![]() In singing “Baby, you’re the one” for the Latin festivities of “Cobbler” and “Baby, don’t go” during the mellowed strut of “Rumble,” her affirmative reproductions of popularly-treasured clichés function to implore the audience not to go, that the audience is the One she wants to keep happy and by her side.ĭepending on how far you’d like to excavate, this indulgence of trite blandishments can even be framed as an unlikely case study in how all relationships are to a certain extent relationships with wider society, or rather attempts to appease that society and conform to its mores. Right or Wrong to “Give me what I want/ Give me what I need/ I’m begging you please/ I’m down on my knees.”Īnd even where things are a little more jubilant and self-assured, any alleviation emerges only because and for the benefit of a certain select crowd or market, rather than for the sake of the music “in itself” and Kelis “in herself.” It’s almost as if the carpe-diem sentimentality of “Forever Be” and the mundane tribute of “Bless the Telephone” are not, in their respective uses of piano-led balladry and folkish intimacies, so much professing their fondness for a significant other as professing their devotion to the commonplace notions of romance and relationships that Kelis imagines her desired audience to harbor. ![]() Moreover, there’s something unnerving about hearing Kelis play the role of the doting supplicant for so much of the album, her voice sounding vaguely tired and cracked in the nocturnal drift of “Runner” and the bar-room call-and-response of “Fish Fry,” where she pleads with Mr. Almost everything on the album is skewed complaisantly toward other people, with the libidinally-charged defiance of a “Milkshake” or a “Caught Out There” replaced by the domesticated “Breakfast” and the chick-flick fanfare that underlies its banal thanksgiving for another’s fidelity. Of course, the same charge could be leveled at every musician and creative on the planet, but on Food, the Other-oriented motivational core of artistic endeavor assumes a glaringly resigned nakedness. ![]() She sings, “I was the girl, my daddy was the world/ He played the notes and keys/ He said to look for melody in everything,” and with this identification of not just “the world” with her father, but by extension also the “notes and keys” and the definition of “melody” he impressed upon her, she lets slip that her love of music is at bottom identical to her love of validation, acceptance, and affection, to her deference to patriarchal authority, and to a dependency on approval and applause from her social milieu. ![]() For instance, “Jerk Ribs” may very well be the best of a tepid bunch, with the nimble bass and pushy horns of its verse, but its reminiscences on Kelis’s father, and more specifically on how he was responsible for instilling a passion for music in her, betray what the album’s musicophilia is really all about. Roger’s former energy and sass isn’t the only issue with Food, because it’s all-too possible to argue that the album’s “mature” restraint and politeness are bolstered by a complementary problem. But there’s a small hitch in its plans to mingle gustation and audition into one celebratory dish, and it’s that it represents the weakest music of her career, a recurrently insipid mélange of MOR pop, MOR R&B, and MOR AOR that’s been sieved of pretty much every flavor that installed the New Yorker as a harbinger for so many of the names (e.g., Rihanna, Lady Gaga) who today stand at the intersection between electro, dance, R&B, and pop. Or at least that’s what her sixth album might persuade you into believing, with its song titles that read like the menu from some po-mo restaurant and lyrics that tenderly quote her storied musical biography. Music may be the food of love for Shakespeare, but for Kelis, food is the love of music.
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