Credit: Alamy

Missy Elliott wouldn’t be the trailblazing rapper she is today without being exposed to a variety of different artists during her youth. Thanks to her mother and father, she listened to a combination of R&B and gospel music, laying down the foundation for her to go on to achieve platinum albums and chart-topping songs.

The Virginia native appeared on legendary producer Rick Rubin’s Broken Record podcast in 2022, during which she opened up about the music she listened to as a young girl. “My father would play Marvin Gaye, Prince, Michael [Jackson], then go to Men at Work,” she said. “I remember ‘Whip It’ (by Devo), Grace Jones, and all that stuff. It was R&B on one side and gospel on the other side.”

Missy Elliott revealed she learned lyrical content, love, heartache and social commentary from her father’s R&B influence, while picking up harmony by listening to her mother’s gospel music. “I truly had the best of both worlds listening to both,” she said. “I would stand in the mirror and pretend that I was at an award show with Janet and Michael, thanking Madonna for letting me write her new song.”

Despite fond memories of music during her younger days, Missy Elliott experienced a tough childhood. During her episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, she opened up about being sexually abused by her 16-year-old cousin when she was just eight years old.

“Each day he wanted me to come to the house after school,” she said. “It became sexual, which, for me at eight years old, I had no clue what that was, but I knew something was wrong. Being molested… it don’t disappear. You remember it as if it was yesterday.” She also witnessed her mother being abused by her father; when she was 14, she saw him pull out a loaded pistol. “Missy saw that the fight was just beyond measures,” her mother said. “My husband said, ‘This is it, I’m gonna kill you. It’s over!’ I was so tired of being beaten over and over I just said, ‘Fine, just do it.’”

Missy added, “He pulled the gun out in front of me. I was screaming, ‘Daddy, please don’t kill my mother!’” Her uncle, who was living next door at the time, intervened and stopped the incident, which she described as the “scariest time” in her life.

Her parents, who came from a place like Virginia with a rich musical history, undoubtedly helped shape Missy Elliott, with everyone from Pharrell and Timbaland to D’Angelo and Ella Fitzgerald representing the state. “When you talk about game-changing states, Virginia has to be on the top of that list,” she told Essence. “We have so much talent that have gone on to become successful. It’s not just Missy, Timbaland and Pharrell, there’s Pusha T, and so many others.”

She continued, “We always say there’s something in the water; that’s our big saying. To this day I haven’t figured out what that ‘thing’ is. For me, I felt like we were in that middle space. A lot of people don’t know that Virginia is actually a Southern state. You had New York, you had the Midwest, and the West coast, and we were kind of in a place where we would get things a bit late, so we just started creating our own sound.”

It’s easy to forget just how impactful Missy Elliot was on the explosion of hip-hop, but it is also easy to forget how hip-hop was wildly influenced by the music that came before. Elliott is proof that the genre is as rich and textured as any other.