Songfacts®:

• In "Gossip Folks," Missy Elliott addresses all the rumors that started floating around when she came into the public eye. We hear some of them in the whispers at the beginning:
  
  She lost weight by eating a cracker a day
  She was married to her production partner Timbaland
  She got hit with three zebras and a monkey
  
  This was 2002, when the internet made it possible to disseminate all kinds of nonsense, often on chat rooms and forums. Elliott is an introvert, so it was hard for her to handle, but in this song she shows she can clap right back.
• The nonsensical hook ("Izzo kizzay lizzay...") is sampled from "Double Dutch Bus," a 1980 hip-hop landmark by Frankie Smith, who invented his own language for the song's chorus, a kind of pig latin that doesn't mean anything. Smith also had a group of kids sing on it with him, giving it a whimsical feel.
  
  On Missy Elliott's hit "Work It," which like "Gossip Folks" is on her Under Construction album, the hook is "put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it," followed by that same phrase played backwards. These scrambled lyrics fit in well with Elliott's daring production style where we had no idea what was going to come next. It was fresh and funky, unlike anything else that was out there.
• Note that Elliott doesn't call out specific people as the gossipmongers in this song. The rumors and jabs that came her way were largely anonymous, reflecting the internet of 2002 when everyone hid behind a user name. In later years, hip-hop gossip became its own industry, with the feuds and beefs fueling the stories and diss tracks becoming more common. Elliott, though, didn't really beef because just about everyone agreed she was the shiznit. Plus, she produced many popular singers and rappers who would readily come to her defense, so picking a fight with her was a bad idea.
• Ludacris is featured on this track, coming in for a verse at the end. He was on the rise at the time, with hits like "Move" and "What's Your Fantasy," and he was in demand as a guest rapper. His first big feature came a year earlier when Elliott had him drop a verse on "One Minute Man."
  
  In 2003, the year after "Gossip Folks" was released, Luda put out his album Chicken-N-Beer, which includes his first #1 hit, "Stand Up." The following year he featured on the Usher smash "Yeah!"
• Elliott wrote and produced this song with Timbaland, her primary collaborator. They teamed up to produce tracks for the likes of Aaliyah, Da Brat, Total, and also worked on each other's albums. On "Gossip Folks," Ludacris also gets a songwriting credit for writing his verse, and the writers of "Double Dutch Bus" are credited because of the sample.
• Ludacris' line, "I got a headache and it's not a tumor," is a reference to the 1990 movie "Kindergarten Cop," where Arnold Schwarzenegger somehow ends up in a kindergarten classroom, where the kids annoy him to no end. When he gets a headache, one of the kids says, "It might be a tumor." That's when Arnold delivers his classic line, made funny by his thick accent: "It's not a tumor!"
• When Elliott throws shade at the "J.J. Fad wannabes," she's referring to the female rap trio J.J. Fad, who had a hit with "Supersonic" in 1988 but then vanished.
• The music video is set in a school where a lot of gossip goes on. It's loaded with kids dancing to the song, appropriate since kids sing on the chorus. The bus driver at the end is Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC.
  
  Elliott made lots of colorful, outlandish videos that earned loads of airplay on MTV and BET. This one was directed by Dave Meyers, who also did her videos for "Get Ur Freak On" and "Work It."
• "Gossip Folks" was a big hit for Elliott and helped her Under Construction album sell over 3 million copies. Along with Lil Kim and Eve, she was one of just a few female rappers churning out hits in the early '00s. All three faded away a few years later, with Elliott slowing down due to Graves' disease. Her 2005 album The Cookbook was her last.
  
  From 2005-2010 there were very few women making any noise in hip-hop. Nicki Minaj changed that with her 2010 debut album Pink Friday, and years later artists like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion emerged.