That's What Little Girls Are Made Of

Album: Here's to New Dreams (1993)
Charted: 68
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a song from the debut album released by Raven-Symoné. The actress and singer first came to the public attention at the age of 3 when she played Denise Huxtable's precocious stepdaughter Olivia Kendall on The Cosby Show.
  • Raven-Symoné was just 7 years old when she began her singing career after signing with MCA Records. She released her debut album, Here's to New Dreams, the following year after taking singing lessons from a then unknown Missy Elliott.
  • The track was co-written and co-produced by Missy Elliott, who was credited as Melissa Elliott. It was the first song that Elliott wrote for another artist; she also contributed a verse for the recording featuring scat singing and Jamaican-style toasting.
  • Missy didn't appear in the visual, which instead featured a thinner, light-skinned actress lip-syncing her part. According to Elliott, she was not informed of the video shoot and she used this disappointment as motivation. Missy would embrace and even exaggerate her look on her own recordings, such as the oversized garbage-bag costume she wore in her 1997 clip for debut single "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)."
  • The song samples both "Funky Worm" by Ohio Players and "The Payback" by James Brown.
  • Released as the lead single from Here's to New Dreams, the song peaked at #68 on the Billboard Hot 100. However, the album sales were disappointing, and Raven-Symoné was dropped from MCA Records in 1995. She subsequently found some chart success with the soundtracks for the Disney Channel's Cheetah Girls movies.

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