Missy Elliott Announces First-Ever Headline Tour With 2000s Throwback Lineup

 

Missy Elliott speaks onstage on Dec. 5, 2019.

A cacophony of early 2000s music icons will hit the stage this summer for the “Out of This World: The Missy Elliott Experience" tour that will see the "Get Ur Freak On" singer headline a tour for the first time with the support of Ciara, Busta Rhymes, and Timbaland.

Elliott, a four-time Grammy winner, announced her 24-stop tour Monday morning that will open at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena on July 4 before heading to Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta and other cities through the end of August.

The performer said in a statement to multiple news outlets that fans have long been asking for a solo tour, but she "wanted to wait until I felt the time was right because I knew if I was ever going to do it, I had to do it big, and I had to do it with family."

Elliott co-headlined three tours between 1998 and 2004 and featured as a special guest or opening act on a half-dozen more through 2015 (including for Madonna, Janet and Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey), but has never been a solo headliner.

The three supporting artists announced for the tour all collaborated with Elliot on major 2000s hits—Ciara was a co-writer and featured artist on Elliotts "Lose Control" in 2005 (the song peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100) and Elliott was featured on Ciara’s popular song “1, 2 Step”; Timbaland and Elliott wrote at least a dozen songs together, including “Get Ur Freak On” (which peaked at No. 7); and Busta Rhymes has been a longtime collaborator of Elliott's, praising her as "an icon" and one of his "greatest inspirations" when she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

KEY BACKGROUND

Missy Elliott (born Melissa Arnette Elliott) is a hip hop and R&B artist who started her career as a member of the Swing Mob, a collective of artists that included Timbaland and Sista, the band Elliott was a member of at the time. She left Sista in the late 1990s and started working with Timbaland as a songwriting and production team, creating songs for artists like Aaliyah and Destiny's Child. She released her first album, "Supa Dupa Fly" in 1997 and went on to release five more before her last in 2005. "Sock It 2 Me" was the first song she led to make it to the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 12 in 1997. In total, 33 songs on which she is either the main performer or features on have made it on the Hot 100 chart. She has won four Grammy Awards—best solo rap performance, best female rap solo performance (twice) and best short form music video. She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2021, the same year she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. She was the first female rapper to be nominated and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.

SURPRISING FACT

Variety ranked a Missy Elliott show from last May as one of the best concerts of 2023. The performance at a resort/casino in Highland, California led to Elliott being praised as "the full package: looking great, sounding great, energized by the crowd and buoyed by her own natural bon vivant-ancy, on top of the production values you’d expect from a show built to travel."