On her first single, 1999’s “Caught Out There,” she screams, “I hate you so much right now” at a cheating boyfriend. She is a smart, opinionated, quasi-feminist sex symbol who can’t stop telling everyone to admire the goods and then fuck off. Raised in Harlem and educated at the progressive Country Day School and the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, the 27-year-old singer effortlessly straddles an array of social circles, including rock (she toured with U2) and the downtown club scene (“I’m a gay guy’s best accessory”). The men’s magazine King once decreed Kelis “hip-hop’s hottest housewife,” but her persona is far more complex than that. He has her naked body tattooed on his bicep. The only thing that betrays her pop-star status is the conspicuous array of diamonds adorning her ears, wrist, and fingers, including a giant rock from her husband, Nas, the acclaimed New York rapper. (“These are new-real eighties jeans give you a soccer-mom butt,” she says.) There is a long, homely rat tail hanging down the back of her retro Salt-N-Pepa crop. She’s wearing enormous white bubble sunglasses and tight, ultrahigh-waisted flares. “Now I’m all about jumpsuits.” Unsurprisingly, she’s a frequent victim of Us Weekly’s “Fashion Police” patrol.
“I told my friends they were coming back for three years, but they laughed at me,” she says. Today, as she combs the racks at What Goes Around Comes Around, a vintage-clothing showroom in Tribeca, she is trying to take credit for resurrecting eighties MC Hammer pants. In the world of R&B, Kelis is an anomaly, a pretty singer who likes to be disliked, feuds like a gangsta rapper, and dresses like a Ludlow Street fashionista.
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