“Even hearing 50 years just didn’t even sound like the right number to me,” the “Bossy” singer told Blavity via Zoom. “You know, when you look at it historically, like we’ve been, I think, as Black and brown people, culturally, we’ve been spittin’ bars for centuries.”

Kelis is just as I expected her to be — everything about her is effortlessly cool, from her voluminous Afro to her ask-me-anything attitude.

“[Hip-hop’s] evolved a lot,” she added. “It’s become pop music, which just means that we are not just the voice of a nation, but the voice of a generation.”

Kelis knows something about being the voice of a generation. “Milkshake” left listeners’ mouths agape when it released in 2003. The song’s sound was unlike anything out at the time, and Kelis is well aware of its power and significance.

“It was a cultural moment,” she explained. “It changed the way that we listened to female artists, it changed the direction of music forever.”

Kelis said she remembers that music at the time was shifting from “very R&B, like pop-sounding music” to “something else where it’s like that line between hip-hop and R&B became very blurry.”

“I definitely feel like I was a part of that,” she said.

The 44-year-old shared it took “over two years” for “Milkshake” to hit radio waves.

“It was a fight. That experience was a perfect reminder of who I am as a person [and] who I am as an artist, because it is about putting something out there and standing behind it, whether people agree or understand it right away or not,” she explained.

That realization has informed the way she navigates the music industry, Kelis said.

“When you are in this business, you have to make a decision early about who you want to be,” she said. “Because if not, people are going to dictate that to you really quickly. It’s scary because it’s hard to decipher what’s yours and what’s not.”

Kelis is proud that she made the decision to be “who I wanted to be” early on in her career. She added that it helped her “drown out the noise” and not be “concerned about what people’s opinion” of her or her work is.

 

As for the music industry today, Kelis said she thinks it “sucks.”

“Overall, it’s trash,” she said with a chuckle, adding that she wished fashion “stayed in the ’90s.”

“A lot of this stuff we could repeat more maybe and repeat less of this,” she told me.

The New York City-native possesses the same confidence she has with music with food as well. Kelis has penned a cookbook, My Life on a Plate, and started her own beloved sauce line, Bounty & Full. Most recently, she partnered with Lactaid on the company’s “It’s Dairy” campaign. The campaign aims to show buyers that you can enjoy a milkshake made with real dairy — including the nutrients, flavor, taste and texture — without the stomach discomfort. The singer shared a remix of “Milkshake” for the campaign Tuesday on Instagram.

Kelis told Blavity that when Lactaid approached her with the idea for “It’s Dairy,” she was skeptical.

“I didn’t know enough about what lactose-free meant,” she said. I had to do my research, because I always feel like eating real ingredients, they’re always my first choice. I don’t like substitutes. I don’t like anything artificial.”

After going down a “rabbit hole of information” and learning that “it’s actually dairy and that Lactaid is actually milk,” she was sold.

“I was like, Oh, this is actually really cool,” she said. “I don’t think people really realize like it is real milk. And so you can have real milk and you can do all the things you do with a milk.”

In her research, Kelis discovered that while there’s “weird information” on the internet about dairy, ultimately, it’s a necessary food group that shouldn’t be avoided.

“We need calcium,” she explained. “We need all that stuff. It is good for us.”

Watch the singer and Lactaid’s “It’s Dairy” campaign video below.