When you've re-invented rap, R&B and pop music too, what exactly do you do for an encore? That's the challenge facing Missy Elliott, with her equally workaholic producer Tim 'Timbaland' Mosley, on her third album.
After all, here's someone whose radical sounds and image - those staccato beats and surreal videos - have spread like a virus over the past few years, to the extent that both British and American charts have become unlikely playgrounds for bizarre beat scientists. Minimalist electro with a few tablas, Jamaican dancehall-style rapping, and a spot of Japanese counting? Sure: anything goes.
Hence 'Get Ur Freak On', one of the most remarkable records from any genre for years, has become a massive worldwide hit. And as a teaser for Elliott's playful, genre-busting, frequently fairly insane 'Miss E…So Addictive', it's irresistible.
Her last album, 'Da Real World', was an uncharacteristically austere outing, money-obsessed and revolving around repetitive assertions of power that cumulatively sounded defensive. 'Miss E', however, is a dayglo, mischievous, hour-long party: sexually rapacious, chemically satirical, dancefloor-directed and almost entirely wonderful.
From the intro on, the premise is clear. Why bother with drugs when you can have as good a time through music, dancing or shagging? Once on her theme, Missy can't resist hammering it home, so 'X-Tasy' is packed with E allusions and endowed with a woozy, discombobulating production from Timbaland. '4 My People', a pumping retooling of hip-house co-starring Eve, even aims directly for the Ecstasy generation on their own territory, an ambitious and broadly successful melding of disparate styles.
In fact, 'Miss E' careers from genre to genre with bravura, twisting and modernising them as it goes. So 'Old School Joint' hypes up disco, the brilliant 'Dog In Heat' (with Method Man and Redman) restyles P-funk and 'Take Away' gives spine-tingling new dimensions to the great soul lovers' duet, with Ginuwine playing Marvin Gaye to Missy's space-age Tammi Terrell.
What else? Amazing baroque hip-hop on the hilarious critique of crap lovers, 'One Minute Man', which comes in two versions so both Jay-Z and Ludacris can plead the case for men. Some extraordinarily futuristic Timbaland trickery on 'Watcha Gonna Do' (Hawaiian ragga electro, vaguely) and 'Slap! Slap! Slap!' (backwards sitar). A big gospel finale. And - and you won't believe this - skits between tracks that are actually funny.
It's hard to believe a better advertisement for music's capacity to be simultaneously adventurous and entertaining, funny and moving, leftfield and mainstream will be released all year. "Me and Timbaland got tracks that will kill you," Elliott boasts on 'Watcha Gonna Do' and really, for once, it's impossible to argue.
by John Mulvey