Critical Reception
John Bush of allmusic described the song as "turn the tables on male rappers, taking charge of the sex game, matching their lewdest, rudest rhymes, and also featuring the most notorious backmasked vocal of the year." Bush cited the song as an example of Elliott's "artistic progression, trying to push hip-hop forward...neatly emphasizing her differences from other rappers by writing tracks for nearly every facet of the female side of relationships." However, L. Brent Bozell III criticized the song's production and lyrical content: "The only melody on this "minimalist" single sounds like a siren on a toy fire truck...The lyrics are unbelievably blunt, and far too obscene for a family newspaper. You'll have to turn to your children's favorite station to hear them. How can this trash not trickle down to the kids who love listening to the radio and watching MTV?"
Rolling Stone ranked "Work It" 25th in its list 100 Best Songs of the 2000s.
Read more about this topic: Work It (Missy Elliott Song)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)