Missy Elliott's Behind the Music

VH1 is airing the Missy Elliott episode of Behind the Music all week, and it's one of her most revealing interviews to date. (She talks about her early childhood abuse, her weight and the image-obsessed music industry, her friendship with singer Aaliyah who died in a plane crash ten years ago, and her recent diagnosis of Grave's Disease.)

I'm generally not a fan of hour-long bios of musicians -- they tend to follow the same formula of starting from nothing, the rise to stardom, then the fall, and back up again -- but I thought this one was really well done. I've been a fan of her music, but I never really knew that much about her outside her music: she seems like such an intensely private person, at least in comparison to the compulsively Twittering, spotlight-addicted celebrities that tend to dominate headlines.