Missy Elliott‘s new album, This Is Not A Test, probably isn’t the best thing she’s done. I’d even say it’s the first album she’s done that hasn’t at all surprised me in some way; which implies that she has finally reduced what she is doing to a formula.
Nevertheless, I still like This Is Not A Test. There are the monster beats, courtesy of Timbaland, of course; the best songs on the album are the ones in which the arrangements are most minimal, the beats most spare, and at the same time, most booming (“Pass That Dutch”, “Let It Bump”, “Pump It Up”). The R&B numbers, on the other hand, are relatively weak.
But it’s Missy’s charisma, her “flow” (to use that overused and underdefined hip hop word) that still makes me want to listen, even when I feel that I’ve heard it all before. I mean, it isn’t what she says, so much as how she says it. Even when she’s boasting, her voice remains in a strange way conversational, and matter-of-fact. It promises an impossible intimacy, as if she was best girlfriends with each and every one of her millions of listeners; as if there were some way we could join in the gossip and laughter. It somehow seems the most straightforward and “natural” thing in the world, how she segues from celebrating vibrators and other sex toys in one song, to complaining that sex with her man is no longer as good as it was the first time, to mourning Aaliyah (still) in another. The closest she comes to a message is in “Wake Up,” where she tells black people that it’s OK not to have a gun, not to have a cell phone, not to have to strip for a living. (Oddly, or maybe not, this is the song where Jay-Z, who has made his living by peddling the fantasies that Missy dismisses here, makes his guest appearance – he says he used to think like his friends who ended up in jail, but doesn’t any longer). But all in all, as I already said, it isn’t the words that matter here, but the way that Missy says them, and the rapport she establishes with her listeners thereby. A fiction, of course; a fake utopian vision of the everyday, no doubt. There’s no ecstasy here. But the conjunction of Missy’s voicings, and Timbaland’s beats, set up a resonance that works, and that moves me almost in spite of myself.
This Is Not A Test
Missy Elliott‘s new album, This Is Not A Test, probably isn’t the best thing she’s done. I’d even say it’s the first album she’s done that hasn’t at all surprised me in some way; which implies that she has finally reduced what she is doing to a formula.
Nevertheless, I still like This Is Not A Test. There are the monster beats, courtesy of Timbaland, of course; the best songs on the album are the ones in which the arrangements are most minimal, the beats most spare, and at the same time, most booming (“Pass That Dutch”, “Let It Bump”, “Pump It Up”). The R&B numbers, on the other hand, are relatively weak.
But it’s Missy’s charisma, her “flow” (to use that overused and underdefined hip hop word) that still makes me want to listen, even when I feel that I’ve heard it all before. I mean, it isn’t what she says, so much as how she says it. Even when she’s boasting, her voice remains in a strange way conversational, and matter-of-fact. It promises an impossible intimacy, as if she was best girlfriends with each and every one of her millions of listeners; as if there were some way we could join in the gossip and laughter. It somehow seems the most straightforward and “natural” thing in the world, how she segues from celebrating vibrators and other sex toys in one song, to complaining that sex with her man is no longer as good as it was the first time, to mourning Aaliyah (still) in another. The closest she comes to a message is in “Wake Up,” where she tells black people that it’s OK not to have a gun, not to have a cell phone, not to have to strip for a living. (Oddly, or maybe not, this is the song where Jay-Z, who has made his living by peddling the fantasies that Missy dismisses here, makes his guest appearance – he says he used to think like his friends who ended up in jail, but doesn’t any longer). But all in all, as I already said, it isn’t the words that matter here, but the way that Missy says them, and the rapport she establishes with her listeners thereby. A fiction, of course; a fake utopian vision of the everyday, no doubt. There’s no ecstasy here. But the conjunction of Missy’s voicings, and Timbaland’s beats, set up a resonance that works, and that moves me almost in spite of myself.