While some singles by The Fall are right up there with my favourite ever recordings, like 'Fiery Jack' or 'Fantastic Life', if pressed I would have to say that the greatest single ever is 'Get Ur Freak On' by Missy “Misdemeanour” Elliott. It scared the hell out of me when I first heard it, and still it has the power to amaze. This astonishing track surely comes from outer space. It’s science fiction in the way we’d always dreamed of. “Man, I think we are aliens”, says Missy to her partner and fellow mad inventor Timbaland in the credits on the accompanying So Addictive set. Mind you on another day I might claim their Work It was right up there too.
The Missy and Timbaland partnership is an unprecedented one by pop standards. Friends since childhood, they supposedly arrived from the American south (whereas we know they were beamed in from another universe) in time to save the hip hop world from self-destruction. Somehow in my mind there’s Missy experimenting with wordflows and irrational assemblages while her Tim would be percolating strange combinations of beats and electronics. Yeah, this is what pop should always have been about. Except the bizarre thing is that Missy and Timbaland became monumentally successful, and that is just not meant to happen. We’re more used to the pioneers tinkering away in the shadows, meddling on the margins, unloved and unheard. But these extraterrestrial visitors pretty much changed the face of pop.
I seem to remember someone like DJ Vadim pleading keep the r’n’b out of hip hop, but it’s no big thing blending the two. Sugarhill probably put out as many streetsoul releases as hip hop ones, and the lines were often blurred. Mary J Blige probably set the agenda in the ‘90s, but I don’t think anyone’s succeeded as seamlessly as Timbaland and Missy. Their big break was on Aaliyah’s One In A Million set, which they mostly wrote and produced. Songs from this collection still seem to ooze from the pirate airwaves, and it’s not just rosy-eyed romanticism following Aaliyah’s tragic death. The feel of this set still seems to epitomise the potential of smooth soul and sophisticated strangeness subtly mixed.
Timbaland’s trick is to eschew the old hip hop ways of samples and scratches in favour of electronics and broken beats, which over time have borrowed liberally from dancehall, drum’n’bass, bhangra and bleep to create something unique. His sound sprinkled like gold dust over certain singers and rappers has transformed the potentially okay into the occasionally exceptional. A great example is Tweet, an old comrade of Missy, whose Timbaland tracks on her Southern Hummingbird set, like the infamous 'Oops (Oh My) carry on', are a real treat. Similarly Timbaland acts as alchemist on Brandy’s Afrodisiac, arguably against the odds creating something on tracks like 'Sadiddy' that sounds like abstract electronica from the Warp Records stable, and could perhaps be linked to Nicolette’s own work with Warp’s Plaid, and back to her earliest recordings with the Shut Up And Dance organisation. My own favourite Timbaland collaboration is Ms Jade’s Girl Interrupted set which is one of the strongest and most inventive hip hop sets in a long time from a proudly outspoken MC who at least has something to say.
Inevitably the fear would be of Timbaland spreading himself too thinly. He was after all the name to have plastered over a record, and it was difficult to keep up. On paper one of the more intriguing collaborations was on the first western set for J(apanese)-Pop phenomenon Utada, though in reality the more adventurous and odd tracks were not touched by Tim. Indeed on a couple of tracks you might swear it was all turning into A Man Called Adam. Interestingly the rest of the world seemed to be throwing things back at Timbaland, via reggaeton or the sound of the Carioca funk or the messed up music from any part of the world turned around by hip hop.
And as for Missy? Well, she became an American institution and the world’s not always good at taking notice of its institutions. They can be taken for granted. Writing about UK rapper C-mone, Melissa Bradshaw argues: “I like that she’s doing for independent UK rap what Missy did for big bucks US rap. I like her enthusiasm for meeting and collaborating with people.” Melissa immediately challenges my own irritation at the numerous times her namesake has shared tracks with contemporaries from all over the place. Yeah, I can see that it’s been worth Missy making links in that way, and yeah wouldn’t it be great to talk about C-mone in the same way in years to come?
© 2006 John Carney