WOEBOT

Milkshake.

I was driving down the Portobello when I came across this poster, illuminated in bright sunshine, red pitched against a deep blue sky. What an awesomely arresting image! I stopped the car and snapped it. It's a bit of genius design, utterly uncluttered by marketing microtype; just Kelis in pink sitting on top of a gigantic milkshake.

Very naughty of course, and in keeping with the high-school imagery of the song:

My milk shake brings all the boys to the yard,
and their life, it's better than yours,
damn right it's beter than yours,
I can teach you, but I have to charge!

The single came out ages ago in the USA, and for some reason it's only been available over here as a Star Trak Import, only now gaining a British release proper. I think it was the only good Neptunes record of 2003; Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful" had it's fans, but it does nothing for me. And "Milkshake", what a strange song! It reminds me of nothing so much as the curious "left-footed" club tracks on Sleeping Bag records, like Nicky Siano's "Tiger Stripes" and The Jamaica Girls "Need Somebody New", too artful and sexy to groove conventionally, even seeming to move backwards. Another reference point must be Eve's "Gotta Man" which also pimped a naive, insouciant, lollipop-licking chorus. I mean, lets be frank!

I thought The Neptunes had shaken off Kelis. I read interviews with her where she dropped Pharrell's name one too many times; telling how she was involved in helping to conceive their clothing line. Unlike Missy, who *wrote* a massive amount of Timbaland's material, she seemed a dispensible pawn in The Neptunes fame game. I that found really sad. I liked her attitude alot, she seemed sufficently courageous to hold on to her gentle sexuality in the media glare. I thought she dared to be tender. Look at a woman like Madonna, and I'll probably be labelled sexist for this, but is she not a bit TOO ballsy? I respect powerful individual women, but isn't softness an incredibly pursuasive tool?

Trying to think of precedents for the kind of imagery Kelis uses here within the field of pop, I came up with a few leads, but none which had the same psychological depth.

Here for instance is Janet Jackson off of her debut LP cover. There are similarities here with the "Lolita" imagery Kelis is manipulating, though obviously (well it is the Jackson family!) there are more complicated overtones. Janet was probably very young here, whilst Kelis is a fully-grown woman.

Iconographically this is my favourite pairing:

Donna Summer from the reverse sleeve of "Love to Love You Baby', obviously a head-to-head combination of Black Southern Belle (itself a powerful detournement):

Vivien Leigh in "Gone With The Wind"

and Fragonard pastiche:

There are mildly disturbing overtones to "Milkshake", not just owing to it's US High School Disco trappings, but also (in this poster) of the commodification of women. "Take a lick" the image says. The project's head keeps it's head above water largely because we trust in Kelis's control over her own image. However none of this could be conceived as shocking in a culture dominated by the likes of Britney Spears and Girls Aloud and their desperately cynical use of similar imagery.

Of course K-Punk (at the old address) discussed with reference to Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" and Adolf McGrrot, the notion that women pimping their sexuality who were under the impression that they were liberating themselves, were sadly deluded. I have strong sympathy with the idea when run alongside Kylie Minogue and Ms. Aguilera, but such is the understatement of Kelis's tack that I'm more than inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Certainly I can't bring myself to get overly worried about it in this instance.

But take a look at this!

The similarity is undeniable, well OK she isn't wearing any clothes... Mel Ramos had, early on, a profile matching Lichtenstein's and Warhol's. It always amuses me to see his paintings in the same tomes alongside more knowing self-reflexive "sexists" like Tom Wesselmann and Allen Jones. Ramos is the Russ Meyer of Modern Art. I think he's an interloper, someone who just happened to share some approaches to the construction of pictures which filtered through from Graphic Design as Hockney et al. Ramos's later work really shows him up to be the tawdry (yet funny and fascinating) artist he is.

Very similar image to the Kelis "Milkshake" layout though producing very different codes. Oh, and have a laugh at this! It's really so wonderfully awful!

Kelis got married to Nas. Did you hear the story of what happened what they met? He said: "Wow, I'm so glad to meet you, you're the girl I'm going to marry." And she said: "Well that's funny cos you're the guy I always wanted to marry." The lady knows what she wants.

Posted by Woebot at January 11, 2004 09:54 PM