Kid Tested, Mutha Fuckah Approved
The moment I truly fell in love with Missy Elliot was during a Rosie O'Donnell interview where she was talking about how she never thought she was good looking enough to be a pop star. Not that I hadn't already known that she was a frigging genius, but that was the moment I felt rabidly in her corner. It was unfathomable to me that Missy would consider herself anything but a star and it made me loathe those pre-fab corporate pop hookers that dominate the charts all the much more.
Those days of insecurity have long since eaten dust, and Missy Elliot has come to cast one of the longest most dominating shadows in the history of the hip-hop scene. If Madonna were to have a talented counterpart in the world of hip-hop, it would be Missy Elliot. She consistently outpaces the musical pulse of hip-hop, ahead of every curve, and putting out musical playpens that virtually no one can deny. I root for her success. I wait in those stupid late-night Tower lines so I can get some sort of glow from the idea that I'm one of the first several thousand people to hear what's she's doing next. Missy is just one of those artists that make you shuck off the opinions of others and dance in your room like you're the hippest mother fucker on the planet. She's shit hot gold cool.
The anthemic instant hits that will be heavily rotated on your local urban formatted radio station sit thick stacked in Test. "Pass That Dutch" reprises the sonar bass of "Work It", adding a skeleton of hand claps that will either make you want to jump rope or engage in ridiculous bouts of car choreography. "I'm Really Hot" with its readymade crowd roar rhythm and space laser interplay, sounds like a stadium wave pouring through your speakers. "Let It Bump" continues her old school homaging with her rhyming over a spare knuckle lick and scratch. Missy's new record burgeons with kinetic commandment. It's literally impossible to sit in the room with this on and not have your body independently respond, tic-like, to the nudging, groping popped-bone beats. As usual, Timbaland skips in beats like flat stones on a river, effortlessly cobbling together tracks from rhythms that sound fractious and madly off.
Where I have reservations about Missy's music, it has nothing to do with her ability; she is at the top of the heap in every game she deigns to play. But I'm not personally a fan of the style of R&B that Missy loves to dabble in, those sort of R. Kelly candles on the tub grooves. It seems almost comically serious to me, sludged down to a lava lamp pace and drawn out in slow motion melodrama that's usually about fucking or getting fucked over. For either activity, I prefer a different soundtrack. This Is Not a Test has its share of these slinking, mood-lighting jams. Speaking of crappy R. Kelly songs, he guests on "Dat's What I'm Talkin' About" with his quavering, on the verge of coming, falsetto. I think this kind of overkill is about as sexy as bullet holes. This song also exemplifies Missy's boring side: it's repetitive, and the beat drags like an anchor, grinding the whole song down into bleary R&B yawn. It's hard to fuck, once you've fallen asleep. Like I said, this is wholly related to my own taste in R&B, whereby I would take Jill Scott over Ginuwine every single time. In fact, I don't even consider that a proper choice. "Toyz" might be the only exception I'd make, simply because of it's strutting funk bassline and the fact that its an ode to how getting a few good vibrators makes dealing with trifling men obsolete. If only, Missy, if only.
Perhaps it's every jokester's fate to desperately want the world to embrace their serious side. This Is Not a Test finds Missy struggling to assert a more fleshed-out point of view, whether it's mentioning the victim's of 9-11 or on "Wake Up" vaguely threatening crack dealers and congratulating people who don't live the thug life, it's clear that Missy wants listeners to know that she's not all blahze-blasé about the world. Thankfully it's not remotely heavy handed, woven in amidst the free form fray, a line here and there that make you realize that she's more than a Playdoh fun factory of slanged out hits.
The Neptunes are the only people to have come even close to snaking away with any of Missy and Timbaland's unparalleled beat chemistry. And they haven't really touched it. The Neptunes, for all the praise confetti dandruffed onto them, present little more than a more polished, louder version of what Timbaland does. What's more, they make a lot of bottom-feeding pop crap that's boring, a clackety-clack skeleton that's rattled on and on with mercilessly little variation. They're interesting for top 40 artists, but not necessarily intrinsically interesting. But Timbaland and Missy constantly six shoot your feet, creating songs that you can listen to a hundred times before you finally catch some skittering titter or cartoon sliver that Timbaland has sewn into some of the less obvious layers. Only Missy would interrupt a song for five full seconds ("I'm Really Hot") to let you catch your breath while she let's a stop watch tick.
If Missy's making nervous asides into new more serious territory, everything she tries simply adds to the asteroid momentum of this album. It's the kind of record that makes you feel righteous about all them "haters". And as far as I know, I don't have any "haters". On "Pump It Up" she drops it head on that "I love my gut, so fuck a tummy tuck". It's nice to hear Missy finally recognizing that she won that particular bout of King of the Hill. There's not any new groundbreaking here for the consummate groundbreaker, but when the music is this good, there's no way in hell that should matter. If you haven't bought it, get it. If you've got it, turn it up, and obey the joy.
— 12 December 2003
