Few female pop stars get to have the sort of big, dumb fun their male counterparts do. That clearly wasn't the case with ace rapper, writer and producer Missy Elliott, who crashed onto the Billboard albums chart this week in 1997 at #3 with her first solo album, Supa Dupa Fly, and made a video that involved her getting blown up at a gas station.

"I had an air pump at the bottom of my ankle, and they had to take me to the gas station and pump me up," Elliott said of the garbage-bag-like costume she wore in the video for "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)." "I was too big to fit in the car so I had to walk down the street with that and the glasses on, so imagine if you was out somewhere and you seen somebody walking down the street [like that]. You'd probably think they're bananas or something."

By her own estimate, Elliott was getting 15 calls a day to work with both new and established artists, and while her immediate future would include projects with Total and Brandy, she was most excited about a just-completed song with Mariah Carey.

"I still kind of trip out about it now," Elliott said, "because some people are just that large where you be like, 'I don't know if I could ever get to work with them,' but for [Mariah] to fly down to Virginia just to see us was crazy."

Elliott's collaboration with Mariah Carey, the song "Babydoll," later showed up on Carey's album Butterfly.

Korn announced this week they were dropping out of the Lollapalooza '97 tour because guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer had been diagnosed as having viral meningitis, a serious but treatable illness. One of the last things that Korn did on the tour was to take a video camera from MTV News and shoot their own backstage piece on the daily road outings.

David Silveria, drummer: This is a Korn/Lollapalooza journal. What we're gonna do here is take you through a little tour of Lollapalooza.

Jonathan Davis, singer: It's a cool vibe. It's just one big party. We gotta get some shots of those chicks. They're crazy.

Silveria: Randalls Island in New York, a very old venue. The front area, the pit area is altered. When we went on it just became one huge dust cloud.

Davis: I was coughing up brown loogies with dirt.

Silveria: Now we're in Cleveland, Ohio, backstage in this giant woodshed here. We're gonna go into the crowd and see what kind of trouble we get into.

Later ...

Silveria: A few of us walked out and 15, 20 kids walked up, and once they realized we were cool and shaking our hands, about 1,000 kids just rushed from the crowd and surrounded us and smashed us and we were just like, like actually mobbed. I was kind of scared for about a couple of minutes when security pulled us out. That was a pretty cool feeling, just to see these crazy kids think our dumb asses are cool enough to do that.

Back in '97 Matchbox 20 found themselves with a hit single, "Push," and a problem: The song's lyrics had aroused feminist ire.

"When 'Push' first came out I got a lot of angry, angry women [saying to me], 'I gotta talk to you about the lyrics of that song,' " frontman Rob Thomas said. "It's not about beating women. In fact, I turned around the point of view on [the song] and it was actually about a relationship that I was in and how I was manipulated. It was all about emotional manipulation and about emotional violence."

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