#93, “Get Ur Freak On,” Missy Elliott (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #93, “Get Ur Freak On,” Missy Elliott (2001)

The first words Missy Elliott says on “Get Ur Freak On” are “give me some new shit,” and boy, did she. The song was released twenty-three years ago, and at the time, it felt like a missive from the future, like Missy (and Timbaland, her longtime producing partner, who claims the credit on this one) had glimpsed something the rest of us would be ready for decades down the line.

The song is built around a very simple little riff, just six notes repeated over and over again, sometimes in different keys, along with a synth bass part that drops in and out almost at random. The drum track, for big stretches of the song, is almost inaudible, sounds more like footsteps in the distance than a beat, except in the moments when the drum is the key to the whole thing, big and bassy, but also sounding more like a drum collapsing into itself than one being hit. It’s a club banger without a kick drum. Occasionally there are sci-fi foley noises sneaking into the mix—midway through the first chorus, there’s a sound that I can only describe as, like… a laser gun? And Missy rides the beat in a way that no other rapper would, interrupting her own flow with blocks of silence that sound dissonant and uncomfortable and also perfect, this staccato rapping that makes the chorus—which is just the words “get ur freak on” repeated over and over more times than anyone would think would sound good, but which somehow does. (Don’t try this one at karaoke unless you can commit.)

But also: “Get Ur Freak On” is not from the future. It’s a song that was released decades ago, and while it doesn’t sound dated, no one else really picked up what Missy was putting down here. “Get Ur Freak On” sounds like an artifact from an alternate history, a point at which history split and we ended up in the timeline where everyone decided to rip off Kanye instead of Missy, like how we’re in the future where we went with jet planes instead of zeppelins. That’s not to say that Missy didn’t have an impact—Lil Jon made a nice career for himself producing songs like “Yeah” and “Get Low,” that sand the edges off what Missy does here a bit—but ultimately, “Get Ur Freak On” is more of an outlier than a standard bearer.

That’s okay, because as an outlier, it stands alone. Maybe that’s for the best. An iconoclast is more compelling than an influencer, and there are definitely not two just like Missy Elliott. But the thing that gets me is that “Get Ur Freak On” really did seem to point the way toward something that we might have seen. The first and last words of the song are in Japanese, that six-note riff that runs through the song comes from a bhangra record from 1995, and is played on a tumbi. It’s a song from the U.S., pulling in, in a more active way than most, sounds and voices from around the world. The future of “Get Ur Freak On” is more well-traveled than the one we got, in a new American language that’s a little bit more global. Listening to it now, it’s hard not to think that Missy’s timeline is probably a more dynamic, more interesting, more vibrant one. I can’t help but think that maybe someone stole the future.