“Work It” by Missy Elliott

Missy Elliott’s most successful single, bolstered by one of Timbaland’s most infectious beats.

Let’s start here: You’d be hard-pressed to find a more iconic hip-hop emcee-producer duo than Melissa Arnette “Missy” Elliott and Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley.

The latter was already a household name when he produced 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly for Missy, with hits like Ginuwine’s “Pony” and Aaliyah’s “One in a Million” under his belt. From then on, the pair crafted chart-toppers by breaking established sonic rules. Their records, like “Get Ur Freak On” and “Pass That Dutch,” folded elements of electro, avant-funk, and futurist R&B into the hip-hop mainstream. As Missy described in 2022, “We were open to showing what the FUTURE of music could sound like in our minds.”

You can hear that experimentation in Timbaland’s execution. The beat takes elements of well-known 80s rap, such as a sample of Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper,” and pushes it into the unknown, sounding so ahead of its time it’s almost alien-like. The stuttering synths, a slowed-down Blondie sample, and the whirring siren-esque stabs provide Missy with the infectious backdrop over which she does her best work. These may not be Nobel-worthy rhymes, but it doesn’t matter. How many Gen Xers and millennials have heard this song and resisted rapping along to lines like, “Keep your eyes on my bum-bump-bum-bump-bump/And think you can handle this badonk-a-donk-donk?” Very, very few.

“Work It” eventually became Missy Elliott’s most successful single, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in November 2002, kept out of the top spot by one Marshall Mathers and “Lose Yourself.” I’d argue it’s also the most Missy song ever made, arguably one of the primary reasons mainstream music publications have consistently ranked it as one of, if not her best, track ever.

Hats off to one of the best emcees ever. 🫡