Missy Elliott raps with DIVA

It's been raining cats and dogs for three days now, but sitting in a hotel room in Jamaica with Missy Elliott, you don't care any more. The 33-year-old, famous for her weird, filthy, dark, intense, funny tunes such as Get Ur Freak On, is here in Montego Bay to promote her sixth album, The Cookbook, and it's the 'funny' bit of the equation that's getting the better of her.

She has a warm, mellifluous chuckle, and her black eyes sparkle as she tells of her life as 'class clown' in high school back in her hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia.

'I gotta be jokin', I gotta be playin', I gotta be in the hallways - yes.' Her Southern twang means that 'yes' comes out as 'yey-ass'. 'If I ask to go to the restroom, I end up at the cafeteria in someone else's lunch period. I've done stuff like spit in my English teacher's coffee.'

She chuckles and her face glows as she recalls the day in high school when she recited a piece of poetry in a rap style. 'I got somebody to come up and start beat boxing, and everybody was like, "Missy rapped The Old Raven!" It was a big deal.'

You sense that she's still as drawn to taboo things as she was as a child, and it is this thirst for new knowledge that's been instrumental in elevating her to her current position of hip-hop queen.

Her first public performances came when she was seven and she got up on the trash cans in front of her house to 'sing these made-up records about roaches and crickets and people would drive past and honk their horns'. When not singing on trashcans, she'd write letters to Janet and Michael Jackson, hoping they'd turn up at her house in a limo to rescue her.

They never did, but she got a break anyway in 1989, when she had the balls to do an impromptu backstage performance in front of famous producer Devante Swing when he came to Virginia with swing beat boyband Jodeci. Missy and her musical partner, Timberland, ended up producing records for the likes of Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson and Aaliyah. Then, in 1997, she brought out her 1.5million-selling debut album, Supa Dupa Fly. It was an unexpected hit at a time when music industry bosses believed being a Spice Girl was about as 'out there' as female musicians could commercially afford to go.

While the childhood was undoubtedly colourful, it was also hellish. Missy was sexually abused when she was 16-years-old and was subjected to regular intervals of violence. Interestingly, she's keener to talk about her mother's battering - and how her mother's decision to eventually leave her father made Missy a stronger person - than she is about the sexual abuse.

She admits that it's weird how she's religious, yet she writes about sex all the time. 'Twisted' is the word she uses. 'I'm not supposed to be talking about this, but every time I write, this is what comes to mind. I kind of question, you know, from being a child, being molested, and I don't know if that - and I've talked to my friends about it - if that plays a part in it. I mean, I really don't know.'

She turns her obsession into a positive thing, though, and says sex is a subject that helps her get through writer's block. The notorious song Toyz was the result of a conversation with a stylist friend.

'My friend was doing somebody's video, and they wanted a bunch of girls in skimpy clothes, so she went to this sex shop, and she was like, "You're not gonna believe the stuff that's in this place!"'

She goes into her second level of Missy-laugh - up a gear from the warm, mellifluous giggle into a kind of guttural staccato, like the naughty cartoon dog from Dastardly and Mutley.

'One of my other friends was telling me he got some video tapes from out the sex store, and he stumbled across a snuff tape, where they were doin' the craziest things, like using the bathroom on each other - oh, my God!'

She admits that she delights in being a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles: 'I sit around with friends and listen to people's conversations just to get song ideas, and I'm like, "Wow, this is what goes on in people houses when the doors are closed!" Like, "If your co-worker knew that you thought like this", so I guess I'm that voice.'

And what of her own dark secrets? When I ask her what she makes of the rumours that she's a lesbian, she doesn't flinch. She keeps eye contact and only slightly avoids the question by talking again about that troubled childhood - she's currently working with Paramount to direct a story of her difficult youth - 'I think people are sometimes intimidated when you're strong like that. And for me, I just feel like, I had a mother that was a single parent. At first she was very dependent on my father - I mean very. Everything was like, "I can't do this without him", and when we left him, she became very strong. I picked up so much of her ways. When people see how strong I am, and there's not a man around, it's like, "Ok, what's she doin'?" But I'm never bothered by it. It's just like, I'm gonna still be strong.'

And if you had a relationship with a woman would you admit to it? 'Yeah. I feel like, love is love. When you're growing up, everybody's always, "You not supposed to do this, you not supposed to do that", but I feel like no sin is greater than another, and if you say God is love, then that's what it is. If I was in love, then I'd just have to be like, "Hey, world".'

I mean I would never say what I would never do. When I was 15 I would have said I would have never tried weed so you know…never say never'.

But in the here and now, the press have picked up on what they deem as clues to her Sapphic potential. There are the clichéd tomboy pointers: the ownership of 3000 pairs of sneakers, her addiction to bubble gum (an opened pack of water melon Bubblicious sits on the hotel table), and having a bed shaped like a car in her Miami home. Missy is never seen with any obvious boyfriends, and seems to prefer the company of women. She's best friends with Lil' Kim, for instance, and advised her to wear the famous one-breast dress that she donned one scandalous night on the red carpet. Missy apparently told Lil' Kim that she shouldn't be afraid to show off such great breasts.

In a new musical talent show that she fronts, called The Road To Stardom and shown in the UK on Trouble, she's flanked constantly by three hot dancer chicks in leather boots, and Jessica, the winner, now signed to Missy's label along with a string of other female artists such as the boyish, tuff-looking Tweet, That word is never used, of course.
Jessica's a black girl with a beautiful voice from an impoverished background in Chicago. She goes around in wife-beaters and cut-offs for the duration of the three days of this publicity tour in Jamaica. Missy says she's here 'to learn the ropes' about the music industry.

'I had a lot of people email hits with like, 'We love Jessica', and that helped me understand that there're a lot of people out there that just won't judge your appearance.'

Her liberal attitudes were put to the test the night of the MTV Awards when Madonna famously kissed Britney Spears on stage. It was, apparently, all a set-up. 'Madonna's very serious about her stage performance. Even at rehearsal, it's like full out. So, each time it was the kiss - and we probably did that rehearsal 15 or 20 times. All I was thinking was, "Oh, my God, my Momma's gonna watch this, and all the church people gonna call her up".'

She brings up her Momma a lot. She, Patricia, deals with her finances and keeps Missy on her toes. 'I just bought a Yorkie dog the other night. And I'm nervous, like, "Ma". She's like, "Yes?" I'm like, "Guess what, I just bought a Yorkie, and it was 36 hundred". She's like, "Oh, my God, what are you doing!"'

She reflects that money, or 'paper' as she calls it, is 'a funny thing', although she's managed to make a massive joke out of it, picking up the multimillion dollar Gap campaign and now creating her own brand of Fly-Girl sportswear in conjunction with Adidas, called Respect Me.

The best thing about paper, says Missy, is that it conveys the illusion of confidence, which, she points out, has never come naturally to her. 'When you walk into a room, you can't walk in there seeming weak, even if you feel it inside. You have to display that you're a very strong person, and then watch how people around you begin to believe that you're strong.'

Something that does come naturally to her is honesty. The air of absolute authenticity she exudes has been the lure for fans and advertising people alike since she hit the big time as an unashamed size 22, prancing around in an inflatable PVC cat suit in the video for The Rain. She didn't lose five stone through vanity, but through lust for life - doctors told her she'd die of high blood pressure if she didn't.

When, the night before this interview, Missy Elliot bounces exuberantly - all five-foot-two of her - into a room of the Ritz Carlton, where selected international journalists have been listening to a sneak preview of the new album, she apologises with child-like glee for her woozy speech, but she's been trying 'one of those Jamaican Brownies!' It's now eleven in the morning, and she's drinking an orange Lose Control cocktail- named after one of the new songs on the album. The Cookbook is inspired by the innocent days of old-school hip-hop and filled with tunes which jump seamlessly from the romantic to the horny to the plain-weird horny. Lose Control, for instance, is a fabulous concoction that sounds as if instrumentals are being performed by psychotic mice.

Her liveliness is always tempered with thoughtfulness, and this is reflected in the hand-written letter she gives all of us when we've listened to the album preview. In the high-spirited letter, penned in black biro and dotted with random capital letters and haphazard grammar, she writes that Jamaica is special for her because she was here when she heard of Aaliyah's death. Missy credits the singer, who would have been bigger than Beyoncé had she been alive today, on all her albums.

She finishes the letter with characteristically open sentiments: 'Sorry it's raining. If I could do magic, I'd clap and the sun would come out. But I can only do music, so I guess we'll have to party in the rain, people! Love, Missy Elliott.'

This interview first appeared in  DIVA magazine, August 2005.