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In an exclusive interview with Billboard, Missy revealed the anxieties she battled coming back into the game:
“I have to be very careful. It’s different now. People are quick to be like, ‘You’re irrelevant, you’re a flop, you’re washed up,” she explained.
Missy’s return to the scene was marked with various trials, including her diagnosis with Graves Disease.
“It causes hair loss, your eyes bulge. My blood pressure was always up from just overworking.”
Once she scaled back on work and got on the right medication, her diagnosis and blood pressure got under control. That’s when she was able to switch her focus from her health, back into her art.
As a survivor of childhood violence, the eclectic musician explains the source of her inspiration comes from her ability to escape tumultuous situations through her imagination:
“My room would become a whole other world once I shut that door,” she says. “That’s why I believe my videos are so important to me. It was Alice in Wonderland: my bed, my closet — it would all turn into something else. And I would write and sing and block out whatever was going on.”
Her work in the mental lab culminated in the explosive hit, ‘WTF,’
The ‘Work It’ rapper describes the excrutiating creative process behind creating her new hit:
“We did so many different treatments,” she says. “It was hard because we’re like, ‘We did that before.’ ‘Oh, that ain’t hot.’ We knew that we just had to push the envelope.”
Missy has definitely kept it hot for decades, and her new work is indisputably on the same caliber.
Missy will be honored with the Innovator award for her lifetime of excellence at Billboard’s 2015 Women in Music event on Dec. 11, to be aired on Lifetime Dec. 18.
Much deserved for years of #blackgirlmagic.
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