Who's the Boss?
Kelis is reinventing the role of women in hip hop. Or is she?
By Carina del Valle Schorske
May 15, 2008
Singer Kelis performs on stage in Bern, Switzerland. (KEYSTONE/Peter Klaunzer)Kelis Rogers-Jones—commonly referred to as just Kelis—is probably best known for two things: writhing on a soda fountain counter in her 2003 music video “Milkshake” and her marriage to acclaimed rapper Nas. As a young woman, Kelis attended the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Music Arts & Performing Arts, where she mastered the violin, piano, and saxophone. She also released four albums by her 27th birthday. Kelis’ success in America has been limited to her 2003 single “Milkshake,” but she has a strong fan base in Europe. In 2006, the video exerted its authority—petulant or empowering, depending on whom you ask and how you’re listening—over American radios. But in the end, who is Kelis the boss of? A close examination of the lyrics and video for her single “Bossy” shows she both defies and reinforces stereotypes about women in hip hop.
Music videos like “Bossy” allow the artist (or in most cases the artist’s managers and publicists) to manage audiotopia, the intersection of race, music, and culture. Hip hop can be an aesthetic as much as a message, and “Bossy”‘s video evokes complicated reactions. Kelis’ voice, as she repeats the catchphrase “I’m bossy!,” can most accurately be likened to the spoiled whine of a five-year-old girl. Most male hip-hop fans I know were quick to point this out, and one of them went so far as to jibe, “This song just shows what a pussy Nas is.” To me, there is nothing overt or “no-doubt-about-it” about Kelis. If she sounds like a petulant five-year-old, the song shows how unempowered women remain. If the song just shows what a pussy Nas is, the song’s threatening. But if Kelis’ subversion is practically unrecognizable, is it really subversive?
The opening image of the video is a little unsettling—a puffy white poodle sits in the middle of a vast, manicured lawn where Kelis also reclines in a large canopied bed, refusing to acknowledge the incongruency of a Versailles-style boudoir stranded on an empty green. Her voice immediately picks up over the scene as she snips away at her signature Afro: “You don’t have to love me. You don’t even have to like me. But you will respect me.” The New York Times 2006 fall fashion supplement cited this scene as a “no-doubt-about-it sign of self-determination,” noting that “short hair may not command desire, but it sure commands power.” This analysis ignores the racial component of doing away with her “authentic” hairdo. Before “Bossy,” Kelis was more or less the only woman visible in hip-hop with chemical-free hair, unlike Beyoncé’s long golden waves or Ciara’s voluminous extensions. In this sense, her new straightened bob seems almost assimilationist—the loss of one more girl to the hegemonizing force of mainstream culture. On the other hand, Kelis does not just “appear” in the “Bossy” video with new hair. She shows us how that hair was made, and shows that the scissors—if not the flatiron—were in her own hands.
Her newly straightened hair is her ticket into the hip hop world—a world, to quote Jay-Z, of “money, cash, hos.” Except in her case the “hos” are male, and Kelis walks on their naked backs in four-inch heels. Later on, an ebony-colored supermodel slaps an equally model-esque boy toy across the face. If the song is “not about bossing a man,” but rather about “being in control of your life,” as Kelis claims, then why is the video punctuated by images of female-on-male violence? All of these instances of abuse take place in a room overflowing with oysters, champagne, ice sculptures, and jewel-toned silk. The room, like the vast bed and lawn, recalls Versailles. Kelis presides over the scene declaring her bossiness rather laconically.
The comfortable place for women in hip-hop has generally been “dancing outside” as one of “dozens of scantily-clad, lighter-than-a-paper-bag sistas and mamis,” Raquel Rivera, a professor at Hunter College in New York City, wrote in her 2003 book, "New York Ricans From the Hip-Hop Zone." Kelis, who makes Rivera’s list of influential Puerto Ricans, seemed to break this mold with her 2006 album Kelis Was Here. The primary departure from this gender paradigm takes place during the breaks, when a solitary Kelis appears against a white background to mouth “diamonds on my neck, d-diamonds on my grill” more or less in drag. Hooded in an oversized sweatshirt, draped in diamond chains, and masked by huge “stunna shades,” Kelis runs her tongue over her diamond-studded grills in blatant mockery of the typical gestures of male rappers like, well, Nas. In another one of the video’s unsettling about-faces, her subversion of male musical tropes is complicated (or reversed) by the fact that she is dog-tagged as Nas’ wife. But as soon as the inconstancy flashes, her lyrics remind us “I’m the one that’s tattooed on his arm.” Fair enough.
Perhaps the most disturbing turn of the video and song does not have to do with who has authority but rather why she has authority. The guest verse by rapper Too $hort reminds us that the "who" and the "why" are connected. He locates her power in the fact that “she’s fine and she’s pretty”—a sex object and a “classy lady”—and in the fact that she costs “about a million dollars, playa,” that there “ain’t no refunds, she spent the cash man, in your Benz with her friends in the fast lane.”
Is Too $hort saying what the video says but Kelis does not, or is he contradicting Kelis’ message? According to Too $hort’s rap, Kelis’ authority must come at the expense—literally, the financial castration—of the men who desire her. What happened to the creative autonomy of “I switched up the beat of the drum”? Too $hort’s rap, while problematic in its conflation of feminism with masculine disenfranchisement, largely overshadows Kelis’ lyrics. He is snappier, fresher, and more subversive: “Ya know / it’s a hard pill to swallow / when they tell you you strange / and you ain’t hot / but in the blink of an eye / they got on what you got.” Lyrically he matches, if not surpasses, Kelis.
But when you actually read the lyrics to “Bossy,” there is something intoxicating about her assertion of authority, largely because that authority seems to be derived from her creativity as an artist. Kelis is “bossy” because she’s “the first girl to scream on the track,” because she “switched up the beat of the drum,” and because she’s “the chick that’s raisin’ stakes.” In the written lyrics, Kelis does not derive her authority from her “pretty eyes, [light], flawless skin” nor even from her financial independence, as male rappers and their female imitators do. But “Bossy” is not a poem to be read. It is not a written text; it is audiotopia. When the same poodle from the first scene appears in the last scene dyed electric blue, Kelis reminds us once again how “fresh” she really is.
As a producer of the track as well, Kelis made a conscious effort not to rely upon the talent and fame of her erstwhile bandmates, the Neptunes. “The way this industry is set up, if you don’t take credit, people assume there’s some great man behind it all. Did [the Neptunes] have a huge part in my development? I would be total jerk to say no, y’know? But this is not a Frankenstein situation here. It’s not Weird Science,” Kelis said in a July 2006 GQ article. In the end, “Bossy” only reached number 16 on the Billboard charts. Kelis’ ranking is either a triumph or a defeat for women in hip-hop—or maybe we should stop requiring each individual woman to be metonymic for the women of her race.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a junior at Yale University. An earlier version of this article appeared in Hippolytic, part of the Campus Publications Network.
Social Bookmarking
--------
Comments
!
Great observation. I do feel as though most hip hop women often feel conflicted in choosing which songs to place on their records. Somehow society doesn’t allow them to be empowering and sexy. Therefore, may hip hop women have to choose side. Which in it self seems ludicrous… women can be sexy while empowering. I love the way Kelis try to confront this conflict. I own all her records and although at times I disagree with her stylistic choices I must say that I’m in awe of her ability to be so honest about her femininity and so straight forward about her “masculinity”.
— S0bbie - May 16, 07:23 AM - #Kelis is a force and she doens’t give a shiet if is contradicting she says what she wants to when she wants to and that in it self weather people or listening or not is sexy and is also a command of ones own power and thats the one thing people forget who cares who she’s saying it to the fact is that she speaks her mind and we as human beings weather women or men are all guilty of being contradictions.
— Thu Cao - May 23, 03:04 PM - #