Kelis opens up in a new interview, discussing her early career including a bad contract with The Neptunes.
As the singer prepares to kick off a European tour this March celebrating the 20th anniversary of her debut album Kaleidoscope, she sits down in an intimate interview about her career. She details with The Guardian how she signed a contract with The Neptunes that left her being unpaid for album sales. Kelis went in hoping for a free and safe creative space but it turned out to not be the case.
“I was told we were going to split the whole thing 33/33/33, which we didn’t do,” she says. Instead, she says, she was “blatantly lied to and tricked”, pointing specifically to “the Neptunes and their management and their lawyers and all that stuff.”
During the interview, Kelis also expresses how she is a private person, but shares some details on her lifestyle. An avid farmer, Kelis gives the interviewer Hadley Freeman a tour of her property and informs her “I’m waiting for my greenhouse to be built. We have chickens coming and also baby goats.”
Kelis also shared how her existence as a Black woman placed her in a box she refused to let contain her creatively.
“The issue of race has been such a big part of my entire career. It was never something that I struggled with personally. But it was other people’s confusions. Macy Gray and I were the first [black women] to be considered alternative. But people were like: ‘But you’re black and alternative? What is that?’ says Kelis.
Read the full interview here.
