Freaks and B/Witches

Abstract

This annotated playlist follows Missy Elliott's musical cinema. Paying particular attention to the use of speculative tropes, it argues that Elliott's work draws on Black feminist aesthetics to paint paths through memory, nostalgia, sexual autonomy, and spiritual rebellion. This mélange of speculative and sonic aesthetics creates what I call reverberative memory: a polytemporal structure that uses music and performance to tap into intergenerational memory. Using the aesthetic markers of speculative genres, Missy Elliott's videos fuse hip-hop to the conjuring of the blues, providing a generative commentary on sexuality, Black femininity, gender nonconformity, and pleasure. This critical layering of the strange and uncanny provide a utopic space in which Black feminist life thrives. The methodological focus of this essay draws on an array of Black scholarship that maps historical formations of blues aesthetics in order to address Black women in the horror genre; constructions of gender, aesthetic, and sonic mapping that exists in the music video form; and the spiritual ontology of nostalgia. Chiefly, this playlist highlights the pioneering art of Missy Elliott across a body of work that centers the vibrancy and vitality of Black women.