Missy Elliott
The Cookbook
Goldmind/Atlantic Records
By now, hip-hop superstar Missy Elliott’s hit-making formula should be considered part of the public domain. Depending on your ability to herd cats, it’s simple: Work with cutting-edge rap and R&B producers and duet with every famous person you know.
Maybe that’s why Miss Elliott titled her new album “The Cookbook”: The ingredients and recipes are here for any and all to see.
Miss Elliott, also known in these parts as “the Chef,” puts it this way: “Add a pinch of Fantasia mixed with a Grand-sized Peba, then sprinkle one Scoop of Fatman throughout to add flavor.”
That’s “Cookbook”-ese for the fact that Miss Elliott has corralled the likes of “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino, Nation of Islam rapper Grand Peba and New York rapper-producer Fatman Scoop on the same LP.
At 17 tracks, “Cookbook” is a fattening, chain-restaurant-sized platter that tastes good going down but may induce a stomachache on the ride home.
Its sense of style is dizzying, as Miss Elliott and company carom from rump-wriggling grooves (“Partytime”) to old-school break beats (“Irresistible Delicious,” featuring British rapper Slick Rick) to blippy club tracks (“Lose Control”) to sweet-and-smoky R&B (“Now and Then”) to … well, name any offshoot of popular music of the past 20 years, and Miss Elliott and her kitchen mates will at least take a crack at it on “Cookbook.”
Miss Elliott rhymes at one point that she has given up her butch, “b-ball” look for “girly” clothes. That may be, but she still can give her male counterparts a run for their money in the obscenity racket. The sensual “Meltdown,” for example, is a graphic lament about sexual dissatisfaction, while the Houston-scene-influenced “Click Clack” includes some gratuitous hygienic details.
Then there are tracks such as the two-headed “My Struggles” (featuring singer Mary J. Blige), a snarling song that employs boring ego-stroking (“I control the industry,” she brags) to mask confessional snapshots of Miss Elliott’s father abusing her mother.
Miss Elliott’s rhymes are occasionally lazy; her delivery even more so. At times, it’s as though she is, in her capacity as executive producer, too intent on building a track instead of selling one.
Her usually unerring eye for collaborative talent falters in places, too. The retro, Neptunes-produced “On & On” feels like a wheezy gasp from two years ago. “4 My Man” is Miss Barrino’s moment, and for that reason feels current — and therefore disposable.
Her ear (and her co-producers’ ears) for samples is somewhat more imaginative. “Cookbook” discreetly weaves in snippets varying from Smokey Robinson, the J. Geils Band and 1980s electro band Cybotron.
Howard University graduate and area native Rich Harrison (one of the wits behind Beyonce Knowles’ “Crazy in Love”) produced and co-wrote with Miss Elliott one of the album’s hottest tracks, “Can’t Stop,” which mingles funky brass with hard-hitting syncopation.
“The Cookbook” is a step up from its hastily produced predecessor, 2003’s “This Is Not a Test!” Unlike that album, however, and certainly unlike the acclaimed “Under Construction” (2002), this new LP doesn’t contain any obvious home runs.
It’s a highly professional work that suggests Miss Elliott is in that comfortable, overindulgent stage that befalls too many pop stars.
The creativity is there, but the concentration that comes from striving, perhaps, is not.
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