‘This Is the Met Gala of Outer Space’: Missy Elliott’s Live Triumph in Brooklyn
Now that’s a legend. Missy Elliott blew the roof off Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Monday night in her historic Out of This World Tour — her first headlining tour ever. It was a celebration of her gold mind and its evolution through the years. But it was also a revelation of her impact and her one-of-a-kind artistic legacy, as her avant-funk hip-hop and R&B style has shaped the way pop music has sounded for the past three decades. Her last full album, The Cookbook, dropped nearly 20 years ago, yet she continues to sound futuristic. This is a tour that many Missy fans assumed would never happen — but she makes this show an epic, full-blast sensory overload.
If there was an emotional highlight, it might have been “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” her debut hit from 1997, when she blew out of Virginia to dazzle the planet. It’s one thing to hear an arena packed with party people, across a 40-year age range, scream “Beep beep, who got the keys to the Jeep?” But it was weirdly cathartic to hear everyone sing along with Missy’s late-night driving mantra — “Oh. Missy, try to maintain!” — complete with the windshield-wiper noises. Over the 27 years since she hit that road in “The Rain,” Missy has done a lot more than maintain — she’s thrived in her role as the genius who still defines the outer limits of pop music.
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The Out of This World show is designed as a flight in a space capsule. “Well, well — we have left Earth,” a narrator announces. “This is the Met Gala of outer space.” That sums it up. Missy’s set was an awesomely eye-popping parade of fashion coups and sci-fi visuals, banging through more than two dozen hits surrounded by a horde of acrobatic dancers. But even in her funkiest disguises, she’s got that mischievous grin that any music fan can recognize across an arena.
The show feels like a whole festival in one night, with opening sets from longtime friends and collaborators: her original artistic partner Timbaland, R&B queen Ciara, and hip-hop god Busta Rhymes. LL Cool J made a surprise appearance to do “Flava in Ya Ear” with Busta, while Brooklyn’s own Queen Bee, Lil Kim, came out to join Elliott for “The Jump Off.” But it was Missy’s night all the way — as Busta called her “the empress, the reason we’re all here.” The whole show is steeped in rap and soul history, evoking the 1990s/2000s anything-goes days. Everybody was feeling that vibe tonight. The guy outside the venue before the show, hustling vodka shots for $5 on the sidewalk with a boombox blasting Cassie’s “Me & U” — he totally got the mood right.
This is the first time she’s ever gone out there solo, with her own 30-city tour. But Missy’s always had her own unique flair for onstage spectacle. It was there at her first-ever live gig at Lilith Fair, in December 1997, where she took the stage in a flurry of white vinyl and feathers. (None of us who witnessed that moment will ever forget it.) It also makes sense that Missy wants to claim outer space as her turf, because she’s still light years ahead of the pack. Just last month, NASA’s Deep Space Network beamed “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” to Venus, 158 million miles away. (The only previous song transmitted into space? The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.”) Missy announced, “I chose Venus because it symbolizes strength, beauty, and empowerment, and I am so humbled to have the opportunity to share my art and my message with the universe!”
Timbalaland opened the night with a sprint through his hits, with the songs he’s produced for Jay-Z (“Big Pimpin’”), Beyoncé (“Drunk in Love”), Nelly Furtado (“Promiscuous”), Ginuwine (“Pony”), and inevitably, Aaliyah. Ciara did an opening set full of classics like “1, 2 Step,” “Goodies,” and her unstoppable peak, “Oh.” Nobody could have predicated that Ciara would get into a dance-off with an elephant, but it was that kind of night — she brought out the New York Liberty’s mascot Ellie, who threw it back for “Drop the Love.”
Busta Rhymes held court in his set, an unvanquished master of showmanship, taunting the crowd with his manic growl, with his trusty hype man Spliff Star. Halfway through “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” Busta called for the house lights to come on, to catch anyone sitting down (“I wanna see who’s being insubordinate!”) and added, “I didn’t say put your hands down, either!” He did a roll call of his kids, toasting them with hilarious proud-dad speeches. (“This is my oldest son! Back in 1996, he was the three-year-old in the ‘Woo Hah!!’ video!”) He brought out Rah Digga for “I Know What You Want” and sprayed the bubbly in “Pass the Courvoisier.”
But the surprise highlight: LL Cool J showed up for “Flava in Ya Ear,” which Busta said was their first time doing it together since 1995. He gave a sweet tribute to his childhood hero, talking about the days when he was learning to rap in the schoolyard. “I wasn’t even rhyming yet,” Busta testified. “I was 12 years old. But I went to the crib, took the B.A.D. album, and I wrote four verses.” That’s how the Leaders of the New School formed. “I put them Mama Said Knock You Out boxing gloves on and I took the prototype, because L is the prototype, the first MC to beat everybody’s ass in every battle he ever had. The first motherfucker to get on this Hercules shit!” Busta announced LL’s upcoming album The Force — and also led the crowd in a singalong of Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” just because he felt like it.
But the crowd was fiending for Missy all night. The announcer warned during take-off, “We are expecting some turbulence as we pass Planet Sock It 2 Me and Planet Lose Conrol.” Her all-killer no-filler show covered her whole history, paced like an expert DJ set. Many of her hits got just a verse — “Get Ur Freak On,” which came in at Number Eight on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, got barely a minute, then it was on to the next classic. “Where my day-one Missy Elliott fans at?” she yelled early on. “I’m talking about 1997!” That led into “Sock It 2 Me,” one of her foundational hits (and one of her best). There was a tap-dance interlude to the Gene Kelly standard “Singin’ in the Rain,” a solo spot for one of her dancers, which led into “The Rain.” It felt like a nonstop Missy bombardment.
“Every time I step on a stage, no matter where I’m at, I always want to take time out to say that I am grateful,” she declared. “I don’t take for granted because I’m Missy Elliott! I don’t care about the accolades or anything!” She soared above the crowd for “Gossip Folks,” on a floating stage that looked like a space chariot. “Pussycat” became a Sixties-style girl-group production, quizzically toning down the immortal hook “Pussy, don’t fail me now” to “Coochie, don’t fail me now.” During a costume change, her DJ did a mini set of hits Elliott wrote for other artists. (The room got real live to 702’s “Where My Girls At” — no surprise there.) Miss E launched into the bam-bam-boom home stretch in a hot-pink fluffy hat and a long glittery coat of old-school graffiti done up in psychedelic pastels, roaring through “Work It” and “Pass That Dutch,” leaving no corner of the room unflipped or unreversed.
But she had a surprise saved up for the end. “I couldn’t come all the way to Brooklyn and not do it the B-K way,” she announced. That’s when Lil Kim magically levitated to center stage, triggering pandemonium as she and Missy ripped into “The Jump Off,” all but drowned out by the crowd. Timbaland came out for his 1997 hit with Magoo, “Up Jumps Da Boogie” (R.I.P. Magoo, who died exactly a year ago, in August 2023). She dueted with Busta for “Touch It” and Ciara for the epic climax “Lose Control.” Everybody onstage bowed down to one another, but everybody was really there to bow to Missy. The crowd chanted a “10-9-8” goodbye countdown as the queen climbed back into her capsule and vanished.
Missy kept returning to the interstellar theme all night, asking, “Are y’all still out of this world?” But there’s always been that sense that Missy came from somewhere different. Portsmouth, Virginia, was off the hip-hop map, off the music-biz map, a place of total isolation. But that meant it was a place of freedom for two teenage weirdos named Missy and Tim to create their own sound and spin the world upside down. She was always ahead of her time with her festively inclusive spirit — in the regional wars of 1990s hip-hop, she was the artist nobody could deny. The entire night was a celebration of a visionary artist who has always been in a world of her own. But it was also a tribute to how deeply — and permanently — she has made the world a more Missy Elliott place.
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