Missy Elliott - The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)

What this video is

Released in mid-1997, 'The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)' arrived at a pivotal juncture in hip-hop history — just months after the death of The Notorious B.I.G. and amid a commercial and artistic expansion of the genre into pop radio. Missy Elliott's debut single and its accompanying video introduced a radically new visual language for Black female artists: body-positive, technologically playful, and aesthetically…

Why it matters

This video is a canonical document in the history of hip-hop music video production. It established the Missy Elliott / Hype Williams visual language that would define late-90s and early-2000s rap aesthetics, and introduced Afrofuturist costuming as a mainstream hip-hop visual strategy. Ranked #1…

The director

Harold 'Hype' Williams (born August 1, 1970, Queens, NY) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He attended Adelphi University and began his career as a graffiti artist before transitioning to music video direction via Classic Concepts…