Album: Missy Elliott

The key track on Missy Elliott's Under Construction is "Back in the Day", a collaboration with Jay-Z, which finds them musing upon how hip hop has changed, and hankering after the good old days of gold chains, fat laces and British Knights trainers, when "we was all under one groove". Hip hop was fun back then, she claims, adding that old-skool rappers could even dance and still be considered hard – a statement that raises all sorts of questions about rap's endemically surly image. But there seems no road back from hip hop's death-culture as long as every rapper feels obliged to honour the genre's fallen – as Missy and TLC do here with "Can You Hear Me?", a particularly sickly example fantasising about Aaliyah and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes meeting in heaven. Certainly, there's little hope of any change in attitude while the genre's imagery remains so casually violent, graceless and contemptuous of higher ideals and virtues – while, for instance, Missy's idea of devotion is to offer to fight her lover's ex-girlfriend ("Play That Beat") and to encourage her vagina to perform well so that her man won't want anyone else ("Pussycat"). And although the anti-gun, anti-gang stance of a track such as "Hot" is commendable, it's undermined by Missy's claim that she doesn't need to carry a gun because she can "kick ass with a chain": forget any higher, more humanist motive, it's still just about appearing hard.