Missy Elliott – The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)
1997 · Directed by Hype Williams
368K Likes
Best comments
1.“Only Missy Elliott can make a trash bag look hot.”
More comments
- 2.“NASA just transmitted this song to Venus. Missy Elliott is the first hip-hop artist to have her music sent to space.”
- 3.“Growing up, I thought she was saying 'I can't stand Lorraine,' and I used to sing that around my dad's cousin Lorraine. She used to get so mad.”
The story
Hype Williams wanted to blow Missy Elliott up like the Michelin Man. Stylist June Ambrose took the idea and built a suit with black patent leather outside and a tire inner tube inside. Deflated, it was tiny. Inflated, she said, it was the size of a 900-pound man. Shot through Williams' fisheye lens, it looks like a shiny trash bag with Missy on top, and people are still calling back to it today.
The shoot was chaos. They had to inflate the suit at a gas station in Brooklyn, it got too big to fit in the car, and Missy walked back to set down the street wearing it. Then Ambrose spotted a slow leak, so she stood behind Missy for every take with a bicycle pump. She said later the leak made the suit better. The suit was also a reply to music executives who had told Missy she was too heavy for the business.
This was Missy's first single and first video, the lead single from her 1997 debut Supa Dupa Fly. Timbaland produced it around a sample of Ann Peebles' I Can't Stand the Rain, and the cameos run from Timbaland and Sean Combs to Lil' Kim, Da Brat, Yo-Yo, Total and 702. It lost Best Rap Video at the 1997 VMAs to The Notorious B.I.G., but Rolling Stone ranked it the number one rap video of all time in 2023. In 2024 NASA beamed the song to Venus. Not bad for a leaky trash bag.
