Old-school, new-school need to know this: Missy Elliott is tired of the stagnant state of hip-hop music today. And don’t bring that beef stuff 'round this way.

Hey DJs and MCs too, listen to the supa dupa fly songstress.On the intro to her last album, the two-million-selling Under Construction, Missy Elliott blasted “magazine writers, radio cats, listeners or plain old haters” for fostering a negative atmosphere within the hip-hop community. Citing the death of her friend and frequent collaborator Aaliyah as a wake-up call, and dedicating her music to the families of 9/11 victims, Left Eye, Tupac, Biggie and Big Pun, the 32-year-old Virginia-born rapper/singer/songwriter said that the title of the album reflected her belief that we all had some work to do—on ourselves. “All the hate and animosity between folks, y’all need to kill it with a skillet,” she said.
Dramatically slimmer than she was when her career jumped off eight years ago (when she was penning tunes and rhyming guest verses for the likes of Gina Thompson and 702) Missy’s been steeping her style and sound in old-school hip-hop lately. And in terms of success, she’s bigger than ever. Eminem, Jay-Z, Ludacris, 50 Cent—she can split mic time with anyone. Mick Jagger, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey—these are the folks asking her to write songs for them. And you’ve seen those Gap ads with that elderly White woman.

With her fifth album, This Is Not A Test, on the way, Missy sits down with XXL for a state-of-the-nation address.

XXL: First off: the weight loss. How did you do it?

Missy: I’ve never been an excessive eater. It was more about what I was eating. I’d never been a water drinker. But now I’m just drinking a lot of water. And I go to the gym all the time.

You got to get a trainer, ’cause you need somebody to push you. Otherwise you get to the gym all tired, and you like, “I’m getting off this!” Then you go back to the house and eat something. If a trainer is there, and if he’s doing it with you, you got some kind of motivation. The trainer made it fun, because we did dance class and kick-boxing.
And I never weigh myself. That’s the worst way to lose weight. I know it sounds crazy, but I think that if you don’t weigh yourself and just test yourself by feeling how your clothes feel, that’s better. It can become discouraging if you go to the gym for a month, and in that month you only lost two pounds. So at least mentally, you going to the gym, you kind of looking at yourself like, “I think I lost some weight.” As opposed to going and finding out you really didn’t lose all you thought.

Why’d you choose to lose the weight? Health? To feel sexier?

You can be big and sexy. I believe you can make people think you fly and sexy no matter how many pounds you are. You have to be confident in yourself, which is hard, because people can detect when you not confident. But when you show that confidence, you make them be like, “Oh, she’s fly.” You know what I’m saying?
But I have high blood pressure. And I was dealing with kidney stones, gallstones. I was too young to be dealing with that. Those is when you get older. You know grandmothers and grandfathers with stuff like that.

So you got scared?

Oh yeah! Well, high blood pressure, that’s the silent killer. And that’s like the biggest thing that runs through my family. Everybody in my family is on high-blood-pressure pills. And what’s scariest is not knowing that your pressure is up. It’s why they call it “the silent killer,” ’cause you can end up dying from it. A lot of people have passed away from having high blood pressure and didn’t know. One lady was telling me how she had a stroke from her pressure being high. She said she was in a classroom, teaching, and all of a sudden her whole right side went numb. I ain’t trying to leave here, not this early.
On your last album, you called out problems you had with the atmosphere in hip-hop.

What do you think about the current state of affairs?

What is happening with hip-hop right now is that we have allowed the wrong people to come in. People don’t recognize real hip-hop anymore. People have been allowed to come in and master what it is to become successful, without even knowing anything about hip-hop. It’s like, If we talk about bitches in clubs, we good. If we talk about, “We shot somebody,” we good. Not to say everybody’s story ain’t real, but I think it’s a lot of people that have mastered what to do. And now we’ve become so blind that we don’t know the real from the fake. When you turn on the radio, you can’t distinguish the fake Jay-Z from the real Jay-Z. And I feel that’s a sad thing, because back in the days, everybody pretty much had their own identity, originality and creativity. You ain’t have Rakim sounding like EPMD. You ain’t have Flavor Flav sounding like Heavy D. Everybody had their own style. And now there’s a formula: “This is the hot joint to do.”

Whose fault is that?

The label. Even if you walked in creative, a lot of times they take the creativity away, because they know the formula for an easy hit record. So they try to make you do a record like such and such. “You need a record like Nelly!” Or, “Do it something like a Missy record.” And then they’ll get that same producer.

Is it better to work in a self-contained fashion?

If it’s hot enough. Somebody’s eventually gonna break that mold. I think sometimes people are scared to do it, because they like, “I know that if I get Timbaland or The Neptunes or Just Blaze or Kanye—I know for a fact [radio] gonna play these records.” But you can get the local mailman if he got a hot beat.

You’ve complained in the past about the culture of beef that exists in hip-hop. What would you say about what’s going on today?

I feel like we worked too hard to get to the point that we at—where we’re recognized on Grammys and AMAs and stuff like that, become a part of a whole other world—and then we get to the top and start fighting each other. It’s like we building this tall building, and there’s just one brick left that’s gonna fill it, and somebody just let that brick go on the whole thing. We worked too hard to get this far and just topple the building down.

From the fans’ perspective, though, beef is hot to listen to…

But do we know where it stops? On wax? Look at it. It’s like, we all want Biggie and ’Pac back. And all we know is that [their beef] was left on that kind of note. But it’s sad, because now we hear them piece Biggie and ’Pac together on a record. But when they was here, we would’ve gave anything in God’s creation to [have them work together]: “Okay, y’all got that diss out. Now do this record together, ’cause everybody gonna go run to the store to go get it.”

Yeah. Like, we’re all waiting on that Jay-Z/Nas collabo...

Exactly. The one thing we see in this game is that you gotta be smart. You gotta know what’s big, what’s a career move for you. Just watching Britney and Christina on that stage together [at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards] said to me: Y’know, when this is over, they might not go to Six Flags, they might not go to eat or go to the movies and hang out—but both of them realized this is huge. Like, “If we on the stage together—all three of us, me, Madonna, and Christina—this is huge. I wanna be a part of this.”
It’s like we can never get to that point. And really, deep down inside, I think a lot of artists really do want to do it. But they scared what the fans is gonna think. But at some point, you gotta get tired of going back and forth. You gotta get tired of walking around not knowing who’s about to come up and say something or do something. And if you look at the bigger picture and you say, How many people would run to the stores if Jay-Z and Nas was on a record together? If Ja and 50 was on a record? I mean, shoot, let’s get that paper. Let’s take advantage of it now. It’s over. Let’s go make that money. And it’s history-breaking.

But we don’t need more fakeness. Fake friends, fake brotherhood.

You want it to be real when you do it. You don’t wanna do it just because you can make money. We ain’t perfect. We humans first, and I think that’s where we gotta let our fans know that sometimes we get caught up, and we say or do things that we know is messed up. But if I come back, and I look at the person that I dissed and I say, “Whatever is whatever. I’m on and past that,” then they’ll understand.

But doesn’t it seem like you almost have to beef to succeed in rap nowadays? It seems that every time a new female MC comes out, she comes out dissing another chick.

And that’s the sad thing, too. ’Cause to me, women are more like mothers. And you would think it would be more embraces, because females have more emotions and they’re sensitive about a lot of things. But it can jingle on over to the females too, and it’s a sad thing. I hope that somebody comes in and cleans that. ’Cause it’s a messy situation