Words to Live By: Missy Elliott
Melissa Arnette Elliott, fondly known as Missy Elliott celebrates her 49th birthday today. She’s quite the household name in the world of Hip Hop. She embarked on her music career with the all-female R&B group, Sista, and not too long after, she launched her solo career. On July 15, 1997, she dropped her debut album, ‘Supa Dupa Fly,’ and it immediately landed on the No.3 spot on the Billboard 200 Charts, marking the highest charting debut for a female rapper at the time.
Missy Elliott went on to make a name for herself and ultimately, create quite a ripple in the Hip Hop landscape. The star has always been leagues ahead of her time and this is reflected in the experimental concepts found in her music videos. Her catalogue of songs has tracked themes like body-positivity, feminism, gender-equality, sex-positivity and so much more. Elliott was one of the first artists to make these topics the focus of her music, among other hip-hop and R&B performers.
With all these years of experience, it’s no surprise that Missy Elliott often comes through with such sound advice and so many inspirational messages. And so, we’ve picked out the best of the bunch, to celebrate this superstar.
1. “I want kids of this generation to see 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.”
(Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)
2. “My first love is writing and producing. So I sometimes put my own stuff off to work on other people’s projects.”
(Photo by Shareif Ziyadat/WireImage)
3. “Women are not always taken as seriously as we should be, so sometimes we have to put our foot down.”
(Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for MTV)
4. “I’m blessed to be living this dream of writing and singing, but that’s not the real dream I had. The real dream was to make enough money to take care of all the pain and suffering that my mother has been through.”
(Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images)
5. “Things happen in your life, and then you can write something else instead of the same three topics – like, how many times can we write about the clubs?”
(Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images)
6. “All of the trials and tribulations from personal to the artist. It shows that I’m human. People see the glamorous stuff, but they don’t see the background.”
(Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Something in the Water)
7. “I can’t complain. I think when you get to a certain point, you shouldn’t complain because there’s so many people who would kill to get to this point.”
(Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for FYF)
8. “I’d stand on the side of the road when I was just a little girl singing on trash cans. I always pretended it was some big stage.”
(Photo by The Gap via Getty Images)
9. “No, because I don’t want to hear what’s hot and feel I have to copy it. I’ll just make up my own thing.”
(Peter Kramer/Getty Images)
10. “I gotta feel like what I’m giving the fans is 100 per cent and that it’s game-changing. I don’t just throw out microwave records.”
(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
By: Nina Karun
