WTF

And on this, the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice in the human gift that is Missy Elliot.

It is a scene that I have played out in my mind a lot. Missy Elliot’s squad sits down with her at a meeting. Someone asks, “So, Missy Elliot, how do you want to make your comeback?”

“First of all,” Missy Elliot says, spinning around in her giant, winged-back, crushed velvet rolling chair, “Don’t call it a comeback.”

Her squad nods in unison, apologizing furiously, writing in their notepads.

“And second of all,” Missy Elliot continues, “I want to become a trap disco ball. Obviously.”

A brave member of the squad speaks up: “Say no more.”

If you haven’t seen the video for “WTF” by now—Missy Elliot’s latest—you have done bad and you should feel bad. What are you doing? Look at yourself. Look at your decisions.

What is it that makes a woman return to a music industry that does not deserve her a decade after a thoroughly lit career? What is it about “WTF” that flung me face first into my blackness, despite the weird Pharrell puppet interlude? What is it about Missy’s work that shook my blackness in 2005 when I was, like, literally 10 years old? What is it about the tracksuits? All the tracksuits?

It’s not just about the outfits. It never is. “WTF,” like most of Missy Elliot’s discography, is about her fierce conviction in centering the sexuality of black women in her music. If “Formation” taught us anything, it is that the media loves to debate whether black women are really feminists, putting their beliefs and politics on trial in a way that simply does not happen for male artists. When not completely denouncing a woman’s ideas, the media suggests that politicized women are simply posing. But a political project like Missy’s does not happen by accident.

In “WTF” alone, almost all of Missy’s lines that aren’t just hyping herself and her music up are about her body and her pleasure. She remarks that her “body be thick like a biscuit,” showcasing her body in its entirety, an adorned, painted, holy thing, in the music video.

She goes on: “I’m a Big Mac make you wanna eat that,” and she is plucking the trope of the woman’s body as a meal out of man’s mouth. Missy Elliot is celebrating herself and her people, the song explicitly mentioning its intended audience of “the hood” and “girls.”

Missy Elliot’s super popular 2002 “Work It” discusses the same under-appreciated politics, approaching consent, communication of wants and preferences within sexual acts, and the politics of body hair and one’s choice about it perhaps even more brazenly than in her latest: “Not on the bed, lay me on your sofa / Phone before you come, I need to shave my chocha / You do or you don’t or you will or won’t you / Go downtown and eat it like a vulture.”

Missy Elliot’s is the kind of self-love and self-care black people don’t get to celebrate enough. She’s haughty, certain. She is always curves but never “All About That Bass,” never traipsing onto territory that isn’t hers, never proselytizing or pandering to men. It’s not about what men want her to be, it’s about what she is and how that sometimes has something to do with men, sure. It is hardly a reclaiming, because it was hers all along, but it is revolutionary. It isn’t “wrap yourself up in a blanket and drink tea because you have no real responsibilities” self-care, it’s “let’s not even talk about what’s holding you down because what’s holding you up is those heels” going-out-and-getting-what-is-yours-because-you-have-to self-care.

Folks dance differently when Missy Elliot comes on, like trying to rattle around something the music has shaken loose in them. The first comment, last time I checked, on the rapgenius.com lyrics page for “WTF” is an awestruck “missy still got it.” And she does. She knows that. She always has.

Madison E. Johnson ’18 is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.