Around 20 dancers in ruthlessly choreographed routines did the bulk of the visual work, making for a spectacle that was part Busby Berkeley, part “Star Wars” trilogy, rendered through an artificial intelligence reimagining of “Wild Style.”
And it was notably loud, too, meaning there was less pressure on Elliott’s rapping and singing. Those were just small parts of a bombastic, meticulously produced soundtrack to a novel visual fantasia. It was also a reminder that Elliott in her prime was less a pure vocal hero than a rhythmic genius, a technophilic visual wizard, an imagineer of futuristic Black pop.
She made an argument here that she was also building a tent — late in the night she was joined onstage by her longtime collaborator Timbaland and the R&B technician Ciara, the night’s first two openers, and also Lil’ Kim, a fellow female hip-hop hero of the ’90s. There was also Busta Rhymes, the main support act, who in his prime was hip-hop’s premier eccentric and a sometime Elliott collaborator. He seemed extremely at home amid the pandemonium — his visual accompaniment was as antic as Elliott’s — and he brought out LL Cool J for a rowdy and meaningful performance of their verses on the seminal remix of Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear.”
In Elliott’s music and her often flabbergasting, decades-ahead visual presentation, she laid out threads that would later be picked up on by Kanye West, M.I.A., Drake, Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott and many others. The scale of her impact — she was the first female rapper inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — belies the actual length of her commercial peak. Elliott’s time in the limelight was curiously short — her most meaningful hits appeared during a five-year stretch, from 1997 to 2002. And since then, Elliott has gone long periods without being much seen or heard from.
She appeared grateful for the opportunity to bask in the adoration from an audience that had waited decades to hail her. She returned briefly onstage after the house lights came up to soak it in without the barriers of costume and sound.
It was hard not to engage in a dash of sliding-doors speculation. Had a show like this gone on the road two decades ago, it would have instantly recalibrated what hip-hop extravaganzas could be in a live setting. It would have not only bolstered Elliott’s claim to the innovator throne, but possibly created a pathway for her career to develop even beyond the already substantive level of influence she achieved. Elliott peaked early, and then left the pieces behind for others to pick up and iterate on. Imagine instead Elliott cartoons, films, theme parks, energy drinks. Would we — even more than we currently do — simply live in a world of Elliott’s imagination?
Out of This World — the Missy Elliott Experience continues Friday at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, Ohio, and runs through Aug. 23.
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