Beyond a certain level of empyrean Beyoncé-scaled fame, pop stars are often obliged to field dumb questions from some media institution or another—especially in a music market like this one, where the #2 American album last week sold a record-low 30,000 copies, or 0.0001 per cent of the U.S. population. So it was that Kelis had the opportunity to politely shade a New York Times Magazine reporter with responses like, “I’ve been doing music since 1998, so obviously longevity is not an issue for me,” or, “I don’t know what Paul Newman’s situation is, but I make sauce” (she started producing a whole line).
The best of these came after a lazy series of questions concerning her ex-husband Nas, who is clearly no closer to getting over their marriage than he is to moving on from recording Illmatic just the once: “I don’t really listen to his music anyway.” But the observation that she’s been on a radio somewhere for 15 years now is more revealing than she perhaps intended: study her career, and you find a musician coolly waiting for fashions to catch up, as if she were unstuck in time.
“Jerk Ribs,” the lead track and single from her new album Food, makes that point a little more emphatically. It sounds like a soul record from the 1970s that’s been nestled at the back of a crate ever since, but nothing much like the various British revivalists that description might bring to mind. As produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, the horns have Afrobeat aplomb, and Kelis sings of personal history rather than nostalgized pastiche: “In Harlem, where I started to breathe / Your beat was like a soundtrack to me / I was the girl, my daddy was the world / He played the notes and keys / He said to look for melody in everything.” On “Jerk Ribs,” she’s still there, surfacing from the 3 train right when the sunlight hits the Studio Museum. A musician as unhurried as Kelis would never bother agonizing over any manifestos, but we might take the key hook for one: “It feels just like it should.”
