Credit: Alamy

Missy Elliott is one of the most successful female rappers of all time, with a long career marked by glitzy award wins and highly successful record sales. But things weren’t always so good for her, and she remembers a moment when everything started to change for her.

Missy started out in the music business in the late ’80s as a member of the R&B group Sista, before she started working on other people’s records as a songwriter, producer, and performer. It was only with the release of her debut album Supa Dupa Fly in 1997 that she became known as a solo artist.

The album, which received a lot of positive feedback from critics, was a commercial success. Executively produced by Missy herself and her long-time collaborator Timbaland, Supa Dupa Fly topped the R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart in America and reached number three on the pop charts. It eventually went on to sell 1.2 million copies in the country and it is now considered to be a defining album of the era.

The record’s success was at least partly propelled by its lead single, ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).’ Sampling Ann Peebles’ classic 1973 track ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain,’ Missy’s song became a major hit, never topping the charts but nonetheless becoming a classic in its own right.

The song’s music video helped to drive its popularity. Directed by Hype Williams, it featured Missy wearing a leather blow-up suit that ultimately became iconic. The music video was nominated for Best Rap Video at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, and, while it didn’t win, it is now considered to be a defining promo from that late ’90s period.

Missy credits the success of ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),’ and the album that it represented, with the wider success of her career that followed. In 2023 she took to social media to celebrate the song’s release, particularly highlighting how the video changed her life and career for the better.

“My beats, and style and my physical appearance,” she posted on X. “The chubby gal was not like anyone else out. I was animated and doing sound effects way back then, which we now call them ad-libs. Look at this video. This came out 26 years ago, and it is still so far ahead. This is facts.”

In another tweet, she specifically emphasised that ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ changed “the game.”

This song, its video, and the album it featured on turned Missy Elliott into an icon, and it laid the foundations for all of her successes that were still to come. She would go on to win four Grammys over the years, while her record sales now number in the tens of millions. She is also known as a pivotal star of pioneering music videos. All of it started with that debut single of hers.