At the age of 34, Melissa “Missy” Elliott has become the biggest female star in the macho world of rap. She has sold 12 million albums, has written and produced for Mariah Carey and Destiny’s Child, and has shared equal billing with Madonna on an advertising campaign for Gap. She’s also famous for not suffering fools, or journalists, gladly. She’s not the sort to change her tune for anyone. Except, it seems, for The Knowledge.

“I’m glad you’re telling me that,” says Elliott. I have just informed her that the phrase “batty boy”, which appears on two tracks on her sixth album, The Cookbook, might not do her any favours with some of her fans.

“It’s a good thing that I’m going to get a chance to go in there and correct this,” she says, eyes widening as the full implications of the homophobic expression sink in. She claims to be unaware of the phrase’s meaning: “It’s just something my Jamaican friends say to each other, and I was saying it to imitate them”; nor does she know that several dancehall artists have been banned from performing for inciting violence against gays.

“I would never want to offend anybody,” Elliott insists, vowing to remove the lyrics. “If that’s the case, then I have to switch that up.”

We’re talking in an upmarket hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where Elliott has been playing a work-in-progress version of the record to invited journalists. Several guest stars have yet to record their parts and, as our little chat has demonstrated, she may need to change some lyrics. The promotional cart seems to be running in front of the musical horse.

It is strange to hear someone at the sharp end of such a costly enterprise admitting that she doesn’t know what some of her own lyrics mean. And if anyone should be sensitive to charges of homophobia it is Missy Elliott, whose sexuality has long been the subject of rumours — springing largely from the fact that she is single. She believes that she has shied away from relationships because she saw her mother beaten by her father when she was a child.

“She was so dependent on my father and felt she could do nothing without him,” she recalls. “But when she got up and left, she was stronger than ever before. I learnt from that. I think I’m happiest by myself. I know that’s crazy — people don’t wanna die alone! But most of my friends are in relationships and they’re miserable! They call me on the phone, like: ‘He did this!’ ‘She did that!’ I’m like: ‘Wow!’ Is anybody happy?’” Another thing that makes Elliott an unlikely purveyor of hate rhymes is her status as a role model to another minority in her genre. Women are still massively under-represented in all areas of hip-hop. Until Elliott’s emergence in the late 1990s, women in rap videos were either groupies or pole-dancers. Overnight, Elliott made it hip to be a woman in control.

One of few rappers to captivate an audience among the chattering classes, Elliott intrigued as much for how she looked as how she sounded. Her 5ft 2in (1.52m) frame is now 5st (30kg) lighter than when she donned an inflatable black plastic suit and stuck herself in front of a fish-eye lens for the video to The Rain in 1997, but she’s still larger than life. She’s an artist who has built a career on turning her idiosyncrasies into gold-dust.

“It was like: ‘She’s big and she’s proud about it,’” says Elliott of the response to her early look. “That gained me fans. Especially women of that size. They loved my confidence.”

She has played the men at their game, some of her lyrics rivalling her more ribald contemporaries for libidinous content. “People say: ‘You talk about sex a lot’,” she giggles. “And I reply: ‘Wow, I do, don’t I.’ You would think I’d been locked up in a cell!” Elliott’s strongest suit has always been her creativity. With her production partner, Tim “Timbaland” Mosley, she is widely credited with reinvigorating hip-hop in the late 1990s. The pair’s signature sound, memorably crystallised on the 2001 single Get Ur Freak On, added samples from Asian music to wall-shaking beats, bringing a space-age sheen to a genre that had lapsed into formula.

She won’t speculate on whether her slimmed-down image has had any effect on her music, yet on Under Construction (2003), her first album after shedding the pounds, she also trimmed her sound, reining in some of her excesses. It’s her best work. The Cookbook seems its closest relative, Elliott feeling the record returns her forcefully to her hip-hop roots.

“We went so far left that I didn’t want to lose people,” she says. “I look at Prince — a genius so far ahead that he started to make music that was too far left for us to understand.”

The Cookbook is designed to enrapture the hip-hop fan with paeans to old-school legends, while continuing to challenge preconceptions. She has even fulfilled an ambition by working with the Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams, whose production on On & On works on both levels: a devastating hip-hop track which, unusually, was constructed without drum sounds.

But is this changeable artist consistent when it comes to her promises? A month later a copy of the finished album arrives at The Knowledge: the offending lyrics have been removed. “You bring it to my attention? You’ll never hear it,” she had vowed, breaking into a cackle. “Never.” Missy Elliott’s word is clearly her bond.

The Cookbook is out now on Elektra

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