Big stars do not conduct interviews unattended. There is always somebody looking after them, a press officer or manager to let us humble hacks know when our time is up. This role is not usually performed by the star’s husband, yet that’s what you get when you meet Kelis in a Manhattan restaurant. Hubby sits on the far side of the big round table, taciturn apart from the occasional “five more minutes and your time is up” type comment — and a cut-throat motion to shut his good lady up when she starts telling me that he always leaves the toilet seat up. Thankfully, the extremely self-assured Kelis is having none of his interventionism: she laughs and carries on regardless.
What makes the situation even stranger is that this man is none other than the world-famous rapper Nas, whom the singer married in a private ceremony 18 months ago. And if that wasn’t enough, his daughter (from a previous relationship) is also with them, a chubby-cheeked 12-year-old called Destiny. While her giggling presence beside her attentive stepmum reveals some great family dynamics in action, it also causes a rapid rethink on my part. How to ask Kelis about lyrics from her new album such as “He’s making me hot — or is it his c***?” while she and her husband are feeding the child passion-fruit ice-cream? Yet what’s interesting about Kelis, who rose to fame with the ground-breaking single Caught Out There (better known as the “I hate you so much right now” song) in 1998, is that she has always managed to be sexual without being tacky. She has walked around topless with her hands clasped around her chest in videos, without creating a look-at-me neediness. Her song In Public, featuring her husband, was all about the joys of alfresco rumpy-pumpy, yet it didn’t come across as a Jordan and Pete style celebrity couple providing Too Much Information. Milkshake, with its tales of her milkshake bringing all the boys to the yard, was alluring but not cutesy, and certainly didn’t employ the in-your-face raunch so beloved of many of her contemporaries. Use of the body as a marketing device has never seemed to be Kelis’s game.
And where many big American stars, such as Beyoncé, hide their real selves in a bland front, Kelis is fully three-dimensional, outspoken and with a dress sense as idiosyncratic as her voice. She is fully aware that however many records she sells (and however modest her new haircut), people will always see her as “a little leftfield”. I ask the native New Yorker, who has just turned 27, how she walks the fine line between using her body and selling it. “Because I’m a strong woman, I’m very decisive, I know who I am and I know what I want, so my opinion is not easily swayed. I’m not a follower. I think that people’s view of sexuality is warped. Everyone thinks that if you’re writhing in oil and you’re naked then you’re sexy. I don’t,” she chuckles, in her trademark deep voice, sounding suspiciously as though she’s referring to Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty video.
Even so, she admits that other people’s opinions can be surprising. She was shocked to read someone’s comments about her Milkshake video. “I didn’t think that I was overly raunchy or tastelessly sexy in that, but they were really critical of it, and I decided that it’s because I am so comfortable in myself that even the smallest things I do are seen as very sexual, even just normal things.”
Does being physical often get confused with being sexual? “Absolutely! I’m a very physical person, like, for example, I touch when I talk, because I want you to know that I’m for real when I’m talking to you.” (My knees can confirm that her turquoise-nailed hands do indeed like to give a good whack for emphasis.) She says it was her beautiful mother who first gave her a sense of what sexiness was. “When I was a little girl, I remember so vividly looking at my mom and thinking, how fabulous, I want to be like that. She had long black hair, and it was her red lips and red nails that I thought were so sexy. I thought, ‘That’s a woman’. And I think that sexuality is something that, if you embrace it properly, without someone dictating to you what sexy is, then it’s right.”
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Kelis Rogers’s mother, Eveliss, is a fashion designer of Puerto-Rican and Chinese descent, who raised her four daughters in Harlem. Their father, Kenneth, was a black jazz musician who went on to become a Pentecostal minister, though it seems he wasn’t always around. Hers wasn’t an underprivileged childhood — she studied saxophone and violin and attended private school, ending up, aged 16, at the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, better known as the school from Fame. Yet it was an overly strict upbringing, and she made her escape from her parents while still in her early teens.
The fight for independence clearly left her with a preference for being in charge, something she refers to her new single, Bossy, in which she reminds us of her previous achievements with lines such as “I’m the first girl to scream on a track”. The video shows Kelis cutting all her hair off — a genuine act which had to be shot in one take. “It could have been shot better, but who cares. I waited and waited for the video before I would cut it — I was so ready to cut my hair!” The track is playfully boastful, but on meeting Kelis in the flesh, it soon becomes clear that it is in no way tongue-in-cheek.
“It’s a declaration record. I think my first singles (from new albums) always are; they need to be. It kind of gives you an overview of how I’m feeling right there. I’ve gone through a lot with this album, so it’s about leaving my mark. Sometimes you have to remind people who you’ve been so you can be who you are. All these other singles now have all these other girls rapping and yelling — and I did it in ‘98!” You’re only 27 but you’re talking like you’ve been around for ever. “I have! I mean, I’m on my fourth album. The only other current female solo artist in that position is probably Missy (Elliott). Everyone else is kinda new at it. God bless them all, they’re all great. I think they’re all beautiful, strong, talented women — just not relevant to me.”
Kelis likes being hated nearly as much as she likes being loved. What she does not enjoy is that grey space in between. She says she likes releasing what she calls “chancey” records, that people will either go mad for “or despise with a passion”. But what’s wrong with people just thinking you’re OK? “Because I want people to feel something. I don’t wanna be OK to anybody. Either you hate me or you love me, and it’s been like that my whole life. I am not for everybody. I’m not pop. I’m not meant for children. I don’t censor myself well. I’m not fluffy and cuddly.” Platitudes about strong women and knowing one’s own mind can sound a little tired, but coming from Kelis, who has an unnerving ability to look you straight in the eye and say exactly what she thinks, the truth in the words is palpable. In the restaurant she gives the waiter strict instructions on how she wants everybody’s food served (she is an accomplished chef and has a cookbook coming out later this year), she tells her hubby exactly what new school clothes they need to get for Destiny and she deals with my questions head-on.
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Precise with language, Kelis is keen to point out the difference between behaviour that is contradictory and that which is hypocritical. Yet another song on the new album, a duet with Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley fame, reveals a very different side to her. It’s a modest little number wherein the singer claims that she is “just a little star”. It sounds like something you might sing to a child to encourage them to follow their dreams. Was she trying to encourage the young to become musicians? “Absolutely not! Everyone young that I’ve met wants to be an artist, wants to be a rapper or a singer. I thought about it and I’m just like, why is it so glorified? On one level I get it: we’re musicians and music is always the thing that moves people. But there isn’t anything more special about me than there is about you, or anybody else. We are all people, we all deserve to be here. I have my down moments and I have my insecurities. I have a real life and it does not revolve around this crappy industry. I have a real life with a real family and real friends. Those are the things that are most important.”
But when Kelis was a kid, surely she dreamt of celebrity? “I didn’t have a dream to be famous — I didn’t even know what fame was,” claims the graduate of the Fame school. “I saw artists I thought were amazing and I wanted to be like them.” Kelis’s family might be musical but they’re not showbiz — her three sisters all trained in medicine. “And my middle sister has more masters degrees than anyone I know. My family — they nurture something else.”
I ask Kelis if she ever watches politicians and has those “If I ruled the world” moments? “You know what? That line of thinking is the exact problem with the world. Everyone looks at what’s going on and thinks, ‘Oh, if I could do that,’ but you have no idea what it takes to do that! Now I think politicians are disgusting but I know they weren’t born that way. They got made that way because the business they’re in is ugly and evil, and to survive and to provide for their familes they become vile people. I don’t want that. The music industry is vile enough.” And with that, the superstar is off — sunglasses on, family in tow and no bodyguards anywhere to be seen — to buy school clothes, do some cooking, and not quite rule the world.