Missy Elliott has announced her first headlining tour, Out of This World – The Missy Elliott Experience 2024, starting on 4 July in Vancouver and ending on 22 August. The tour will feature support from Ciara, Busta Rhymes, and Timbaland. Elliott, who was the first female hip-hop artist to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is now embarking on her first headline tour. She has been a trailblazer in the music industry, owning her body, sexual desires, and blackness. In 2004, she co-headed the Verizon Ladies First tour with Beyoncé and Alicia Keys. The song Get Ur Freak On, released three years earlier, was a turning point in her career, becoming one of the most iconic anthems in modern music. Pre-sale tickets for the tour launch today, with general sale available from 12 April.
Get Ur Freak On, a game-changer by American singer and producer, Elliott, was a groundbreaking release in 2001. The track, featuring a six-note melody on a Punjabi one-stringed tumbi, impulsive tabla percussion, and vivacious Southern flow, was a thrilling shock to the system. Despite numerous plays, remixes, and multi-genre covers, the track remains electrifying, showcasing Elliott's ability to create a powerful impact on the music industry.
In her late 20s, Elliott, a savvy businesswoman and founder of her own offshoot, The Goldmind, was aware of industry pressure and the need to change her music. She and Timbaland had created Get Ur Freak On as an impromptu late addition for her third album, Miss E… So Addictive. The track initially aimed to create a street buzz, but later became a crossover storm. It channeled hip-hop caché, worldly flavors, and an all-encompassing pop appeal, allowing the track to be about dancing, the bedroom, or anything. Elliott emphasized that the track could be about dancing or cleaning the house.
The rise of African-American producer Timbaland in Western mainstream music marked a significant shift in the genre, allowing Eastern influences and samples to gain prominence. The album Get Ur Freak On, featuring an intro and outro in Japanese, challenged the esoteric orientalism of some press towards Asian music. This move allowed Asian producers and those using Asian beats to gain validation and commercial success, thereby transforming the way mainstream music was perceived and consumed.
"The percussive spine of this track, the inordinate amount of money they'd spent on this video, meant that its cultural impact was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It came before Addictive by Truth Hurts (2002) and What's Happenin by Method Man (2004), which both sampled Bollywood. I joined a brand-new Asian beats show on Radio 1 in 2002; I can't definitively say the two things were connected, but the fact is that Radio 1 felt something was going on around Asian sounds. I do remember interviewing Timbaland in 2003, and he went to Southall afterwards to buy loads of Asian CDs…"
Get Ur Freak On still feels like a global hotbed, fuelling new generations of samples and remixes; Arthanayake excitedly plays me a 2019 Mastiksoul and Chuckie bootleg down the phone, and adds that the track's creative dexterity is its enduring strength. "Get Ur Freak On is a party record that still bangs; you can imagine it being the kind of track that gangstas and pretty boys wanna dance to," he says. "It's pop, it's hard, it's got everything you want in a hip-hop single. There's another reason why it works; it's 178 beats-per-minute, like drum'n'bass, but you can dance to it on half-time (89bpm) – so ravers and hip-hop heads will like it, it appeals across genres."
The track has even proved a bop for music theorists, such as Professor Ethan Hein: a doctoral fellow in music education at NYU. In his blog (Oct 2020), Hein describes Get Ur Freak On as "my go-to example for Phrygian mode" (similar to the modern natural minor scale, with ancient Greek origins), and transcribes Elliott's a capella flow into a melodic study. It's a hypnotic contrast to a flurry of Get Ur Freak On covers spanning Britney Spears in Vegas to alt-rockers Eels.
"Contemporary stars like Beyoncé or Rihanna will always be paying reverence to Missy – Lawrence Lartey
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