Switched on Pop - How Missy Elliott and Timbaland Freaked the World

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

When the song “Get Ur Freak On” hit radio in 2001, it set the world of popular music on fire. Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s first crossover hit sounded nothing like the chart-topping bluesy rock of Aerosmith or Lenny Kravitz, or the smooth R&B of Joe or Jagged Edge. It was a song that compelled you to dance - literally, with Missy issuing repeat commands to “get ur freak on” and encouraging crowds to gather ‘round in what we’ve only ever experienced as a hot slick mess of bodies, cheering and vibing as one pretzeling mass. But this song was years in the making. Timbaland and Missy had been hard at work on the sound for nearly a decade before “Get Ur Freak On” was heard by anyone. This week, in yet another segment of our Modern Classics miniseries, our guest host and former producer Megan Lubin shares the story of the sound that made “Get Ur Freak On” a pop music phenomenon, and transformed Timbaland into one of the most ubiquitous producers of the aughts.   Songs Discussed Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On Tweet - Oops (Oh My) Jay-Z - Dirt off Your Shoulder Justin Timberlake - What Goes Around... Comes Around 2Pac - Me Against The World TLC - Creep Ginuwine - Pony  Aaliyah - One in a Million Jay-Z ft. UGK - Big Pimpin’ Jay-Z - Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) Justin Timberlake - Cry Me a River Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous Justin Timberlake ft. T.I. - My Love Timbaland ft. One Republic - Apologize Sports Car - Tate McRae Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm musicologist

Nate Sloan. And I'm your guest host, Megan Lubin. Megan, it's awesome to have you back on the pod. You were a producer for the show back in, I want to say, 2021. You've contributed some of my favorite episodes about Rosalia and Esperanza Spalding. And we are going to do another installment of our modern classics miniseries that helps explain how hits. of the early 2000s continue to shape the sound of our modern soundtrack. So I'm enormously excited to ask. What have you brought for us today? We're talking about the song, Get Your Freak-on by Missy Elliott,

produced by her friend and longtime producing partner Timbaland. Nate, are you aware that the legendary Missy misdemeanor Elliott actually headlined her very first world tour last year? wait, what, her first world tour? How is that possible? Like, she's been in the game forever. She's a legend. I know.

What is this first that you speak of? It's totally bizarre. But it's her first world tour. It was pretty brief. It was only about a month and a half long. So I did not catch a show. But I did watch YouTube clips. And, oh, man, talk about a throwback.

I mean, an incredible throwback. Yeah. Even in this iPhone video, I'm, like, blown away by, the stage craft here. Yeah. The dramatic set with its galactic background, the dancers in their steampunk outfits executing perfect choreography, Missy it in the front are just like commanding the stage. She is such an immaculate live performer. Yeah, she's not asking you to get your freak on. She is commanding you to get your freak on. It's an imperative. I was going to say the clip is essentially 10,000 people in Baltimore's CFG Bank Arena, all singing. Every,

word to this song that came out more than 20 years ago. And Nate, I felt all sorts of ways watching that clip. Like, on the one hand, seeing artists I love live, I think is one of life's greatest and most magical callings. And I would have killed to be in that stadium singing along. And I have a weird history with that song. Ah, okay. I'm intrigued. Tell me more. I'm a dancer by training. Like, that was my childhood. You name it. I trained. in it, jazz, ballet, hip-hop contemporary. For 18 years, that was my life. And it has a lot to do, I think, with my eclectic taste in music, and it definitely contributed to me becoming a hip-hop head and studying music in grad school and making it a defining aspect of my career. And?

I don't know how to dance to get your freak on. It's something about the beat. It's super fast. In fact, it's actually got a BPM of 178, which is like much faster than most tracks that you would hear like in the club if you went out dancing. Definitely. And I guess the beat felt really complex. And I remember not knowing which part of the beat to listen to to figure out how to move my body to it. I'm curious, Nate, did you have a song like that? I have to say that I've never met a song that I couldn't groove to. Now, that might say something about my innate lack of coordination that I don't know myself well enough when to stop. I have to say there's one more thing about this song that's the reason I want to unpack it today. And it's that even though I have found it so hard

to dance to my whole life, every time this song comes on, people go crazy to it. Like there's that moment, that part where she goes, quiet. Like a lot of Missy Tracks with this one in particular, it's like a play that she's asking everyone to act out, which I think is one of the things that made it so popular and so fun to, if not dance to, just be a part. of. For all the reasons I just said, this song was incredibly intriguing to me. I went digging. I figured out pretty quickly that I was picking up on something, that that strangeness, that difference, that complexity. Like, this song was different from other dance floor hits of that era. It might

feel iconic now. Like, we can't remember a time without get your freak on. But at the time, it sounded so different, like absolutely nothing on the radio at the time. We mentioned it was produced by Timbalin. This is a producer responsible for some of the sounds we most associate with 2000s era hip-hop and pop. Think tweets, oops oh my. Jay-Z's dirt off your shoulder. To Justin Timberlakes, what goes around comes around. So today, Nate, I'm going to tell you the story of that sound. You and I, we're going to walk through how Timbalin was workshopping that sound all through the 90s with tracks for a bunch of different artists and how that formula finally came together in 2001 with Get Your Freak On, you're going to

help me break down the musical components so we understand what made that sound so magical, so compelling, and what made Timbalin one of the most in demand producers in pop? Let's do it. So for today's conversation, Nate, we're going to use the song Get Your Freak On as a timeline divider in the lives and careers of Missy Elliott and Timbalant. There's before the Freakon, BTFO, I guess, and after the Freakon, ATF. Love it. So we'll start at the beginning before the freak on.

And that's in 1995, the sound of this moment, the sound of this era in hip-hop, is Biggie, it's Faith Evans. It's Tupac's Me Against the World. It's TLC's creep. Our story starts with high school friends, Missy Elliott and Timothy Mosley, better known by his producer named Timbaland. So Missy and Timbaland have left their home state of Virginia, and they're both grinding it out up north. in New Jersey. They're working with the R&B group Jodacy, but they're both feeling pretty desperate

to break out of this silo that they feel like they found themselves in, and they want to get their beats and their songwriting in the hands of other artists. So one day Timbaland is in the studio with another producer, a guy named Static. And as Tim tells it, Static has laid down a beat, and they play with it a bit until they've got something that they're pretty happy with, but they both know it needs a little more. And one thing that Tim Bullen used to do is he used to collect sounds. So he didn't always know when he was going to use them, but he would just hear something he liked and he'd kind of file it away in a catalog.

So Tim, in this moment, sift through his catalog of sounds and he hears something that he likes. And the way he describes it, it's like a futuristic robot saying, yeah, over and over in different tones. So he takes that sound, he truncates it, he stretches it like dough, to make it sound like it's been dragged through a warping machine. He throws a little slide whistle on it, and we get... Pony by Genuine. Pony by Genuine. The song that would become the soundtrack for male strippers around the world,

this one sounds as fresh as it did when it first dropped. Oh, yeah. This song is such a good example of what I'm calling the Mosaic Production Approach. So the conventional sampling method in 95 at the time that Tim is making this beat, was to build a new song on a recognizable piece of an old song. Right. Timbalin was almost never trying to do that. He wasn't aiming for nostalgia in his beats.

His approach to sampling was much more, I don't know, kind of collage-like. Like, he would hear these individual bleeps and bloops and bleas. And he'd arrange and manipulate them to separate them from whatever the source material was. And he'd used them to make a wholly new sound, a sonic mosaic. unlinked to the source. Some elements might have felt familiar, but the sum always felt really new. Yeah, I mean, when we compare this composition to, like, the Tupac song, Me Against the World that we listened to, that was like this really straightforward boom bap, a little bit of g-funk. When we hear Timbaland, it sounds completely new. Now, you've referenced sampling, Megan,

but I want to be clear, like, these are not samples in the sense that Timbaland is taking pre-recorded songs and re-stitching them into something new, he is generating these sounds himself. Right. That iconic, yeah, that kicks off pony is like a Timbaland and Static Studio invention. That's their alchemy. And it puts this stamp on the song in this way because you've never heard it before. So now this new sound will be forever identified with that particular track. That's a really powerful statement as an artist as a producer to create this signature that will be indelibly connected to your song because simply it doesn't exist anywhere else.

It sounds like the future. Exactly. I think what's really cool about this sonic mosaic approach is like we talk about songs or sounds that sound futuristic or otherworldly. These are words that often get used to describe the timble in production sound. And oftentimes it's hard to say what the future sounds like. We talk about crunchy computer sounds or like zips and zaps or maybe that slide whistle might sound futuristic. Maybe that robot, yeah, sound might sound futuristic. But I kind of wonder if like sounds that we think of as sounding futuristic are just on some level sounds that we can't place in the past.

Like they're just songs that we can't connect back to something we've heard before, which is often the experience of listening. to something that Timbalin has produced. Does that make sense? Yeah. Part of the pleasure of his craft is how dislocated it is from what is familiar and expected. All right. So Pony Unlocks the first element of Tim's sound for us, his future mosaic sampling approach. To hear the second one, we got a time hop again. To 1996, Virginia Beach, Virginia. Timbalin and Missy are back home from New Jersey. They're making music together around the clock, and they're trying to figure out how to get paid to do it full time. They would have a routine going.

So Timbalin would make his mosaic beats, Missy would listen, and start singing over them, kind of write melody and lyrics as she went. So early that year in 96, they get called up to Detroit to meet a 16-year-old high school student named Alia Dana Houghton. Wow. This, of course, is the Alia. Yes, the one everyone is thinking of. Yes.

Alia heard one of Tim and Missy's songs. It was basically like, how can I get those people to make something like that for me? And at Missy's urging, they end up giving her a pretty unusual beat that Timbalin had been holding on to for the right moment. This would become... Alia's hit, one in a million. Nate, what do you notice when you hear this song? There's a lot going on in the song, but one of the things that sticks out to me is the rhythmic feel, the way the drums, the high hats, the snares, the bass drums, create this kind of stop, start feeling, accelerating, decelerating. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow, sometimes it's fast and slow at the same time.

It's really quite a disorienting experience to listen to, but in a very pleasurable way. Yes, exactly. So Panama Jackson, who's a writer for the root, said he was 17 when this song came out. And he can remember hearing it for the first time and wondering what in the hell he was listening to. And of course, one of the things he's hearing was part two of Timbalin's formula. Percussion that seems like it's moving at multiple speeds at once. I mean, this is like so diabolical in its construction. That high hat, typically a high hat is like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Very predictable, almost metronomic. Here it's like very sparse, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And then all of a sudden it'll just rattle out. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile. Meanwhile, underneath that, the bass drum is doing something similar. Boom. Very single, boom.

You don't know exactly when it's coming then. Boom, butchich-c-ch-ch-bobon. It's almost like drum and bass, but in this like these little micro doses, microdose drum and base. The only element that does give us that metronomic kind of feel is this weird sample of what I think might be a cricket. Chrip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, that's the only like steady, percussive element here. Yeah, you mentioned the, you mentioned the crickets. Well, we don't have the full mosaic sampling effect here. We do get one beautifully random sample here from a track titled primitive animals. Amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think to hear how novel this

is it could help to again return to that earlier song you mentioned. Tupac, Me Against the World. We called it boom bap. That's because it's got this very predictable, boom, bap, bass, snare. Boom, chup. I mean, that is like classic hip-hop. Turn over to Timbaland and Missy Elliott. Very different, not as predictable, not this standard,

boom-da, boom-bap. There's an element of that boom-bap in Timbalin that helps ground you, but then it's constantly being tweaked and played with. the bass, the snare, the hat, they land in places you don't expect. They're constantly changing. As a listener, this polyrhythmic approach kind of puts your brain in two different places simultaneously. That's probably part of the reason it's difficult to dance to is you have to pay attention to two different planes of rhythmic understanding at the same time. That can be challenging, that can be a little weird, but again, I think there's also something very enjoyable about that.

We like that feeling of dissonance. You know, earlier I made the bold claim that I could dance to anything. I think I would have a hard time dancing to this, actually. So I might have to walk back some of my earlier confidence. In someone's memory, there is middle school Nate, like trying to get down to Alia's one in a million. But, you know, that can be for another episode. It's deep in the archives, yeah. So one in a million gives us element two. But Nate, we're going to time hop again. One last time for our third element. It's 1999. And we're back up north. We're in New York again. Timlin's still riding high off the success of his and Missy's work with Alia. He's produced a solo album for Missy, an album called Super Dupa Fly,

that made her a bona fide hip-hop phenomenon. But he's still in grind mode. He's working on a new album for Missy. He's working on his own solo project. He's working on movie soundtracks. Like, The Dude is busy. And as he tells the story, Jay Z, a friend of his and sometimes collaborator, drops by the studio one day and offers to take him to Atlantic City so we can take a load off. And Tim tells him, Close Mouth Don't Get Fed, Jay. And keeps working. So Jay pulls up a chair and says, okay, then, let me hear what you got. And remember, I mentioned this earlier, but the way Timbalin works is he'll hear an interesting sound and he'll file it away in his catalog.

Hear a sound, file it away. Hear a sound, file it away. So he pulls a bunch of half-produced beats out of his catalog and he starts playing them one by one. As Tim tells it, he says, I had this one beat I just couldn't get a grip on. I've been playing with a sample called Kusara Kusara, a beautiful Egyptian melody performed by a famous singer named Abdel Halim Hafez. Jay-Z hears this in the studio,

stands straight up and says, essentially, what are your plans for the song? You have to give it to me. Like, I don't care what your plans are. You have to give me this beat. And that day, in a matter of hours, they finish the beat. Jay-Z lays down verses.

And out of this spontaneous session, we get. Okay, now we are in the world of sampling where a producer takes a pre-existing song and flips it for a beat. But what is so fascinating about this is that he's still finding these pieces that have that same kind of rhythmic syncopation and this like kaleidoscopic kind of timbrel sound world. Yeah, and I love that you use the word kaleidoscopic because the thing about this song is I think it's one of the best examples of Timbaland making us feel like we are everywhere and nowhere all at once. Like that sample, you know you are somewhere, but is it Middle Eastern? And where in the Middle East is it South Asian?

He's blending so many other sounds over it that he really is sufficiently disconnecting it from its sample source that it's just hard enough to tell where the sample is coming from. And I particularly love contrasting this track with Jay-Z's previous biggest hit. Hard Knock Life, Ghetto Anthem. Because that song places you squarely in New York. It's a hard-out.

From standing on the corners bopping to drive in some of the hottest cars, New Yorkers. ever seen for dropping some of the hottest verses rap is ever heard from the dope spot with the smoke lock, cling to the murder scene. You know, we know Jay-Z as this global private jet like country hopping superstar. At this point, he is a product of New York City and his sound is New York and he reps New York. Big Pimpin is one of the starkest examples out there of the Timble and formula on a single artist, where it's almost like he took Jay Z's sound out of the city for a second and just offered him a very

different hat to wear just for a moment. Yeah. So Megan, if I'm correct, we've identified a few different attributes that mark the sound of Timberland and Missy Elliott, this mosaic approach to composition, an interest in polyrhythmic percussion. And now what do we want to call this big pimping influence? The Globetrotter? The Globetrotter. I love it. Okay, so three core elements. How do they all come together in Get Your Freak-on? Great question. I think we answer it when we come back and break. See you there. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for you. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives,

actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Each of the songs we talked about in the first half of the episode highlights a different element of timbulin sound. I want to contend that it's get your freak on that lands the full formula. All of these elements coming together to make something truly spectacular and greater than the sum of its parts.

So it's the year 2000, Tim and Missy are back in the studio, and in Missy's telling, she's feeling serious pressure to make her third album sing. Tim feels like the album is done, and Missy doesn't and keeps ragging on Tim to give her something else. He's clearly frustrated. He goes over to his ASR 10, which is a synthesizer, and he starts to be a song. pressing keys, and in his key pressing, he plays a sound. Here's Missy talking about that moment on the Broken Record podcast.

It was like, do-dun-dun-dun-dun. And I'm like, yo, that was it. And he was like, what? Because now he's going so fast up and down the keyboard, he can't find it no more. So now he's even more mad. Because I'm like, yo, I'm telling you, I know what I heard. And so he hitting the keyboard all hard because he's ready to go. Like, he's like, what?

It ain't in here. I don't know what you're talking about. So he finally hits it again. And I'm like that. And I'm like, that joint is crazy. That riff you're in the beginning, the iconic riff, is the sound of a Punjabi tombi. Do you know the instrument?

I'm not familiar, no. So it's a single string instrument. Just quickly Google a photo, so you've got the image in your head. Okay. It's reminding me a little bit of like a Punjabi banjo or something because we've got a skin stretched over, a hollow wooden sphere at the low end two strings connected to a tuning peg over a long wooden

neck. So yeah, it seems to produce a very sharp, percussive, plucked sound. Yeah, twangy. It makes sense that we're hearing this instrument from the Punjabi region because the whole sound of this track is influenced by a dance style, a music style that also emerges from Punjab, which is Bangra. So right off the bat, we get a samed. that takes us into another cultural context, classic Tim. But of course, the sample that Missy heard in that moment in the studio has already been manipulated by Timbland pulled just enough out of that cultural context for Missy to like not know where it came from.

She just know that she loves the sound. It kind of reminds me of how he uses this Turkish guitar instrument called the Saz at the beginning of the Justin Timberlake track you mentioned earlier what goes around. Going back to Get Your Freak On, the percussion is done mostly on a tabla, which is a pair of hand drums from India. And a very cool thing that you can do if you have a lot of time to listen to covers of Get Your Freak on, which I did in the lead up to producing this episode, is that you can find whole Tabla covers of the song. And you can see the way the drums were played to create the sound that you hear and Get Your Freak On. That is fire.

I need a live remix of that song with Tabla. I mean, watching this, it's so cool because you see how the tabla player, every subtle placement of his hand on the drums with the heel of his palm versus the fingertips versus the center of the palm versus the low drum versus the hydrum creates this different sound and goes back to create that polyrhythmic effect that we've been talking about over and over again. The cool thing, too, is if you listen to where the tabla and say the snare and get your freak on hit, they're effectively talking to each other. The one is hitting where the other isn't, and it creates, like, drum call and response. We think of a song as having, in this case, like, a lead vocalist, and it's Missy, who is the main character in the song. But when I listen to Get Your Freak on, I think of Missy as the lead character, but then I think of the percussion is kind of having its own little, I don't know, like scene of characters where the table is one character and then the snare is another, and they're talking to each other throughout the scene. and I don't know, maybe this is like me spending too much time with Get Your Freak On, but there's something about the percussion that feels alive and human.

Yeah, it's not just an accompaniment to a vocal. It's a conversation. These two elements are in dialogue with each other. And that makes sense because Missy is not just the performer who comes in at the last second to lay her vocals on the track. She is, like, involved in the creation of these things from the ground up. So, of course, she's going to have this different relationship to it. she's going to be deeply imbricated within it, not just sort of dancing on top of it.

I knew I could count on you to drop like one very good SAT vocab word at some point in this. That's what I'm here for, Megan. So, Nate, after all of this, I think I know why this song used to drive me from the dance floor. It's when I hear a song that I'm getting ready to dance to, I listen for a single groove that I can kind of settle into that's going to tell me at the beginning how to dance to it. And this song just never gives you that. It has like five grooves playing simultaneously, five global influences. You know, it has this mosaic production approach, so many layers of sound happening at once, that there really is no one sound that I can pay attention to that is giving the instructions

for how to move my body to it. Something else I realized about this song and why it was such a crowd favorite is that it is filled with ad-libs, shout-outs, and sticks that you can feel. physically shout and act out on the dance floor. But you don't have to be an amazing dancer to love and get down to this song. The song turns everyone into a performer. It is the true people's song. And Missy said it herself, actually, while filming behind the scenes of the Get Your Freak on music video.

The good thing about this Get Your Freak on record is that everybody love it. It's a party record and it's stick in your head, whether it's the Get Your Freak on or the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So it's a catchy kind of record. I mean, that seems like such an important part of this Timbal and Missy Elliott sound. As complex as all of these elements are that we've been elucidating, at the center, it's incredibly accessible and participatory, and you don't have to think that hard because it feels so good. Now, at the top of the episode, I promised you that we were going to talk about not just how Get Your Freak On landed the Timbalin and Missy production formula.

Yeah. But we were going to talk also about how the sound spread and turn Timbalin into one of the most in-demand producers in all of pop for all of the aughts. The answer to how the sound spread actually isn't terribly complicated, I think, and sort of follows many of the historic trends of the popular music industry and how sound moves within it. So one thing to know is that get your freak on shot Timbalin and Missy to a level of fandom that neither of them had experienced before. It was easily their most commercially successful song at that point and their first real crossover hit, meaning it got airplay on pop radio, not just hip-hop radio.

So a lot of musicians heard it and wanted the sound. And it wasn't too long before Timberland put that formula that works so well and get your freak on to work for a very young Justin Timberlake in a song called Cry Me a River. Almost have like a pony light sound there. Yo jill jill jill jill. I mean, this is another one. There's so much going on in this track. I mean, at the very beginning, too, I always love listening because there's like Gregorian chant. So good. Once again, you're left asking, like, how do these elements go together? Somehow they meld them not only into this convincing kind of tapestry, but one that gives this solo artist from a boy band, his first breakout hit.

Yeah, and this song does something that I remember Missy and Timbalin talking about figuring out how to do very early in their career. Timberlin claims that Missy taught him that you could sing over a hip-hop beat. Like that was something that he hadn't experienced before until he started to work with her because that was her instinct. He'd hear her beats and because she's a singer and a songwriter and a rapper. But at that time, a singer, she'd start singing over his beats. And that's exactly what's happening here with Justin Timberlake's Crimea River. Timbalin is producing a heavy, crunchy, layered hip-hop beat. But Justin Timberlake is an R&B and pop artist. And he is crooning over the top.

And that combo is just, oh, it's like, it's not. itself one of these core production elements, but it is a defining part of the Timbaland, kind of like how he shaped the industry. This song did a lot of things for Timbalin, but above all, it solidified Timbaland as a pop music producer who could make hits with mass appeal. Like now, we have all these production techniques that had previously kind of been siloed in hip hop as a genre. Now these techniques are being heard by a much whiter and a much more mainstream audience. Then in 2006, two things happen. Timbalin takes on a protege, a producer named D'Anga, and suddenly his capacity just explodes.

Like, all of these asks he's been fielding as a result of the success of Get Your Freak on and Crime Me a River, he can actually meet the demand. Tim would select the sounds from his vast library that he'd built up over the past 15 years. Danger would create the loops that Timbalin would then sample. So together, the two of them churn out in the span of something like a year or two, three mega hit albums. Nellie Furtado's Loose featuring the song Permiscuous, which went number one. Nice. Justin Timberlake's Future Sex Love Sounds, which produced three number one hits, including the song My Love, featuring TI. And Timbalin's own album, Shock Value, which featured a ton of big name pop-up.

artists of the era, including Justin, including Nellie Furtado, but also artists like Carrie Hilsen and One Republic, on tracks like, Apologize. I mean, this is one of the most impressive CVs in all of pop music, and it's kind of amazing how this sound that we heard in the beginning of this episode as being so new and daring and sort of revolutionary is now becoming pretty mainstream in a way that you don't quite like raise your eyebrows in the same way when you hear some of these crazy sounds, this mosaic approach, these globe-trotting influences, these polyrhythms, now they're like part of the sound of mainstream pop. Yeah, that is the beauty of, I think, this music and in particular,

pop music becoming increasingly influenced by hip-hop and the creativity that comes with sampling and beat production. It means that pop is constantly being infused with new sound. And we have to remember that there's a time when these new sounds were totally original and radical and had never been heard before. And now so much of this stuff is just like, we just don't even, we don't blink an eye. I know you guys just did an episode on Tate McCray, but the song, Sports Car is produced by Ryan Teter, formerly the frontman of One Republic and a close collaborator of Timbalins for some time. And if you hear this song, you know, my first thought was, oh my God, that sounds like, no offense to Brian Tetter, like a knockoff Timbalin beat.

Oh, yeah, I hear it. Yeah. Now when I hear a song like sports car, I don't just hear it as the new Tate McCray song. I hear it in the lineage that started with Get Your Freak on that continued with Cry Mear River and continued with that three album sprint in the 2000s. I hear it as part of the sound that Timbalin and Missy started building in the mid-90s and it just gives it all new meaning. So how would you describe your relationship to get your freak on now? Because when we started, you were like, two left feet, can't dance. What about at the end of this journey? I mean, it's everything to me now. Like, I feel like we're in a long-term relationship. But I guess it's safe to say that if Missy ever goes on tour again, I will be right there with the rest of the crowd,

shaking my ass with the best of them. This episode of Switchchampop was produced and hosted by Megan Lubin. Our producer is Rianna Cruz. Our editors are Chung. Our engineer is Brandon McFarland. Iris Gottlieb does our illustrations. Our theme music is by Zach Tenoreo. and Jassy Adams of Ark Iris.

We're production of Vox Media Podcast Network in New York Magazine's Vulture. You can subscribe to New York Mag at NYMag.com slash pod. Find us on social media at Switchdown Pop. Tell us what your favorite Timberland Missy Productions are. And go to our website, Switchdown Pop.com, to sign up for a newsletter

where we'll blast you with additional musical pop-related insights every week. We'll be back next week with a brand-new episode And until then, y'all, thank you for listening. Attention Spotify. Has given to the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera. A fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized, and tonka-tosted.

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