Missy Elliott will be recognized with Queen Latifah, Lil' Kim and Salt-N-Pepa on VH1's Hip Hop Honors: All Hail the Queens special (Monday, 9 ET/PT). USA TODAY catches up with the rap icon, 45, to get the stories behind her five highest-charting songs on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart:
Get Ur Freak On
Released in March 2001; peaked at No. 40
Even after wrapping third album Miss E ... So Addictive, Elliott felt it was incomplete. Longtime producer Timbaland "said, 'You crazy, this is solid.' I was like, 'I feel like I'm missing that record.' " Annoyed, Timbaland started hitting random keys on a keyboard, until he happened on the six-note riff that makes Freak's melody. "I was like, 'What'd you just hit?' And he said, 'A bunch of stuff.' I said, 'Go back to each one of those things until you find it.' When he hit that sound again, I was like, 'That was crazy!' That was the last record I recorded and the first I released" off the album.
Work It
Released in September 2002; peaked at No. 35
For her next album, Under Construction, Elliott persuaded Timbaland to move to Miami to record at the height of hurricane season. "He was so mad. It was raining every day, and we didn't come up with anything for two weeks. So he went to a mom-and-pop store and grabbed a bunch of old records." Among his finds: Blondie's Heart of Glass and Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three's Request Line, both of which are sampled in Work. The song's chorus, which is played partially in reverse, happened by mistake. When the lyric, "I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it" came on in the studio, "the engineer hit something and it went backwards. I didn't have the hook yet and was like, 'Oh, snap!' So I built around that."
Pass That Dutch
Released in October 2003; peaked at No. 27
The infectious This is Not a Test! single, which is memorably featured in Mean Girls, sparsely samples tracks such as Santa Esmeralda's Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood and De La Soul's Potholes in My Lawn. "I liked it because it didn't have a lot going on, it was just claps and a bass line. Being that it was so open and didn't have any kind of musical sounds in it, I said, 'Let me do the who-di-whooo! part to let it have melody.' "
Lose Control
Released in May 2005; peaked at No. 3
Elliott recruited R&B singer Ciara and rapper Fatman Scoop for her lead The Cookbook single. After Ciara recorded her part in the studio, Fatman "had her stand in front of the glass of the booth so he could see, and he told her to dance so he could come up with the chants. That was dope, because people just hear him saying all these different chants, but that's how he was coming up with stuff." Control is still Elliott's highest-charting song to date, but upon release, "the label said (it) wouldn't play on any station because it was too fast. My gut told me that this is the record and I'm going to take that chance."
WTF (Where They From)
Released in November 2015; peaked at No. 22
Coming off his whirlwind 2014 with Happy, Pharrell Williams invited Elliott to Los Angeles, where she instantly fell in love with WTF's beat. "The tempo and cadence is different from anything you've heard on the radio and that's always been a Missy thing. If everybody else is wearing white, Missy is going to wear hot pink. He was just like, 'Yo, you feeling it?' I was like, 'Yeah,' and he was like, 'Let me get eight bars on it.' So he went in the booth and did his rap." The concept for the video, which features marionettes of them dancing, came when she saw "one on the street and was like, 'That would be crazy to make ones of me and Pharrell.' "
