walking upstream…
Missy Elliott
photo: atlantic records · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗Missy Elliott
sourcesGrunge — Missy Elliott profile, quoting her 2001 account of writing to Michael and Janet Jackson as a kid · WDET 101.9 FM — Control is Janet Jackson's Declaration of Independence (critical framing of Control's influence) · Hello Beautiful — Missy Elliott inducts Salt-N-Pepa into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (2025) · uDiscover Music — on Salt-N-Pepa's influence, naming Missy Elliott · Rolling Stone — Missy Elliott on "Get Ur Freak On" (the "hip-hop thriller" quote) · Revolt — Timbaland's 2019 VMA tribute to Missy Elliott's video legacy
Melissa “Missy” Elliott grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia, and has spoken publicly about violence in her childhood home — a hardship she funneled into an early ambition to write and sing her way out. A local girl group put her in the orbit of producer Timbaland and the New York crew Devanté Swing built around Jodeci; when that deal stalled, Elliott went solo. Her 1997 debut, Supa Dupa Fly, opened with a beat built from Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain” and sounded like nothing else on the radio — “we were in such a vulnerable place… we just did what felt good to us,” she said of making it. Over the next decade she and Timbaland rewrote what a rap record and its video could look like, and in 2019 she became the first female rapper to receive MTV’s Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.
the sound in question
2002
Work ItMissy Elliott
walk the tributaries ↓
Salt-N-Pepa1980s · Hip hop / Pop rap
When Missy Elliott stepped up to induct Salt-N-Pepa into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025, she called them “the brick layers — the foundation that hip-hop stands on,” closing a debt she had been naming for years. “Salt-N-Pepa made me want to be an emcee,” she has said. “They were the whole package. They were the main reason I got into rapping.” The duo also modeled the mentorship Elliott later paid forward to Queen Latifah's and MC Lyte's generation of successors.
listen: upstream & heresource: HotNewHipHop — Missy Elliott on Salt-N-Pepa and her mentors ↗
1987
Push ItSalt-N-Pepa
1997
Sock It 2 MeMissy Elliott
listen forBoth tracks strip a beat down to a hard, syncopated pulse and dare a woman's voice to fill it with total confidence: Salt-N-Pepa trade bratty, playground-chant boasts over "Push It's" bare drum-machine groove, and Elliott and Da Brat do the same over Timbaland's skittering, futuristic update on "Sock It 2 Me" — the boasts are the song's real hook in both cases, the drums second.
Michael Jackson1980s · Pop / R&B / Funk
Elliott has said that when Timbaland brought her the beat for “Get Ur Freak On,” it “was like listening to a hip-hop thriller — like, not Michael Jackson Thriller, ’cause that's just unbeatable, but just a hip-hop scary movie” — measuring her own dystopian dance-floor horror movie against the video that set the bar. The comparison held: when she became the first woman to receive MTV's Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award in 2019, Timbaland said of her run of videos, “people wouldn't do the videos they are doing today if it wasn't for her.”
listen: upstream & heresource: Women's Media Center — on Elliott's Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award (first female rapper to receive it) ↗
1983
ThrillerMichael Jackson
2001
Get Ur Freak OnMissy Elliott
listen forListen for how each song breaks its groove for a spoken, scene-setting moment — Vincent Price's cackling monologue closing out "Thriller," the eerie tabla loop and Missy's guttural ad-libs threading through "Get Ur Freak On" — before the beat snaps back in twice as hard. Both are built less like pop songs than short horror films with a beat, which is the exact comparison Elliott reached for the first time she heard the track.
Janet Jackson1980s–90s · R&B / Pop / Dance-pop / New jack swing
As a kid in Portsmouth, Missy wrote letters to Janet Jackson, imagining her showing up at school to pull her out of class; she checked the mailbox “every day, come rain, sleet or snow” and, she has said, “cried every night” when nothing came back. Two decades later, after her 1997 debut landed, the reply came by phone instead — Jackson called to say she loved the record. “I was like, wow, did I arrive?” Elliott recalled of hearing from the childhood idol who had modeled owning your own image, video, and career.
listen: upstream & heresource: Grammy.com — Missy Elliott on Supa Dupa Fly's 25th anniversary (making-of quote, Janet Jackson's response) ↗
1986
ControlJanet Jackson
2002
Work ItMissy Elliott
listen forBoth songs open on a voice announcing ownership before the beat fully lands: Jackson's spoken intro on "Control" — "this is a story about control, my control" — stakes her claim in the first line, and Elliott's "Work It" answers with its own signature trick, flipping her own vocal backwards mid-hook so the record announces its own strangeness before the groove settles. Neither woman waits for the drums to make her presence known.