Kelis 'Tasty' album - MusicRemedy

It's been four long, chaotic years since Kelis first captivated the worldwide public's ears, eyes and imagination when she beat up a cheating boyfriend and led an angry pack of women down the street, screaming, "I hate you so much right now! Aaaargh!" in the video for "Caught Out There," the lead single from her debut album, 1999's Kaleidoscope. Now, with the release of her hotly anticipated new CD, Tasty, the boldly original 24-year-old siren proves that creating a provocative modern classic not only takes time, but is also well worth the unbearable wait.

Buttressed by an indestructible foundation of superb tracks supplied by virtually all of today's hottest hip-hop and R&B producers (the Neptunes, P. Diddy, Timbaland and Raphael Saadiq, to name but a few), Tasty represents a kind of "coming out" for Kelis. Her first two albums (the second, 2001's Wanderland, was never released in the U.S.) were created under the tutelage of the Neptunes' Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who she's known since she was a teenager. And although their presence is felt in five cuts on Tasty, including the phenomenal "Milkshake," the album is a noticeably stronger reflection of Kelis's distinctly pro-female and sexually forthright vision. She attributes much of this self-confidence to her romance with fianc? Nas (who appears on "Attention" and no doubt inspired Tasty's steamiest moments), as well as to her massive popularity in Europe, where she made the rounds on the festival circuit for nearly all of 2000 and 2001.

Born Kelis Rogers (her name, pronounced "kuh-LEESE," is a combination of her parents' first names), the singer-songwriter was raised in a middle-class household in Harlem. Her Puerto Rican and Chinese mother, Eveliss, is a fashion designer, and her black father, Kenneth, who died two days before she inked her former deal with Virgin in 1998, was a jazz musician and a Pentecostal minister. As a child, Kelis sang in her church choir as well as the Girl's Choir of Harlem, and played violin, piano and saxophone while attending a prestigious private school on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

When she was 13, Kelis shaved her head and, after it grew back, dyed it a succession of colors (blue-black, blood red, green, orange, platinum blond and pink). By the time she had turned 16 and enrolled as a drama major at New York's renowned La Guardia School for the Arts (immortalized in both the movie and television series Fame), her parents, worn out from trying to control her, kicked her out of the house.

Although Kelis remembers those tumultuous years as a miserable time during which she struggled to support herself by working odd jobs, she stuck it out in high school rather than dropping out. At La Guardia, she formed an ill-fated R&B trio called BLU (Black Ladies United) that caught the attention of key players in the music business who helped her land gigs singing backup for fledgling rap groups such as the RZA side project, Gravediggaz. After graduation, a friend introduced her to the Neptunes, with whom she formed an immediate musical bond, and with their support, she subsequently landed the record deal that yielded Kaleidoscope.

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Kelis - Tasty