Missy Elliott

Background

Missy Elliott was born Melissa Arnette Elliott on July 1, 1971, in Portsmouth, Virginia, United States. She is the only child of Ronnie, a United States Marine at the time of her birth, and Patricia, who later worked for a power company. While Ronnie was still a Marine, the family lived in a mobile home in Jacksonville, North Carolina, but he struggled for work after his military service and they moved back to Portsmouth, living in a rat-infested shack.

Ronnie was violent, and beat Patricia in front of their daughter; Missy experienced more trauma at age eight when she was raped by an older cousin. She wrote to Michael and Janet Jackson, begging them to come and save her - she already knew she wanted a future in music. They never wrote back. "I cried every night about that," Missy told The Guardian in 2001. "Now I'm friends with Janet. But sometimes we'll be in a club together and I'll find myself thinking, 'But you never wrote me back when I needed you.'"

As Missy entered her teens, Ronnie became even more violent toward Patricia, and Missy begged her mom to escape from him and take her, too. This finally happened when Missy was 14, though life continued to be a struggle financially.

Education

Elliott completed her graduation from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth, Virginia, in the year 1990.

She was an excellent student in school and scored good marks. Hence, she found it difficult to make friends as she was often picked on.

While she was still at school she formed a girl group, Sista, and after auditioning for the producer DeVante Swing, they were signed to his label, Swing Mob Records - and Missy, who by now had finished her education, moved to New York. But her big break turned out to be a false start, as the label folded before Sista's debut album - most of which Missy had written herself - was ever released.

Career

After Sista split up, Elliott continued writing and producing songs, often working with her childhood friend, the producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley - crafting tracks for Aaliyah and SWV, among others. She wrote her first hit, "That's What Little Girls Are Made of," for Raven-Symoné in 1993, and made her first appearance as a featured vocalist in 1996 with a guest verse on Sean "Puffy" Combs' remix of "The Things You Do," a song Missy had co-written for Gina Thompson.

This brought her to the attention of Sylvia Rhone, the CEO of Elektra Entertainment Group, who gave Missy the chance to form her own label, Goldmind. It was on Goldmind, which Elektra distributed, that Missy Elliott released her debut album, Supa Dupa Fly, in 1997. The album went platinum and earned Elliott the accolade of rap artist of the year from Rolling Stone. She continued her prolific work rate, co-writing and co-producing two songs for Whitney Houston's 1998 album, My Love Is Your Love, and appearing on the Spice Girl Mel B's solo single "I Want You Back," which went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom.

Missy's next two albums - Da Real World in 1999 and Miss E … So Addictive in 2001 - also went platinum. In 2002 her fourth album, Under Construction, which featured collaborations with TLC, Beyoncé, and Jay Z, broke sales records for a female-led rap album, exceeding 2.1 million copies in the United States. The following year she remixed Madonna's single "American Life," and they performed together with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Video Music Awards; Elliott also found time to put out the fifth album, This Is Not a Test, which yielded the hit singles "Pass That Dutch" and "I'm Really Hot."

In 2002 Missy won her first Grammy award, for her groundbreaking single "Get Ur Freak On" - its stuttering, the tabla-laden beat was created by Timbaland after he heard bhangra music while traveling. "Get Ur Freak On" sounded unlike anything heard in hip hop before - or since. She went on to win Grammys for the songs "Scream aka. Itchin'" (2003) and "Work It" (2004), for her album Under Construction (2004) and for the video for "Lose Control" (2006).

Along with her Grammys, Missy has received American Music Awards, multiple BET Awards for the best female hip-hop artist, and several MTV Video Awards for her iconic music videos.

The artist was still humming along with the release of The Cookbook in 2005 - on which she helped spark the EDM boom by sampling Cybotron's early techno classic, "Clear," on the single "Lose Control." But by 2008 she began experiencing dramatic weight loss and was diagnosed with Graves' disease - a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the thyroid gland. Symptoms can include muscular weakness, hair loss, insomnia, and involuntary tremors. She learned to manage the condition partly through diet and exercise, and partly with medication.

As a result, Missy withdrew from the spotlight for many years, though she continued to write and produce for other artists, including Jennifer Hudson, Monica, Keyshia Cole, and Sharaya J., one of her protégées on Goldmind. She made guest appearances, too, notably on the remix of Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night (TGIF)," which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2011. There were also appearances on records by Little Mix and Eve, while her collaboration with Kelly Rowland and Fantasia on the song "Without Me" received a Grammy nomination in 2013.

After appearing with Perry during the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show, Missy returned to the front line in November with the Pharrell-produced single "WTF (Where They From)" - a riotous tongue-twisty club banger that ranks among her finest work: it won widespread praise from the critics, was certified gold in the United States and has been streamed more than 60 million times on YouTube. A second single, "Pep Rally," was first aired in February 2016 on an Amazon commercial during the Super Bowl.

A few months later she made a joyful appearance with Michelle Obama on James Corden's "Carpool Karaoke" - Missy said afterward she felt she was "daydreaming" when the First Lady began rapping her lyrics. A third comeback single, "I'm Better," featuring a debut rap from her regular co-producer Lamb, has been well received.

In an interview with Billboard in 2015, Missy revealed she had six houses (two in Virginia, two in Miami, one in Atlanta and one in New Jersey) and a world-class collection of exotic cars. But she also admitted that when it comes to music her trusted circle of collaborators is quite small, and that she still suffers from shyness - even Timbaland has never seen her record in the studio. "I never record in front of anybody," she said. "It's just me and my little Yorkies, Poncho and Hoodie."

Working her way back into the spotlight, Missy joined rising singer-rapper Lizzo on the dance track "Tempo," which earned its release as a single in July 2019. Around that time, she became the first female rapper to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and was honored with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Adding to what was already shaping up to be a triumphant year, Missy in August 2019 dropped the well-received EP Iconology, her first collection of new music in 14 years.

Achievements

• 

  From her smooth flow to her creativity, Missy Elliott is easily one of the most celebrated female artists in the world. She is the unrivaled queen of rap and is credited as the first black female to make it big in the male-dominated hip hop industry.
  
  Her "Under Construction" album was included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".
  
  Missy Elliott has been listed as a notable musician by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• music

  • Supa Dupa Fly 1997
  • Da Real World 1999
  • Miss E... So Addictive 2001
  • Under Construction 2002
  • This Is Not a Test! 2003
  • The Cookbook 2005
  • Respect M.E. Anthology 2006
  • Original Album Series 2013
  • Iconology 2019

Religion

Missy grew up in the Baptist faith and has said that her religious beliefs will always be a large part of her life. She explained in 2003 that her faith helped her cope with her childhood abuse - and subsequent depression. "You have to find some kind of peace," she said. "I believe in a higher being, and that gives me faith to be strong and go on."

The 46-year-old, who rose to fame during the 1990s and 2000s, said: "Not everybody believes in God but I'm a walking testimony. I might have been some people but the God I serve is powerful, and if He wasn't, I wouldn't be standing here today."

She added: "I was sick and I couldn't even lift a pen; my nervous system had broken... I didn't come up here in a wheelchair, nobody helped me get up here; I walked up here but it was through the grace of God."

Views

The music industry had never seen anyone quite like Missy Elliott. She was hailed by The New Yorker as the "biggest and blackest female rap star that Middle America has ever seen," who had "avoided the prevailing stereotypes of the music-video industry." Meaning, she did not pander to the male gaze as many female artists did - or felt compelled to do - during the height of the MTV era. She projected confidence through her personal style instead, donning an inflatable bodysuit and outsized shades in the video for "The Rain," and a red-and-white space suit for "Sock It to Me."

Her message has always been that women "are equal to men, as important as men and as powerful," noted the fashion magazine Dazed retrospectively, in 2016. "If you love Nicki and Beyoncé, it's important to remember the artist who paved the way."

Carving out a niche for women in hip hop in the early 90s along with Lil Kim and Queen Latifah, Elliott has maintained a strong feminist voice in an industry and genre that thrives on misogyny and homophobia; bigotry that is directly antithetical to everything she stands for.

In that same vein, Elliott also supports autonomy in female sexuality. As a survivor of sexual and domestic violence, her sex-positivity reads almost like a war cry, and as such is both powerful and profound, reclaiming her own body as well as encouraging other women to reclaim theirs.

Everything Elliott has done in her career has fit into this narrative of gender equality and feminine empowerment, and even more so than the adored “feminist” pop stars of today, Elliott committed to her cause that was and hopefully will continue being, the nucleus of her art.

Quotations: “I feel blessed and I’ve learned so much. I just wanted to make a record where people can forget their troubles and go buck-wild.”

“Music should be your escape.”

“I want kids of this generation to see that everything is cool, that there’s some kind of unity in hip-hop. We all found something that’s really important to us, and music is all we’ve really got.”

“Hip-hop is definitely not what it used to be, which was creative, original music.”

“And basically I always said when I was little that if I ever became successful or a celebrity, I would buy her this huge house and she would never have to work anymore. And I’ve done that. So I feel happy about doing that.”

“I’ve always had a lot of creative impact on the music with Timbaland.”

”I want people to feel the heat while they walk down the street and they’re just kickin’ it.”

“When you sit down now and really listen, it doesn’t give off the same feel as it did back when Run DMC and those guys were rhymin’.”

“I wasn’t born a superstar.”

Personality

Missy Elliott has a self-titled YouTube channel with more than 500k subscribers. She has a huge social media fan base with more than 2 million followers on Instagram, more than 7 million followers on Twitter, and more than 3 million followers on Facebook.

She has a pet dog named Fendi Dior.

Physical Characteristics: Elliott's height is 5 ft 2 in or 157.5 cm. Her weight is about 55 kg or 121 lbs.

Her hair color is black, she has dark brown eyes.

Her distinctive features are her smile, curly hair, and sharp jawline.

Missy was diagnosed with Graves’ disease in 2008. She got tested for the same after she survived a near-fatal car accident due to severe leg spasms.

Interests

• animals, sport cars, sneakers

• Music & Bands

  Sheena Easton's "Sugar Walls," Janet Jackson, Lil' Kim, Eve, Trina, Da Brat, Monica

Connections

Missy Elliott is not married and has no kids yet. Elliott has said that she wants to start a family, but she is afraid of giving birth. She states, “I don’t know if I can take that kind of pain [of labor]. Maybe in the year 2020 you could just pop a baby out and it’d be fine. But right now I’d rather just adopt.”

Elliott has no spouse or child. She is openly bisexual and has been in a few high-profile relationships.

She dated Nicole Wray, Trina, Tweet, Faith Evans, Olivia Longott, Lil’ Kim, Tim Mosley, and Karrine Steffans.

Father:

Ronnie Elliott

Ronnie was a U.S. Marine who left acting duty and started working as a shipyard welder. Missy Elliott early life was gloomy as she had an abusive man as a father. She often witnessed ill treatment to her mum which led to her taking solace in the performing arts. The celebrity rapper confessed that the scariest time of her life was when her violent father pulled out a pistol and was ready to kill her mother. She remembers how much she was pleading with Ronnie until her maternal uncle who lived next door came in to intervene in the situation. Elliott still has a poor relationship with her father and admits that she has not forgiven him.

Mother:

Patricia Elliott

Patricia was a power-company coordinator and dispatcher who was unfortunate to be married to a man as violent as Ronnie. For years, she was the object of torture to her husband and Missy was always broken when she watched her mum suffer. In a bid to end the torments, Tricia decided to leave her marriage, taking her only child along with her. After leaving, she became responsible for raising Elliott and the starlet, inspired by her mother’s courage determined she was going to do all it takes to become a formidable artist.

To date, Patricia remains a key figure, not just in Missy’s life but also in her success story. She is super proud of her daughter and is even more grateful that the Get Ur Freak On singer is not one of those prissy girls who forget their background when they eventually make it in life. Both Elliotts are positive role models in the society today who project strength, confidence, and female empowerment but still retain their sense of the sun.

colleague:

Christina Aguilera

ex-girlfriend:

Nicole Wray

Singer Nicole Wray was dating Missy in 1996. The two dated for nearly 2 years and decided to break up in 1998.

ex-girlfriend:

Katrina Laverne Taylor

Missy dated rapper Trina for a year from 1997 to 1998.

ex-girlfriend:

Charlene Keys

Singer and songwriter Tweet was dating Missy from 1999 for nearly 4 years till 2002.

ex-girlfriend:

Olivia Longott

Singer Olivia dated Missy for 2 years from 2002 till 2004. Rapper 50 Cent confirmed their relationship.

colleague:

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter

colleague:

Pharrell Williams

colleague:

Janet Damita Jo Jackson

colleague:

Justin Timberlake

colleague:

Jay-Z (Shawn Carter)

colleague:

Dr. Dre

colleague:

Ariana Grande

References

• Missy Elliott - Twitter
• Missy Elliott - Instagram photos and videos
• Missy Elliott - Facebook
• Missy Elliott - The official YouTube channel