“I been waiting for this one,” Missy Elliott screams at the beginning of “Tempo,” Lizzo’s new single from her upcoming album Cuz I Love You and to be real, we have too. The energetic collaboration comes ahead of Cuz I Love You ‘s April 19 release date. “Slow songs, they for skinny hoes / Can’t move all of this here to one of those,” she raps on the song’s frenzied hook. Halfway through the record Elliott enters the track purring through her verse in a way that makes Cardi B’s “okurr” seem tame.
Last month in a Beats 1 interview with Travis Mills, Lizzo shared her vision for her upcoming album (“What if Aretha Franklin made a rap album in 2019?”) and how she got Elliott on “Tempo.” The rapper met Elliott before Cuz I Love You materialized, in what she considers to be her “trap phase,” but it wasn’t until she created “Tempo” that she reached out to her idol. “This new one I heard it and I was like this is so obviously Missy,” Lizzo told Mills. According to Lizzo, it took two months for Elliott to return the track with a verse and the Virginia native did it in an unconventional way. “She sent me a memoji of herself singing her verse.” If Missy Elliott wasn’t already the coolest person on Earth, she definitely just got a lot cooler.
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Kristin Corry is a staff writer for Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.
