Twenty years ago, Missy Elliott worked it with two other legendary divas — Beyoncé and Alicia Keys — on the Verizon Ladies First Tour. (Just let that lineup sink in for a minute. I’ll wait .
..) I was fortunate enough to be in their presence at the now-defunct Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, NJ, back in 2004 — and there was no mistaking that Misdemeanor brought all of her “Supa Dupa Fly”-ness to the stage as one of those co-headlining queens.
Little did any of us witnessing all of that Black girl magic know that it would take another 20 years before Elliott took her show on the road again in the US — this time on her first-ever headlining trek in the Out of This World Tour with her longtime collaborators Ciara, Busta Rhymes and Timbaland. But man, was it ever worth the wait. In what has been a relatively slow season on the concert scene — perhaps we got spoiled with both Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyonce’s “Renaissance” World Tour last year — Elliott cooked up the hottest show of the summer at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Monday night.
After launching her North American invasion on July 4 in Vancouver, Elliott had reached a career performance peak as she turned Jay-Z’s house into her own. It was the ultimate victory lap after the four-time Grammy winner became the first female hip-hop artist inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last December. Touring had never seemed to be Missy’s thing — perhaps because she was most comforta.