't really trip off of what other people say. I just do music.''