Missy Elliot has accomplished a lot in her 48 years. She transformed the hip-hop landscape with her rhymes and did the same for the way we consumed music videos when they were regularly shown on television. Within the past year, she’s been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame — the first female rapper to do so — and earned an honorary doctor of music degree from the Berklee College of Music. Add that to her host of hits like “Work It” and “The Rain,” among others, and there’s almost nothing Missy touches that is not gold.
Looking back at her career achievements in a new cover story for Marie Claire’s August issue, Missy noted that all she’s accomplished has come to fruition just by her verbally putting it out into the universe.
That even goes back to when she was in kindergarten. At the time, she remembered telling her teacher weekly, “I’m going to be a superstar.”
“The whole class would bust out laughing,” she remembered. But there was a power in her reciting that.
“It’s funny because I was just telling somebody that everything I spoke, I’ve done. And that’s how powerful the tongue is,” the rapper said. “I used to sit in the house and act like I was having conversations with Janet [Jackson] and Michael [Jackson] and Madonna and whoever. I then would go and say my thank yous for award shows that I hadn’t made it to yet. I had speeches, and I would be in the mirror thanking my mama.”
Yet, even with all she’s managed to do in the last two or so decades, Elliot hasn’t always taken the time to stop and smell the roses.
“I was just going, going, going,” she said to the publication. “It wasn’t resonating what was happening. After I did the Super Bowl [in 2015], my friends called me and they are like, ‘So, what you about to do?’ I’m here mopping my floor, and I got to wash the dogs. And they are like, ‘What? You just finished doing the Super Bowl.’ I was in the car with Michelle Obama [for ‘Carpool Karaoke’ in 2016], and they called me like, ‘Girl, we got to celebrate, that’s huge!’ And I’m like, ‘I’m watching a movie on Netflix.’ Now that I’ve had a chance to slow down, I look back at stuff, and I look back at my ‘She’s a B—h’ video [1999], and at the time I didn’t even think about it. But I look at it now and I’m like, ‘This is still so many years ahead.'”
Next up, Elliot is set to release new music in the form of her highly anticipated seventh studio album. She says when fans listen to the tracks for the first time at a TBD date, the MC hopes people think, “There’s no one like Missy. No one.”
