Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliott doesn't make music for now.
She makes music for a few years from now, then waits for everybody else to catch up.
Future music.
The problem with making future music is that it's a real gamble: it can be visionary, or it can just be weird. Sometimes when you try to do something nobody else has done before, you get it wrong, and Missy
herself has had her share of both wrong and right in recent years.
2002's Under Construction was mostly visionary, mixing up Jam Master Jay beats with squirrelly synths to create what was, at the time, Missy's best front-to-back record. But the overly ambitious follow up, This Is Not a Test, was too big for its britches, and for every great song there seemed to be two of "Let Me Fix My Weave."
After Test, Missy owed us a good one -- one that'd break the mold for years to come. Good thing her latest, The Cookbook, is her best one yet.
Be patient with the first 90 seconds of The Cookbook: it's a trying bit of dialogue you'll just have to sit through to get to the good stuff. But the good stuff is very good on album-opener "Joy," a thudding, rumbling head-nodder that makes "Drop It Like It's Hot" sound like "Ice Ice Baby." The marimba-laden "PartyTime" will make you throw away your White Stripes album, and "Can't Stop" finds some weird, untapped middle ground between Boogie Down Productions and "Crazy in Love." And you don't stop: "On and On" is the finest thing The Neptunes have done since "Shake Ya Ass." It sounds, I swear, like working a straw in and out of a McDonald's cup lid, in space. And "Teary Eyed" bests everything Mary J. Blige has done since "Not Gon' Cry," and Missy isn't even much of a singer.
But the real strength of The Cookbook is in the aesthetics of all its beats: the far-flung sounds of her last few records give way to a slinky, ice-cold electro-funk feeling on nearly everything here, and that cohesion makes The Cookbook a club-rocker from start to finish. That's not to say Missy's getting safe in her old age, since Cookbook is a supremely strange record, but no matter the track, nearly everything here plays well with others.
It wouldn't be a Missy album without a glut of guest spots, and each one on The Cookbook is on fire: Slick Rick's typical genius on "Irresistible Delicious" and Grand Puba's laid-back turn on "My Struggles" makes you wish both of them would make some new music themselves. Future Texas governor Mike Jones does his Mike Jones thing over the best beat he's ever rapped on, and Ciara and Fatman Scoop chew and spit out crunk on the batcrap crazy "Lose Control" -- probably the album's highlight among highlights. And Sri Lankan breakbeat chanteuse M.I.A. (repaying her debt to Missy, without whom there would be no Arular) shows up on album-closer "Bad Man" to say cool things in an accent.
And it wouldn't be a Missy album without a wildly inappropriate sex song, and a few weak lines from Miss herself. But those (and the intro, which is really, truly stupid) are mild complaints.
The Cookbook is a near-classic, near-perfect record from an artist who is far more than just near-genius. And in a few years, once everybody else catches up to Missy, it may just sound even better.
