Welcome to Rolling Stones five hundred Greatest Songs, a podcast based on Rolling Stones hugely popular, influential, and sometimes controversial list.
I'm Britney Spanis.
And I'm Rob Sheffield and we are here to shed light on the greatest songs ever made and discover what makes them so great.
So big one, big one this.
Week all time favorite.
Both of us and I mean, one of the best songwriting production duos in all of music history.
Worked on this song. Today.
We are going to talk about Missy Elliott's get Your Freak on the I mean absolutely transcendent song that placed four sixty six on the two thousand and four and twenty ten lists and jumped all the way to number eight on the twenty twenty one list. It's one of three Missy songs on the list. Work It came in at number fifty six, and the Rain Super Dupa Fly
came in at number four fifty three. And the song was written and produced by Missy and Timbaland, one of the again one of the greatest combinations, one of the greatest duos in songwriting history, and they have had a long running just collaborative partnership and friendship and just continue to make really avant garde and experimental music, as Get your Freak On is exemplary of absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean there's no way you would hear any five second snippet of this song and not think two thoughts simultaneously. This is Missy and Timbaland, and second, what planet is this coming from? They always had such a completely innovative, original sound that sounded like nothing else, even when everybody was trying to imitate what they did a couple of years earlier.
Yeah, it's a level of weirdness that literally only Missy can get away with performing. You know, It's like Missy can only do this so effectively and so perfectly where she herself is i mean just completely always futuristic, always kind of weigh hundreds of thousands of years ahead of whatever's going on in pop music, and can get away with I mean, this was her third album.
This was Missy so addictive.
The fact that it still sounds like this could be you know, people would kill for this to be like the first time that you ever heard them.
Yes, and that this is just one song from one album in one of the greatest runs in pop music history. Yeah, Missy and Timbaland just always had that unique chemistry and as soon as people around the world heard it, people became obsessed. I mean, you don't forget when you heard them for the first time. The song I voted for on my list was The Rain Super Dupa Fly Yes, which that was the beginning. That was their first hit and they had so much further to go and so
much further to evolve. But really, I mean, whichever their songs you pick, it's just an absolutely unique run.
Yeah, I mean, this song is just I mean, there's so many different levels and layers of the parts that make it so great and cool and eclectic. I mean there's the bongra type of beat that's on there, and there's someone speaking in Japanese and either end of the song, and there's like a German kind of new age artist sampled on it. You know, it's just like this very like worldly song. They're able to encompass all this and
still make it so distinctly Missy. It doesn't sound like Missy stepping into anything else, but what Missy does, like, it's it's so purely her.
Yes, And every time you think this song couldn't get any weirder, it gets weirder.
Yeah.
They just both keep throwing in like bizarre sonic things. I really like the part where like Missy Hawks Aligi. Yeah, and it's like who else, literally who else on the planet would try this and make it rock so hard and make it so undeniable.
Yeah.
And I think the thing that for both of them that works so well and what I think, of course, kind of keeps them sort of united and so with such great respect for each other, but also to have so much fun and so much freedom in.
The studio together.
It's just the fact they both love hip hop that makes you dance, like they really have such an appreciation for that above all else, Like it matters so much to them to make kind of this like really classic hip hop that's meant.
To be in tribute to the great bee.
Boys and hip hop dancers of the previous eras that inspired them so much as kids and inspired them so much as as artists. And you can feel that in everything that they have made together.
It's really true and that they came from. Talk about a place that you know, qualified as the edge of nowhere is considered by the music world in the nineteen nineties, but Portsmouth, Virginia, which even by Virginia standards is a
really isolated place. Yeah, and for them it was very much like the John Lennon Paul McCartney story, that they're from this town that is completely ignored by the rest of the world, not just the music world, a very isolated place that where they find each other and they have a unique sonic chemistry from the very beginning, and they have this formula and people around the world were like, what is the Liverpool sound? What is it about the
Mercy River. It's like, no, it wasn't Liverpool, It's just John and Paul found each other and created something, and very much that way with Portsmouth and the Missy Timberland sound, and considering how much great music each of them has made individually and in collaboration with other artists, but always something so beautiful about the way that they always saved their best tricks for each other.
Yeah, I mean they definitely they push each other so much further, and they always push whoever they're working with
so much further, which is so excellent to see. Like the way that, you know, thinking about their joint production and work on Alia's music, you know, the fact what they were able to kind of accomplish with Aliyah is so I mean that sort of trio together is so beautiful and wonderful and kind of you know, I wish for you, which we had gotten like a million more albums from them, because I think that was such a great kind of combination of sort of this R and
B budding princess and like these kind of these two absolutely avant garde producers and writers who were able to see so much of what put so much potential that she had.
Unbelievable that the collaboration between them was so unique and so perfect.
Yeah.
I remember when One in Million came out, and it's weird because people thought that the Alias story had already happened and was over. Everybody thought, well, it's great that Aliah is making another album and starting over, And it was so shocking for people to hear One in a Million. Nobody knew who Missing Timberland were. They were just the names and the credits, and it was such a striking and other worldly sound.
Yeah, and there are individual kind of you know, Timbaland working with Nelly Fortado.
And justin Timberlake and kind of what.
He was able to bring out of these two pop stars and in this moment. I mean, we've talked about Max Martin in a previous episode, and then this kind of like polar opposite type of production for pop music comes up and kind of like challenges but also pushes
a lot of that conversation forward. And thinking about just kind of this like very very futuristic R and B and kind of dance music and kind of spacey kind of beats and melodies that he brought to both those artists who were doing vastly different things prior to working
with him, is like pretty extraordinary. What he did, like with all those albums, like thinking specifically with like Loose Otherhado and feature Sex Love Sounds with Justin even though of course he worked on Unjustified a bit too, but kind of the.
Further they pushed was great.
And of course with get Your Freak On of that made already the two thousand and four list again a song that people already just upon its release knew it was great and ahead of the time, ahead of its time, and you know, just kind of already a brilliant enough song to even crack the list within gear or two of it coming.
Out and being on there. Yes, what do you think it was?
About Get Your Freak On to immediately make the list and then also jump up so high into the.
Top ten the way it did on the newest version.
I think it's come to stand for all the brilliant stuff that they've done. Honestly, it's weird that in a pull like this there's always going to be vote splitting for somebody like Missy, who has so many songs, the proportion of songs that are classics, like, it's weird that there's not a lot of mid Missy songs. Yeah, and especially when Get Your Freak one came out, people were used to the idea that, Okay, it's summer, so that means Missy's going to have a new record and it's
going to be the song of the summer. Yeah, because that was the fourth summer in a row, when people were just used to that. People just assumed that was going to happen at that point. It's really weird to even try to imagine what summers and pop music were like before Missy and Timberland started making records. Because super Dup a Fly was definitely Okay, this is not just the song of the summer, this is how a summer
actually sounds. And this is how it's always going to be from now on, and it's wild that forget your freak on. That was one where people said, Okay, it's going to happen. Let's see what they have this year and get your freak on. Such a even by Missy's previous standards, such an outlandish, outrageous, almost daring you to say, Okay, you're going a little far this time. We really don't need all this stuff in one song. And it's so excessive,
but it doesn't feel excessive. It's got a real minimal aspect with just you know, that throb all the way through, the bongera sound that it uses, which was so innovative. This is before it really took off in two thousandspop.
But that Punjabi sound where there's the tombe hook that and then the tabla rhythm and that for the most part, those are the instruments you hear, and there's all these crazy ideas and tricks and effects that they throw on top of it, but that is the pulse of the song all the way through, and so it feels really minimal yet super expansive.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the way that Missy and Tim in particular very much like loop their beats and samples into things. Is like it really gets under your skin in the best way possible, Like it's in such like specific and get your freak on thinking about just like the way that they do the reverse part and work it, which was my vote actually for the list I had work on my ballot. You know, it's just kind of is like that super addictive, kind of
perfect dancy thing that they really accomplish in it. That's like so just like so far superior and so far advanced, and what they did with that in particular.
Yeah, I remember when We Get Your preak On came out in very early summer two thousand and one, and I was writing about it in a Rolling Stone, and I was bluntly saying, like, what did we do for fun in the summer before these two came along? And it's really wild the rain super Dupa Fly. That's a huge
sentimental fave for me. We can argue all day about what their absolute peak moment of genius and inventiveness is, but I was in Virginia at that time, and it was wild that everybody I interviewed for the next few years as soon as like I mentioned that I was from Virginia. All they wanted to talk about was Missy and Timbaland. I remember I was interviewing Massive Attack around the time that their mezzanine cowp album came out. They're classic from early ninety eight, and the guy's in Massive
Attack very wary with journalists, always very guarded. When I mentioned that I was from Virginia, they had all these questions, and they were asking me things like what did people eat there, and like what's the weather? Like we had all these specific questions because they were so obsessed with the idea. Everybody around the world was obsessed with Portsmouth, Virginia. Yeah, and it was really kind of incredible to have the two most visionary artists in pop music come from the
same town. They find each other, and they create the sound that completely radicalizes pop music.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's crazy how much you can make a case for even I mean not even just for the three messy songs that end up making the list, but for really any Missy Sinkhole that like even from even from so Addictive. I'm like one minute mat it's such like a perfect song too, like such a great just like again, like very weird kind of like mid tempo rap song from them, Like it's just really great.
I love that song so much.
I'm like, you can make a case for almost any Missy Missy tim collaboration to kind of to be in the top ten of this type of list, or to even make the list at all. But I feel like any of those three could have very much made the top ten.
Of this list absolutely well. And you mentioned that Work it is.
Your favorite, Yeah, I love Work.
I think it has some of my favorite Missy lines on there. I mean, like the halle Berry poster line is one that always comes to mind, the reverse part. I mean, I think it's just like some of her best lyricism in it, Like she always has such a great flow, and she always has such a good, great way of playing with words and sounds and like just like saying kind of like kind of witty and like kind of.
Ridiculous things and songs.
I feel like Work it is just like some of her greatest bars that she's ever had. And I love that so much of the most memorable lines.
Is under construction. Your favorite Missy album?
Honestly, No, I think it's probably it's probably stupid super Fly. I think it's that one because I love socket to me so much, and I do, I really do love The Rain, And there's just like so much like young hungriness in it that I or in that album that I really love.
Yeah, Yeah, and the Rain. It's it's a song that you know, we've all heard a million times and it's still so shocking. There's so much open space in it, the way you hear that swamp kind of sound, you hear frogs and crickets. It's funny because I think of Under Construction as her greatest full on album. Yeah, and yet super Dupi Flies probably the one. It's one of the albums I've listened to most in my life in
terms of sheer quantity of listens. It's one that I've just listened to front to back, over and over and over again. I never hear it without being shocked and surprised by stuff in it. Yeah, but Get your Freak On is a song like that that you can hear it thousands of times over the years and you still wonder, how did this even happen?
How does one even get here?
You know, like creatively, and it's perfect, you know, it's like no one else can can do that and kind of set off set a new bar of like what pop music can be, what hip hop music can be.
It's funny. It's something that's such a weird. Factor of where they came from, when they can came from, is that hip hop was so focused on two cities all through the nineties. There was New York and LA and there was a real resistance, especially in New York but also in LA to hip hop from anywhere else. And so even like Outcast with songs like Elevator and everything, they couldn't get any airplay in New York because that was seen as a niche. You know, Southern stuff was
seen as a niche. So for Missy and Tim to come out of a place that, even within the South is a really isolated and overlooked place with a sound that was so universal and almost anybody who heard it got their minds blown. It really I think of as that's what killed off the whole regional thing, the regional biases that kept artists from Atlanta and Houston and other places from being heard on that same universal level. And it's really weird how much it sort of opened the
frontiers for pop music all over the board. It's a all that whenever Missy goes back and makes new music, it's always still brilliant. It's funny that she's never repeated her old formulas, even when people would love that. Yeah, you know, when she goes back to the studio, it's not to do better versions of things she's done before or different versions of things she's done before. So it's well, even like the last ten years of being a Missy fan have been such a trip.
Yeah, I mean, it feels also like everyone is very much thinking about the ways to show greater appreciation for the work that she's done, the work that her and Timberland have done together. And I mean I think more and more props will be given to Timberland as a producer in the future, I hope, because I think there's a lot of great pop production he's done that deserves a lot of And also like having a protege like
Danger who worked on Blackout. I mean, that's like an incredible thread that in pop music that we simply must get into. But like, but I think, you know, I think there's been a lot of you know, Missy finally getting a video Vanguard at the VMA's which was well overdue. I mean, she's someone who completely reinvented the wheel of what a music video canon should be. And again not afraid to get weird, not afraid to like, you know, let just like that, get your freak on flag flat.
You know, she's open to it.
Honestly, everything about Missy she's clearly someone who doesn't have any driving need to be a celebrity. She when she wants to work, it's always as an artist. But she doesn't do you know, she's not a red carpet, She's not sort of selling herself as a brand. She's got musical ideas, and when she has moved to make music, it's always unmistakably her. But it's wild that she just decided kind of early on that she didn't want to
be a mainstream celebrity type. She wanted to be just that weird artist at all times.
And you could feel so much kind of respect and awe that so many legends pay Missy. I mean, thinking about the way that people like Jant Jackson and Maria Carrie love Missy Elliott and love her music and constantly speak about her.
Just to pick an obvious rock example, but you can't imagine Radiohead's trajectory without the inspiration that they took from Missy and from Timberland, but that they go from you know, okay computer to kid a and amnesiac and hail to the thief, that whole evolution that they did. You know, like they'd be the first to say that Missy was
a huge inspiration to them. It's really wild to see what a worldwide for she was in terms of artists who didn't necessarily sound like her, but they just wanted to be as cool and as free and as radically open musically as she was.
Yeah, and we're all better for it.
And I feel we're going to keep hearing and seeing that even more now that we have a bunch of a bunch of kids who grew up on her making music now and pop and wrapping all over.
We're all still catching up with like where Missy was twenty twenty five years and up next we have Missy Elliott. Thank you so much. This is Rob from Rolling Stone and thanks for talking today.
Hi.
Rob.
It is such an honor and such a thrill to talk to. You're one of my all time heroes.
Oh, thank you, thank you, I thank you. I appreciate it.
How did you and Timberland have this kind of music chemistry? I mean, when did you two start making your music together.
Tim and I started making our music together when we were in high school and he went to another high school. I was at another high school and I met Magool, which was tim rapping partner, and Magool introduced me. He said, you know, I want you to meet my friend Tim. And Tim at the time was a DJ. He wasn't even a producer. We went to his house and he would just he had like a little keyboard and he would just play on it, like not even with producing
in mind. That's how you you know when God is in effect and the lot the stars aligned because his goal wasn't to be a producer at the time, and so he would get on your keyboard and the cassio used to have like a little sounds, animal sounds and stuff, and I just remember thinking like, Wow, he's making this
sound hot with this little toy keyboard. And so he would start he would do that, or because he was a DJ, he would have like instrumental records and he would play the instrumental and I just started like rapping and singing, and then I just started going to his house every other day, if not every day, until his dad was like, look, I got to drive this bus to work. His dad was like a long haul driver or something, and we would be in there making so
much noise to the wee hours of the morning. He would play instrumentals and then I would start writing, and I was just like, you need to produce, like you have something, and so he started doing beats. And you know, back then, we didn't have the technology that we have now. We used to record on a cassette tape and then put another cassette in and bounce the vocals. It was
some weird way we used to do it. So by the time you heard it, it sounded muffled, but you know, because you didn't bounce these vocals from tape to tape. So now it's it's sound muffled. But we would ride around in a car and be grooving like, oh my god. We thought it sound amazing, but it was a mess. But it was enough to get people attention. Though, I will say that amazing.
And yet what you were doing then people are still trying to catch up now, is what you were doing two years ago.
A lot of the tracks that we did were always say hypnotic when I think get your freak on just ad no, no, no, no, no, it is this hypnotic is like, yeah, those records were very special, and people always say we want to hear a record like and they'll name something from back then. But what you have to understand is that it was a time and a space that we were in and those moments I don't
feel like can be recreated. Like I said, they were my fun times and I don't have fun times anymore, but I wouldn't trade it for nothing in the world. Tim has always been a genius that he didn't even know.
Some people like.
To deal with people who go to school for this very technical.
About what they do.
But sometimes it's great to be raw because you're going off of this feels right instead of technically.
What is right.
And so it's funny to hear because we were, you know, one of those ones that were doing the I don't know how you can describe it, but it's like a
jump style rap the beats to where the catenance. You hadn't heard the catenance like Kaki kat Ki cat cat a kick do that multiple, you know, multiple hits back to back like that, you know or hearing sound effects and in the music that that hadn't been done and before we even allowed the world when we came out and I was just like, hey, Tim, like let's give them,
especially when we will work on the list stuff. I was like, let's give let's do give the world what we've been doing, because we've been doing this kind of music for years. It's just that the world hadn't heard it. And I'm just like, why sit on you know sounds where I watched him make a snare out of a ceiling fan and it's like, yo, let's give them this, it's gonna sound different, and it did.
They basically they had to beg you to make a Missy record.
Yes, yes, I totally just wanted to have a label. And that's how super Dupi fly cas because they said, okay, well you will give you a label if you give us one album.
And that went on and on and.
On amazing And you said you made this album in two weeks.
In two weeks? Yes, yeah, how.
How is that even possible?
The way man Tom was able to make an album in two weeks because, like I said, we before then we were used to doing five six records a day, Basically, we were doing what we were used to doing and we didn't know anything was to come of it from that.
We just okay, let's go in and knock this out.
So we were just doing what we do five six records and for you know it, it was, it was done and amount of time.
You made everybody else sound lazy. So thankful to you for making this great album, an album that really just reinvented music for the nineties. Nobody had heard anything like this before.
First of all, we didn't listen to the radio, and we didn't watch TV, and which played a big part of the sounds that we have because because we were TV watches and at the time, we didn't hear, and so by us not hearing, we didn't mimic what was out. So when we came we didn't know what was hot because we have been just listening to what we had been doing. And so that made us unafraid and unapologetic because we just didn't know that, okay, y'all doing something different.
Everybody else is doing this and you know, and making us fear that hey, this what we're doing might be too left. We didn't have that thought because we didn't hear nor see.
Well, it's like you moved everybody else to the left because you were so ahead of everybody else.
Oh man, yeah, we were on some futuristic stuff for sure, Yes, yes, yes, yes, amazing.
And all these years later it doesn't sound dated. So much stuff from the nineties now it sounds dated. It sounds good, but it sounds old, right.
Yeah. Man, It's like I said, it was special, and I think it was special because it was coming from a pure place. There was no expectation on that album.
It was very.
Natural because it was what we were accustomed to doing anyway, and because there wasn't an album before that that we were trying to compete with. It came from a pure place where it's innocent. It's like, hey, let's just do music.
We love music.
The second album is what became hard because the first album was so much of a big success. Then it was like, okay, what do we do now, Like how we're gonna beat out these records? But the first album, you're not comparing it to anything else.
It was like nobody heard anything like it before. I mean, I love that second album. I think that's a classic too.
The funny thing with the second album that was the hardest album for me, and I didn't I didn't appreciate it at first. Now when I look back, I'm like, this is probably one of the most artsy album because it was so theatrical, three violins and horns and all that stuff, totally different and on a kind of like dark edged kind of sound, which was totally different from the first album. But yeah, that second album was stressful because of that first album, No mind You, I was never supposed to.
Even get to a second out.
But hey, you know, I thank God. I most definitely don't want to be regretful, because I'm not. I am so thankful. I always believe that if it happens for you, that means it was supposed to. You know, God blessed me with the talent and that's why it continued to go on and on.
Well, I want to thank you for what you did with that talent and what you did with your genius, because that super Dupa Flyings Out an album that changed my life and it changed the way music has sounded ever since.
Thank you. I'm I'm always humbly grateful to you know, to hear that, because I know somebody asked me earlier this year. I can't remember they they I remember them saying like, when did you feel like you had made it or people had accepted your whole sound, look and video? And I said, to be honest, just now, wow taking a chance to well, I never.
Took the chance to think about it.
We never took the time to think, oh, they get it now, love me now like or any of those things. And now it's probably last year, and this year is now I feel like I made it.
Wow. Yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad you can hear the world like accepting that now. Because boy, even at the time when Super Dupe but Reply came out, people were starved for something like you and for a performer like you. I want to thank you for talking today about this album, but I gotta thank you just for making the album.
Thank you.
That was the completely amazing Missy Elliott being her genius self, We are very blessed to have her as part of our conversation about her genius work.
Thanks so much for listening to Rolling Stone's five hundred Greatest Songs. This podcast is brought to you by Rolling Stone and iHeartMedia. Written hosted by me, Britney Spanos and Rob Sheffield Executive produced by Jason Fine, Alex Dale and Christian Horde, and produced by Jesse Cannon, with music supervision by Eric Zeiler. Thanks for watching and thanks for listening.