The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails

Supa Dupa Fly

Missy Elliott

An avant-garde rap hero and a revolutionary producer team up for a radical, ecstatic debut.

By 1997, Virginia rapper Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott and producer Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley were already two of the most forward-thinking hitmakers of the era, writing boundary-pushing avant-R&B tracks for Aaliyah, SWV, and more. But nothing could prepare the world for Elliott’s star turn—a rap-sung tangle that played like a stroll through a malfunctioning robot factory, which she delivered dressed as a crazysexycool funkateer in inflatable garbage bags.

Elliott’s debut single, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” thrust her into instant stardom; her offbeat coughs, melodic tangents, pauses, and onomatopoeias served as gateways to pop ecstasy, and Supa Dupa Fly as a whole is full of similar bouts of radical expression. Funny, sexually aggressive, careening between sultry singing and cartoonish sound effects and laughs—she offered hip-hop a new avant-garde hero.

“We weren’t scared to take risks, because our ears hadn’t adjusted to hearing a certain sound. All we were hearing was what we were doing, so it sounded correct to us.”

Missy Elliott

For his part, Timbaland redefined hip-hop production, making tracks full of chirping birds and giggles, laced with hi-hats and snares that stutter and trip in unexpected places. Combined with Missy’s art-bubblegum brilliance, Supa Dupa Fly would have a lasting influence across hip-hop, R&B, and electronic music.

The Downward Spiral

Nine Inch Nails

An extreme, downbeat mix of industrial noise and pop that became massive anyway.

Even at a moment when bands like Nirvana could become famous, The Downward Spiral felt extreme. Trent Reznor once called Nine Inch Nails’ second full-length album a “celebration of self-destruction in the form of a concept record that somehow managed to become a multiplatinum worldwide hit.”

Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (“Piggy”), disco and soul (“Closer”), and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic (“Hurt”). Even tracks that found continuity with the band’s earlier music—like the stuttering hardcore of “March of the Pigs”—were drastically more aggressive, making the album’s quieter moments feel all the more exhausted.

The album’s sound is just as polarized, mixing digital and analog, sample collages with live, and naturalistic performances. If the album has a defining moment, it’s the climax of “Closer”: mechanistic synth-funk that gives way to a warped, solitary piano. After Spiral, artists didn’t have to decide whether to be a rock band or an electronic producer—Reznor had bridged the two.

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Supa Dupa Fly

The Downward Spiral