KELIS - Kelis Was Here (2006)

PS: I still hate Kelis.

i had really high hopes as i really like Bossy and i think Blindfold Me is fantastic. the rest of it is just kinda soft and i honestly miss the neptunes

AND LONG! 79 minutes!

"What's That Right There" is the kind of generic club banger I wasn't aware R&B was still making (I thought hip hop had taken over this responsibility).

Someone was totally OTM about the Too $hort verse being too pussy and accommodating to Kelis; i dunno, it didn't bother me at first but the song would work so much better if he pushed back and maybe got a call and response fight going.

also, i've never been big on nas--maybe the only person i know who didn't like illmatic--but the rest of the track is damn sweet.

Don't Make Me Wait
Emergency ft Raphael Saadiq
Freak Me Slow
Running Mate
Bossy [Remix] ft. Slim Thug

quite impresssed with some of the will i am beats too, but agree (if its been said) that the balance of the album is kinda unsatisfying. the saadiq stuff would stick out even more awkwardly if shondrae dominated any further, altho the hint of a good shondrae/kelis concept album along the lines of cassie du jour (or i guess kelis/neps and any other muse/auteur job passim)(fucking hell that christina milian album was TERRIBLE okthnxbye) is tantalizing granted.

Whereas this album is so.. understated. I can't remember an R&B album where a singer projected her voice less, most of the time Kelis sounds like she was just getting over a cold and then spent three days down a well screaming for help, and then was marched into the studio. And that lack of projection makes these songs all sound kinda quiet, it really undercuts any sense of mad-genre-hopping which would otherwise be quite prominent perhaps to the point of being unbearable.

re milian: yknow tbh i couldnt rule out someone else enjoying it, or indeed finding it an electropop masterpiece or whatever. but personally i cant get over the greasily desperate HI WE'RE FUCKIN NOW vibe of christina and dre of cool&dre together, wherein christina is clearly on a lame nick cannon rebound and dre is just way too fucking pleased with himself. (the muse/auteur relationship canon is v delicate! remember how u always wanted kelis and pharrell to come off it and get together, but they never did and it was cute and sad.) how this all comes across in an album of mildly innocuous techy zzz beats remains obscure to me, but it's there.

She should have just gotten teedra to ghostwrite the whole thing for her.

I think I like all the Will.I.Am tracks then! Andy hates "What's That Right There" I know, but it reminds me of going to R&B clubs and dancing to "Giddy Up (The Brick Song)" and Eve's "Got What You Need" and Ice Cube's "You Can Do It".

"altho i still dunno about the understated aspect yet - my idea of the kelis erm mythos doesn't preclude her doing that, if u know wot i mean, so it's not so much surprising. in the context of all rnb albums tho, maybe."

No i agree, Kelis has always been relatively understated in her vocals, screaming and the like aside, but it's gotten a lot more obvious with this album I think. It's interesting to hear her talk about being a rapper on "Circus" b/c a lot of the album almost verges on spoken word (and for a while I thought on "Bossy" she was boasting "I'm the first girl to spit on a track" - an audacious and obviously incorrect claim but it briefly fascinated me!) Also before she had big choruses and flashy production and the like which made the songs more extroverted seeming.

She's so hawt.

Maybe it goes without saying.

The cheap chime-y bit does remind me of "Boyz-N-the-Hood."

Album The world needs more Shondrae, less Will.I.Am (sp? cap?).

I think "Morris Brown" would be huge at any time other than right now. Right now hip-hop radio is so invested in the post-crunk diaspora that anything that doesn't make at least nominal nod to crunk sounds way out of line. I think that's why "Deja Vu" didn't do well either. (Both of those are top 5 singles of the year to me.)
-- Rodn y Greene (rodneyjgreen...), August 22nd, 2006 2:55 PM.

:-p

Deja Vu is terrible! Bossy ain't the best single of the year by any stretch but i like it.

(i haven't seen the video though)

the wife swears he's gay and she's his beard and this is further proof for her.

http://image.listen.com/img/356x237/0/8/8/4/514880_356x237.jpg

I have an incredible weakness for horn funk. Always have, always will. I can't remember the last time I disliked a song as much as I dislike "Bossy", though.

my favourites on two listens are 'blindfold me', 'ahhh shit' and 'little star'. 'blindfold me' is, like, the first* crunk'n'b song i've heard which is ACTUALLY crunk as in crazy and drunk - all other crunk'n'b is, as cis and i realised t'other day, in fact all about self-control and poise.

*apart from 'girlfight' but as the rest of brooke's album demonstrated, that was more camping it up than crunking it up

Lex yr spot on here, I thought of Brooke Valentine as well, and immediately thought the same thing - this album is probably more eclectic but there's something very unflashy about it. I really think it's her voice which ties everything together: I feel like it's more distinctively her than it's ever been. And maybe that's why I'm responding to her directly rather than the songs.

of the brooke valentine album, except where that was mad keen to draw attention to its eclecticism, kelis was here pretends that all the styles it covers are in fact the same thing.

well. brooke did flaunt her eclecticism (camply, ya) but teh cumulative effect wz an utterly cohesive dominant brooke personality - while as said above it's kinda unfair to beat kelis with the eclectic stick this time round it's still an exaggeration to say the album manages anywhere near chain letter's total internal logic, i think. and yeah part of that disparateness may well be down to her proposed subdued prescence here.

in other news, i wz thinking how much monica's ace 'everytime the beat drops' woulda been the perfect brooke comeback single today. (her actual ones are rubbish.)

I really like Lil Star (feat. Cee-Lo), it's a bit sappy but I love Cee-lo and theres something about the chorus and her voice on this track that makes it awesome.

yes i am head over heels in love with 'little star' - it's very sumptuous compared with the rest of the album.

really, really into kelis's little-girl rapping on 'i'm a handful' (and the bizarre clanking backing! this is sampled from somewhere, right?) and 'fuck them bitches' (which works very well as a clean edit as every second word is mangled up), too. and the pass out/spazz out rhyme on 'awww shit', too.

it does drag in areas but in a kind of relaxed, drifting way - stuff like 'trilogy'.

Doesn't touch the first disc of the x-ina album.

Also, I just want to say that I fully endorse Kelis's new haircut, which looks like it came off of Makeoutclub.com(!)

your download might be the initial 128-quality mp3s initially sent out tim (which are also unfinished versions) - i listened to it once and then demanded a finished copy because i couldn't hear anything. it's still v bassy and understated on the final copy though.

it's one of those albums where, yeah, there are the obviously great monster hits-in-waiting like 'blindfold me', but each listen reveals another previously-overlooked gem. 'weekend'!

she's not out of contract or something after this record is she?

/baseless speculation

i think every artist ever has released albums they weren't wholly invested in because of contracts.

bossy blows

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gi8g8dy2izE

Apparently Kelis is an advocate of kidnapping and rape. lol. What an awesome video... Kelis and Nas are just soo much cooler than Jay-Z and Beyonce.

Did anyone see her on the recent tour? She played 3 dates here but couldn’t go