Hit Em Wit The Hee - Missy Elliott made her highly anticipated return to the music scene with her new video for her single “WTF (Where They From)” last week. She recently chatted with i-D magazine about her hiatus, saying “I needed a break,” and also talks the pressure surrounding her return.. plus more.
Read highlights from her interview below..
On the pressure surrounding her return:
Oh the pressure was definitely more! When me and Tim put out those records [9th Inning and Triple Threat], you know, we just put them out, that’s why we never put a video out. But this time the pressure was really on because I knew I had shot a video so now it wasn’t just about, ‘Are they gonna like the record’. I knew that people know me for my videos and so the expectation from those who grew up on my music was high. My goodness. I swear to God, I felt like I sweated out my tracks the night before the video dropped! My weave was messed up waiting for this video to come out!
On how she feels about the reactions to “WTF” so far:
I’m so humbly grateful. First of all, the night before it came out, I felt like a child waiting for Santa Claus to come down the chimney. When I tell you I was having anxiety and everything (laughs). I just hoped everyone liked the video once it came out. Firstly, I thank god and I thank Pharrell, and Dave Meyers and Hi-Hat, without them it couldn’t have been possible.
On if the song is part of a bigger project:
Well, Pharrell hit me. He had hit me before the Superbowl, we had performed at the BET awards [in 2014], and after the Superbowl, he hit me up like ‘Yo, what are you doing?’ I was basically in the house cleaning! I had gone back to my normal life. I was in the house vacumming, walking my dogs – after the Superbowl, I’m just acting normal. He said ‘I’m not trying to push you, but people miss you. Do you see what happened out there? Have you seen the charts’? I think I was still in shock. It still hadn’t registered. He was like ‘I want to get in the studio with you.’ Who turns down Pharrell? He flew me to LA and he put me up and we got in the studio and he said ‘Yo! I got this crazy beat’. You know, Pharrell, he’s very zen, very yoga, he’s such a sweetheart. But this time, he was straight from the hood, like ‘Yo, I got this crazy record for you, I already wrote my rap, I gotta get your bars now’. So he played it and once he played it, it was like ‘Oh my goodness’ He said ‘I know you gon’ kill it’. I said, ‘Well, let me take it home and live with it’. When something is so hot, I don’t want to just jump on it right away, I want to take it home and make sure I give it my best shot. He said ‘Listen, just remember who you are. You’ve always been fun and animated and you have always made people want to dance. Look in the mirror so you can know who you are. It’s time. It’s your time.’ That’s how it happened (laughs). Once we did the record, I knew it was time to shoot a video. The puppet idea I had seen somebody do on the street. I held onto that idea for five years because I didn’t have a record that matched that idea. So I showed Pharrell the clip I had, and he said ‘You know you got to do a video for this’. Believe it or not, we have been making this video since March. The puppets themselves took two and a half, to three months to make. It was very detailed, we had people from StarTrak working on this video, so it was a lot.
On the video’s concept:
It started with the puppets. The facepaint came from my make-up artist. The box scene came from Dave and the way that facepaint turns around is another Dave creation. We collectively knew it had to have some kind of iconic outfit. We all came up with the glass outfit, which was the hardest thing to wear because it was really cut up glass so I was bleeding and everything! (laughs) I was so agitated but I had to get it done.
Additionally, Missy talks going through a period in which she lost confidence in herself: “I was doing Missy and also making sure I was giving all of these other artists a different sound too,” she says. “That was hard for me.” And, she also gives her thoughts on the music industry.
