She's the Boss

Music Video Review
Artist: Kelis
Song: "Bossy"
Album: Kelis Was Here
Director: Chris Robinson


Kelis came into my life one lazy night during my senior year of college. One of my roommates was hanging around our living room, scanning the annals of pop culture, and, shocked, exclaimed, "This is what America is listening to!" He turned up the volume on Windows Media Player, and out poured "Milkshake." Kelis's voice had a tone that embodied shrill adolescence, and the song's content reinforced as much. At the time, I couldn't much stand "Milkshake." Slashed jeans, suggestive lollipops, and rhythmic breast-shaking make not for a lady prim and proper.

But thanks to the real world, my prudish days are over, and Kelis, now a married woman, a bit better coiffed and more stylishly refined, will be releasing her new album, "Kelis Was Here," tomorrow. "Bossy" is the first single, and it's nothing short of fantastic. The synthetic keyboard -- over which Kelis initially reasons for her dear listeners, "You don't even have to like me, but you will respect me" -- taps a morse code of sinister cool, and the promise of more narcissistic pronouncements to come.

And the video makes the case that Kelis isn't just out to conquer those who fell under the spell of "Milkshake", but that she's fit to be a queen of pop cool. The first scene features Kelis cutting her kinky curls, and we find out very quickly that she's traded them in for a sleek bob, several pairs of wrap-around shades, diamond-studded grills, an electric blue-dyed poodle, and a hot red Ferrari. It's not as though she does all of this in a vacuum either. Blinged out during the whole of the video, we track Kelis from her outdoor boudoir to a pool party ripped with (male) hotties; from which we get the opportunity to oogle as she splays out on a diamond-and-ruby-encrusted floor. Soon, she's less scantily clothed and sporting sunglasses while driving through late-night Downtown Los Angeles. And it's not long before she's alternately partying and rolling around the floor of a lush carpeted bar, replete with Veuve Cliquot, oysters and a unicorn ice sculpture, and, later, spotlit in front of a concrete wall. Ridiculous, excessive, and unruly as this all may sound, every single cut contributes to Kelis's uncanny now-ness.

To help, Chris Robinson takes care to put Kelis in tantalizing situations, ones in which it is not necessarily Kelis's sexuality that does the enticing, but those which underline the sway she holds over her domain. While there's something down to earth about Kelis -- we see her hanging out with friends, drinking, getting into a one-person food fight, doing a modified bridge pose in fancy silk clothes -- she's clearly the center of attention, and she holds court wherever she goes, her limp, apathetic hands ready to snap into a middle finger at any moment. At one point, Kelis even has the gall to push her boobs up at the bar, as though to assert her ubiquitous title from just a few years ago. And the gesture couldn't be hotter.

But the genius mark of the video is its knowingly hipsterly look. There's bling aplenty in Kelis's world, but she also wears clothes and inhabits spaces that are best described as indie and vintage; certainly not your typical rap/R&B ghetto fabulous feel. It's refreshing, as though Kelis isn't just looking to conquer her Jive demographic, but Pitchforkers and their curmudgeon critics too. Nothing's too exclusive for Kelis; she'll undoubtedly win her way in because she's knowingly, intelligently pan-cool (she even centers her chorus on how she made John Sterling -- presumably the Yankees sportscaster -- "switch debate"). And it's this dead-on confluence of hip that makes "Bossy" one of the best videos in months.