A left-handed masterpiece, in 2002 Missy Elliott released "Work It", a then/now/and forever classic retro-future hip hop single whose aesthetic circumference is everywhere and whose centre is nowhere. If she indeed led the latter-day/contemporary forces that reivigorated old school, customary styles (i.e.: AAAA ["ah/ya/cha/blah"] rhyme schemes, DJ scratch shuffle, 808 kick) and actively explored the potential of putting "things" — or rather, the "It" in "Work It" as the metonymic standard or known norm of styles — a) down; b) flipping; and then c) reversing it, then Timbaland's likewise radically de-centred production took on the form of a spiral trajectory, elaborating twisting-turning arabesques and spinning constructivist song structures around Borgesian paradoxes of time. The past in reverse as the future: progressive aesthetics in reverse! (1)
Timbaland always played the deliriously accelerating history of hip-hop/R&B, in which he was himself a participant, against the ever-advancing strides of grown-up teenpop, of which Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback" and Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous" are two exemplary examples. Aside from both songs' too-easy pleasures (a surfeit easily hastened by each performer's over-exuberant savoir-faire), and given the innocuous knowledge of sex-rhythm-romance-and-reason learned from past records (see: "Tearin' Up My Heart" and "Like a Bird"), it's almost necessary to think towards how the image of sexual experience is made commensurate with artistic maturity. For one thing, the subject of sexual/artistic adulthood is as plainly declarative as each tracks title; and as for the song-forms themselves, given the "Work It"-like askance aesthetics embedded in "Sexyback" and "Promiscuous", Timbaland's production for Timberlake and Furtado acts as a signifier for how overt-complicated sonics might embellish not just the convoluted drama of one's sexual awakening, but also, and inevitably, the more simple-and-plain artistic need to be taken more seriously — always classic pop music master trope!
All of which describes the crucial difference that separates "Work It" from "Sexyback" and "Promiscuous". The greater-than-grand achievement of Timbaland's work with Missy is that their art is meant to destabilize the field it arrives into while making that instability just one of many topics. The unhinged conflation of bygone styles and genres within Timbaland/Missy tracks is that it's a conflict meant to shatter and extend the tangents of pop; a desire that stems from a want-and-need to revitalize the standards of a historical past in order to reinvigorate the norms of a contemporary present. Yet the question then becomes what happens when Missy/Timbaland's unruly re-patterning of past conventions becomes the operative new standard/known norm? Both "Sexyback" and "Promiscuous" emanate off this conundrum: each track confuses the act of simply extending a type (or using its producer) with living up to its inherent artistic ambitions. What Missy understands is that the norm — even one inaugurated by her — is something to be always fucked with: formal conventions to be put down, flipped and reversed. One then imagines what a Missy-assisted remix of "Sexyback" would produce: "Sexyback (Forward)"? By association, this principle also suggestively applied to Nelly Furtado might result in "Promiscuous" — spun backwards — sounding like "Like a Virgin" (in reverse).
(1) The pervasive weirdness of the song's back-and-forth narrative also comes in how audio metaphors are used to illustrate the visual — i.e: in the middle of "Work It", after the line "Listen up close while I take you backwards", "Watch the way Missy like to take it backwards" is looped in reverse.
