Supa Dupa Fly

This maintains a smooth and laid back vibe the entire time. Beats are consistently solid and her vocals are the real highlight here. Some of these just kinda come and go for me and I almost expected more from such an acclaimed album. Favorites were Sock It To Me, The Rain, Pass Da Blunt, and Gettaway.

Tell me where the party at! Where the party at! Where the party at!

I liked the Missy Elliott record that I had yesterday, and I like this one too. There is some more tuneful r&b kinda stuff on it, but it doesn't slow it down. There's always a solid beat happening in the background; the repeating beat in "They Don't Wanna Fuck Wit Me," for example.

I particularly enjoyed "Pass the Blunt" with its amusing quotes of "Pass the Dutchie" by Musical Youth. Again I don't know how often I'll go back to this record, but I'm really enjoying it now - 4 stars

Cool debut

A bit easy to have in the background

Second half of the album definitely better than the first

This was great until I realised I was half way through and there was another 8 fucking songs

Another hip-hop album that feels kind of repetitive. Not very interesting for my taste. And definitely too long.

The beats in this album were okay and mostly listenable, but I still wasn't a fan of this. I know Missy went on to get big, and this is a good start (more r&b influences than I expected). This genre really isn't my thing, however.

For the first couple of tracks I was quite enjoying this one. It just couldn’t hold my attention in the long run. There was a stretch of 2-3 tracks, might’ve been more lol, where I basically tuned out completely and forgot I was listening to this. Overall definitely not the worst album ever, just not for me.

Pleasant but unremarkable.

bom album. infelizmente a produção do timbaland é boa demais né, vsf. dito isso, tem umas pegadas de popzinho nas letras/beats que são bem massa. um pouco longo, mas bem decente!!

Can’t lie. At an hour run time this was a tough listen. Very dated and also bloated with skits. Missy upped her game later, but this particular time effort is not worthy of this list.

Trash. 1/5

Mediocre at its best points, which are few. The R&B is awful and the hip-hop is nothing remarkable.

Overlong but lots of invention, particularly for the era

Pretty cool. Even the weaker songs on the album had me interested.

I guess my main complaint is that it is reliant on collabs but I guess it's just the done thing.

Why are so many hip-hop albums an hour or more long? I didn’t hear anywhere near enough variability to justify it. This very quickly turned into background music for me. A few songs caught my ear but not enough for me to ever come back to this one. Yo-Yo remains my female rapper of choice.

I’m at a 4.

Missy Elliott’s debut, and honestly? A pretty damn good debut. Timbaland’s production is really on point here, occasionally jumping ahead about 5 years in ways that feels really ahead of everyone else in 1997, most apparent on “Beep Me 911”, which is probably my favorite track here. Missy’s rap flow is just as good as it was on “Under Construction”, as is her singing voice, and she never puts in a bad performance.

Her lyricism hasn’t quite caught up though, and between that & the album losing a lot of its steam after “Izzy Izzy Ahh”, that’s where I’m stuck at a 4. This album does roll really nicely through its first 12 tracks, but once “Friendly Skies”, “Best Friends” & “Don’t Be Comin’” kinda hit a one-note topic for all of their runtimes, along with “Izzy Izzy Ahh” rehashing some of the “Me & Timbaland are REALLY good together!” topics that were already touched on earlier in the album, the cracks fully start to come in with “Why You Hurt Me”. I do think it’s a good track, but it’s an unbefitting track, and one that feels needlessly mean for an album centered around black female empowerment. I understand warning the ladies not to get too promiscuous to the point where it hurts your image, but affirming it by calling Loosie Booty an “ugly bitch”, along with the ‘chicken’ & ‘cotton-pickin’ lines feels like a direct antithesis to everything Missy has preached about on the album to that point, even if it’s just used as shock value for emphasis. It derails the whole thing to me.

“I’m Talkin’” is… well, it’s just “Izzy Izzy Ahh” again, really, and nowhere near as catchy. It’s the same thing that plagued Queen Latifah’s debut album where the entire track is just about herself, and we’ve kinda done that already. If you have to sing “I’m such a good rapper” in your chorus, it feels a little off, you know? “Gettaway” is fine, but none of the 3 verses really connect at all, making the track feel incomplete. Since it’s the closing track of the album, it’s a really weak way to finish off the whole thing, especially with Busta Rhymes talking about a “whole emotional rollercoaster” right after.

If this album had ended at “Izzy Izzy Ahh”, or even ended on “I’m Talkin’” with all the shoutouts at the end, I might be inclined to look past the slow stumble and bump this up to a 5, but I can’t do it in good faith. I think it’s still worth listening to, don’t get me wrong, but it is frustrating that this got hit with the CD bloat curse. It’s certainly influential, and deserves a lot of the awards it got for its individual tracks, but there’s a reason the album dwindles in plays on Spotify the longer it goes – the later tracks are just that much weaker. It’s still definitely a 4, entirely on the strength of the first 12 tracks, but that’s kinda where the ceiling sits. It just doesn’t finish satisfyingly as a full album, even when it gets 80% of the way there. I did enjoy it though, and I’ll definitely add a lot of these to my big playlist. Really fun stuff, for the most part. Just a 4 though.

not bad

Easy listening