“I’ve been a superstar since Daddy Kane was raw / I’m live on stage, c’mon, give me some applause,” Missy Elliott raps on her 2002 single “Bomb Intro / Pass That Dutch,” delivered with a steamrolling fervor. only then does she take a beat to accept her flowers in a moment of breath-catching respite: “Oh thank you, thank you, you all are so wonderful!”
There isn’t a better summation of Elliott, who has consistently (and increasingly) expressed gratitude for, and perceived incredulity of, the adulation she receives the further she stretches away from her six studio albums. The last of them, 2005’s “The Cookbook,” was an exclamation point on a career that defied any and all conventions of hip-hop. Sometimes a singer, sometimes a rapper, Elliott has transmuted what we’d come to know about popular music — how it sounds, looks or feels — and defied the odds, whatever those were, by defining an aesthetic that spoke to what she had to say and express, no matter how weird it may have seemed.
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All of it crystallized at Elliott’s first headlining trek — yes, her first, if you can believe it — at Crypto Arena for the first of two Los Angeles nights on her Out of This World tour. Elliott has long been celebrated as an outlier in hip-hop and pop, the two genres she’s played a crucial role in fusing, and it worked to her advantage last night with a ceaseless exploration of her catalog. Armed with a team of backup dancers, Elliott traipsed from hit to hit, moment to moment, with shooting flames, verses from a spate of songs, and an enveloping stage production that never lost its steam, even when she took a minute here or there to slip into an outfit more eccentric than the next.
The Out of This World tour could easily be considered a nostalgia play on paper, with Elliott’s longtime collaborators Timbaland, Ciara and Busta Rhymes coming along as opening acts. But each artist on the trek has brought different flavors to their respective catalogs, offering something ever-so-slightly off or even outré to the genres in which they’ve long been categorized. At the stop in Los Angeles, Elliott felt like the center of gravity for those artists — she’s worked extensively with all of them, pushing them outside of their comfort zones (and vice versa) into places that have resonated with audiences across generations.
With that, Elliott toured her discography with precision and ease. She covered most of the biggest musical moments in her career, from the big guns (“The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” “Work It”) to lesser-known bright spots (“Lick Shots,” “We Run This”). Every performance was plotted and exact, from the billowing cape that floated behind her on “She’s a Bitch” to the two Motown-evoking backup singers flanking her on “Pussycat.”
Credit is due to the production for Elliott’s set, which did some of the lifting. It was a marvel to witness. As she ran through “Sock It 2 Me,” a gigantic vision of Elliott in a Mega Man outfit — the same she wore in the Hype Williams-directed video for it — cruised through space behind her, and she floated above the crowd on a podium for “Gossip Folks.” In person, she’s diminutive and small, but her personality is outsized and her music commutes to the rafters. The show may be a sum of its parts, but Elliott is no doubt the nucleus.
“I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years,” she said in a brief moment addressing the crowd. “If you came here tonight, you think out of the box and you’re special.” But she may as well have been talking about herself, and the effect she has on those around her. Even after all these years, nearly 20 since her last album, she manages to thrill and entertain as if she’s been touring for decades. The fact that she parlayed her love of professional dancers into assembling a top-shelf team of pliable young upstarts only brought her vision more into focus, sanding down any rough edges that may have emerged in the process.
Elsewhere, each opening act helped paint Elliott’s grand vision in the hours leading up to her performance. Timbaland ran through his countless hits, while Rhymes and his perennial hype man Spliff Star showered the audience with a champagne spray to the tune of “Pass the Courvoisier.” Ciara was all sweat and allure, with a dance crew in tow to enliven “Body Party,” “Goodies” and “1, 2 Step.”
And all of them came out at the end to perform a respective collaboration with Elliott: with Timbaland for “Up Jumps da Boogie,” with Rhymes for “Touch It,” with Ciara for “Lose Control.” Elliott’s influence may be understated, at least regarding how she’s mentioned in the hip-hop firmament, but her impact is impossible to deny when it’s tangibly in front of you. Out of This World is a grand tour of excellence, one that not only plays to but accentuates her strengths. If this is the first tour for Elliott, at 53 years old, it’s impossible to imagine where it could take her.
