For a black woman who has done so much to advance the position of women within black music, and of black music within the wider world, it's disappointing to find Missy Elliott committing the misdemeanor of mild racism on her latest album. The Cookbook opens with a depressing skit involving a woman with a badly exaggerated 'Indian' accent reciting a recipe, and later includes another skit involving a supposedly Chinese woman in a nail parlour who keeps saying 'you wanna chicken wit cho manicure?' Which is a pity, because once you get past this rubbish, The Cookbook shows that Elliott can still deliver some jaw-dropping, mindblowing tracks: the bamboo beats of 'Joy', the old-skool scratches of 'Irresistible Delicious' and the delirious, babbling synths of 'Lose Control'. The rhymes are a sometimes- tedious litany of vengeance against an industry which 'tried to stop a chubby chick coming through' (she now wields enough power, she triumphally notes, to 'get yo' release dates moved'), although Missy's rampant egotism is more excusable than most (and the line about 'dropping hits from my booty-hole' makes you do a double-take). The tracklisting is carefully arranged: as it wears on, the quality drops significantly. But by that point, Missy's lying back in her car-shaped bed, counting the dollars.

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