Missy Elliott sat down recently with Billboard to discuss some of her greatest hits and the experience she had writing for big names in the business, including Aaliyah’s One in a Million, “Hot Boyz,” one of Elliott’s hits featuring Nas, Eve and Q-Tip and more.
Aaliyah - One In A Million (1996)
After Aaliyah’s hit 1994 debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, Missy and Timbaland were chosen to work on one song with the R&B songstress. Instead, they ended up working on eight and One In A Million — the song and the album — were created. “I was scared. I don’t know if Tim was scared when we first played it because it was a different sound. It was a different way to attack records because people were really singing then; that world of rap-singing didn’t really exist,” Elliott explained to Billboard.
“Because I wasn’t really a singer like that, that’s why I wrote like that, because I was a rapper, but I didn’t know how to do a bunch of runs, so every record that I would attack, I would attack it like I’m rap-singing it.” ″(Radio) said they couldn’t blend it in, they couldn’t mix it in with records before it or after it because the cadence hadn’t been done before,” Elliott said. “And so somehow, I think her uncle spoke to some people and they end up playing it. I know (Funkmaster) Flex was one of the first people to break that record in New York. …It was a headache at first.”
