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Societies that tend to denigrate women often represent them as subnormal and female sexuality as corrupting and pathological. Racialized capitalist cultures tend to have hierarchies in their devaluation of women.
— Joy James, "Sexual-Racial Stereotypes"

Music video illustrates televisual excess better than any other video form.
— Beretta Smith-Schomade, Shared Lives: African American Women and Television

I was happy to see "Milkshake" blow up, though by the time it did, I had been listening to the MP3 for six months; and by the time it was everywhere, I never wanted to hear it again.
— Jess Harvell, "Dear Kelis", Seattle Weekly (10 March 2004)

As exasperating and exhilarating as music videos can be, they are occasionally useful barometers of cultural import. Two recent movies reveal this import in different ways, using music videos to mark moments and moralities, as means to forge audience sympathy for their youthful protagonists. In the first, the Big-inspired 13 Going on 30, 13-year-old Jenna is practicing the dance moves for "Thriller." As she performs in front of a small television in her parents' rec' room, she's spotted by her neighbor, a shy boy whose crush on her is only exacerbated by the sight of Jenna's adorable, energetic awkwardness. This moment is revisited a few scenes later, when Jenna, transformed into a slick, 30-year-old women's magazine editor (now played by Jennifer Garner), is enjoined to energize a snotty, posh party full of cheerless, harried, mostly white adults. Still seeing herself as a kid, she has the DJ play "Thriller" (and of course, he has it in his crate); within minutes, she has everyone doing those strange monster-moves along with her. It's a triumph of hygienic, manic crossover: nostalgic, delightful, and evacuated of any weirdness, sexuality, Michael-ness, or blackness.

The second scene is from Mean Girls. Here, the music video moment is neither charming nor unifying. Instead, it illustrates the ways that mean girls are produced by popular culture. As new girl in school, Cady (Lindsay Lohan) is learning how to negotiate the most ferocious clique on campus. She is invited into the hallowed home of the head mean girl in charge, Regina (Rachel McAdams). As she enters, she sees Regina's younger sister dancing to a music video on a huge TV screen: she looks about eight or nine, wears a cute little ponytail and tight little pants, and shakes her little booty to "Milkshake".

In this second instance, the movie audience laughs, somewhat uncomfortably, at the simultaneous absurdity and familiarity of the image of this child acting out sexually. At the same time, Cady double-takes, her shock at such under-aged lasciviousness encouraging your own. That Kelis' video is the recognizable emblem for this "gone-too-far" moment surely emerges from its omnipresence at the time the film was likely shot, but it also articulates an amorphous anxiety concerning the infection of little white girl-ness by erotic desire, sensuous display, and, no small matter, blackness.

As these two scenes chart a distance between 1987 and now, or between Michael and Kelis, they also suggest how "blackness" has changed as a signifier of gender and sexuality, status and influence, for a suburban white audience. Where Michael Jackson's supremely strange and much-loved brilliance has long since turned into something more obviously complex and disturbing, a product and reflection of the culture that so reveres and reviles him, Kelis's meaning is at once less individual and perhaps more profound. Last December, Kelis mattered as much as she baffled, inspiring all manner of philosophical and political breakdowns. "Milkshake" revels in and reveals such tensions, in language that is at once verbal, visual, and tonal. Kelis in this video invites audiences to rethink relations between reproduction and authenticity, consumption and creation, raced and sexed identities.

At the time of "Milkshake"'s release (and to an extent, the follow-up release of the album where it appears, Tasty), critics and pundits seemed compelled to comment. The Guardian labeled her style "Afronaut chic" and All Music Guide actually called her "extraterrestrial"; New York magazine deemed her "astounding", while MTV.com took a more thoughtful pose, naming her "sexy and pensive". The New York Times took an even less direct route, coyly posing a question as to her effect: is she "harmless or appealingly smart"? Navigating media conventions and audience expectations, Kelis is aptly elusive: when an AP reporter asks what she wants listeners to "take away" from Tasty, Kelis says, "An intimate moment. Boundaries shifting and that reality is all relative."

This coy ambiguity is probably more accurate than it sounds. The record is intimate but also extremely public, unknowable and apparently obvious. In his perfectly titled Village Voice essay, "Her Cheesecake Is Punker Than Yours, Whatever It Means", Barry Walters writes, "As a female-fronted record with hip-hop origins, 'Milkshake' is of course about sex, but it brings back euphemism in a big way" (29 December 2003). The pleasure provided by euphemism, of course, is that it leaves so much to the imagination, so much engagement by readers (and here we might think of Michael's early self-assessment: "I'm not like other guys"). Euphemism also, apparently, brings confusion for literal-minded consumers.

On Christmas Eve last year, NPR ran a short, youth-oriented piece on the "meaning of the words in the song 'Milkshake'". Says one interviewee, "If you're going to make a song that open-ended, you know you're not talking about a milkshake... She's not specific enough to the point that you feel comfortable enough, knowing that it's not some nasty little thing. I mean, to me, it sounds pretty nasty." Still another civilian observes, "Okay, the beat's good, I guess the idea is good for the feminism or whatever. I just don't like the song."

If you don't like the song, you probably won't be crazy about Jake Nava's provocative video, which simultaneously literalizes and expands the track's central metaphor: in the Yard Diner, complete with swivel stools and milkshake machines, the Neptunes' bells, slides, and crunches punctuate booty-gyrations and patrons' pop-eyed responses (one mother covers her boy's eyes when Kelis shakes her breasts). When, early this semester, I showed the video in my hip-hop class, students also reacted variously. Some appreciated the excessive metaphor as comedy, self-assertion, and ironic undermining of expectations; others saw it as degrading, reinforcing stereotypes, and unoriginal. For one contingent, the video offered an ironic critique of standard sexual desire and display; for the other, it only reinforced traditional objectification of black women's bodies.

Unsurprisingly, this disagreement and resulting controversy made the record hugely popular. This was, of course, pre-Janet-at-the-Super Bowl, when such metaphor might still be understood, misunderstood, and even celebrated as such. At the time, the press touted Kelis' "comeback", as she had something of previous "moment" in 1999, with her sultry hook for ODB's "Got Your Money" and her own girls-angry-anthem single, "Caught Out There (I Hate You So Much Right Now)", off the album Kaleidoscope, released when she was just 19. The single ignited a minor uproar, not unrelated to the funky production by the then relatively unknown Neptunes, though plainly emerging from the feminist outrage expressed in the track and video (which challenges designations of angry women as ignorant, petty or insane and shows placards-holding women taking to the streets to protest no-count men). However, following a calculatedly audacious collaboration with Busta Rhymes, and tours with Moby and U2 (at Bono's request, her bio reads), Kelis dropped off the U.S. pop cultural map. Her next CD, 2001's Wanderland, was only available in the States as an import. So, when "Milkshake" made Billboard's top singles list, just behind both ubiquitous OutKast singles, industry types got excited.

The honeymoon, so to speak, was brief. These days, only five months after the notoriety of "Milkshake", Kelis is most often described as "Nas' fiancée". Writers lapse into comparing her to Beyoncé, fiancée to Nas' recent battle opponent, Jay-Z, or describe her current tour opening for Britney, both topics allowing giddy discussions of her foul mouth and openly expressed opinions, her sexy-babe-ness, and how well she accommodates pop queen expectations (interviewers tend to approach Kelis with the breathless sorts of questions you'd expect from teenaged fans: "What's the tastiest part of your body?" "How did you get Nas to move in with you?" One story of a night out in search of Kelis ends when she is finally spotted; Phoenix New Times reporter Stephen Lemons calls out, "Hey Kelis, what's a milkshake?" He continues, plainly elated, "To which the rap queen, grinning back at me, works her ass so low to the floor that she could pick up a quarter with [it]" (11 March 2004). All this is to say that stories about Kelis reduce her to a familiar pop sexuality, less threatening than the hybrid, more aggressive forms that characterize her actual performances, even in "Milkshake".

Such assimilation is, of course, standard industry practice. In Representing: Hiphop Culture and the Production of Black America, Craig Watkins argues that commodification of an erstwhile subversive cultural form like hip-hop produces "paradoxical results". While the process domesticates and defuses", it also stimulates production, and, as illustrated in those movie examples of white girls emulating music video dancers, creates something of "voracious [crossover] appetite" for black cultural performances and products. Kelis' specific incarnations in the video and in a couple of live performances reveal a range of possible meanings.

This ambiguity begins with the lyrics, which, aside from the la-la-la-las, are not so much nonsense as resolutely indeterminate. The "milkshake" can be defined variously (sex, power, style, body parts, or, as Kelis told a radio interviewer, "anything you want"), and subject positions shift with the pronouns, as in, "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, / And they're like, it's better than yours, / Damn right, it's better than yours, / I can teach you, but I have to charge, / I know you want it". However Kelis (or the speaker in this context) is thinking about charging, the product for sale appeals to boys, theys, yous, and I's: it's better than yours, and they know it. Moreover, "You lose your mind," suggesting that you might work yourself into a frenzy over the object or the lesson, or maybe just the pronouns shuffle. More abstractly, the track's ambiguity has to do with desire, its creation, marketing to it, its uses, and its possibilities.

In Jake Nava's video for the song, the diner setting stages the kind of "work" and marketable product available to urban girls of a certain class and race, as described by Robin Kelley in his book, Yo Mama's Dysfunktional. The video for "Milkshake" simultaneously mystifies and literalizes the selling of sex: Kelis shows up and the place turns into a show, with Nas as fry-cook looking on (and whether he's here to legitimize or street up the activities, to condone his girl's outrageous display or to mark her as off limits for others, is uncertain). This performance is cute enough that little girls want to emulate it, though perhaps not within the framework of "moral" failure that Mean Girls implies. Rather, the tease is contrived and indicative, a reflection and indictment of the social, political, and economic systems it exhibits.

The representation also works against the noble working girl performances in, say, Donna Summer's "She Works Hard For the Money", or more recently, Alicia Keys' more romantic, nostalgic, and respectable "You Don't Know My Name", where she's a waitress yearning for a customer (played by Mos Def), working in and reclaiming the sort of public space that Mark Anthony Neal considers in his book Songs in the Key of Black Life, in an essay focused on Keys' earlier videos, "Fallin'" and "A Woman's Worth". Here, she moves uneasily behind the counter in the diner, but on the street, she opens her arms and sings out -- "Ohhhh!" -- knowing her value for this customer who barely notices her, the waitress. Keys is the good thing that Mos Def, preoccupied, is about to miss. There is no missing Kelis, and the judgment as to whether she's good remains with the viewer.

Perhaps most importantly, she doesn't care. She performs her self-understanding and her power, writhing on the counter, boggling the men and boys in her vicinity. As dancers take up the call, also performing their control of the space, Kelis remains relatively modest, ducking her head and looking up from beneath her hair, seductive and unthreatening even in her independence (this notable as she strolls to the diner at the video's start).

A second performance of the song, just before the 2004 Superbowl for an episode of TRL (30 January 2004), situates Kelis in a typical TRL otherworld. She's on a small outdoor stage, backed by black muscular dancers. Stretching before them is a sea of white kids, screaming with flushed faces and cheerleaders with pompoms. The performance is rough. The sound system is predictably terrible, so that Kelis, whose range is limited on a good day, must shout the lyrics as she moves about the stage. Still, she makes for a vigorous show that moves her enthusiastic spectators; she remains vivacious and recognizably seductive, especially if you appreciate the hardworking athleticism of cheerleaders or you're TRL's target demographic.

In a third performance of the song, on Saturday Night Live just two weeks after the Superbowl, on 14 February 2004, works almost against the music video. Here the act is no longer coy and seductive, but a forceful self-assertion: "It's better than yours!" The performance, on the familiar, railroad-station-affected SNL stage, opens with a bucket drummer, surrounded by Kelis and her dancers performing in time with that raucous, street-identified beat, resituating the song completely. The performance that follows is increasingly aggressive: Kelis is shouting her lyrics: "You want me to teach the / Techniques that freaks these boys. / It can't be bought, / Just the thieves get caught." She's inimitable, she's not for sale, and she's certainly not taking any shit from would-be viewers or censors who would tell her what to show or how to act on a stage. Here, the taunting is no longer playful and the come-hither affect is all but disappeared. This is a declaration and a challenge. "Just get the perfect blend, / Plus what you have within."

"Milkshake"'s many meanings demonstrate the instabilities of art and consumer culture, of music as art and product. At one level, the song and the artist put in your face exactly what Mark Anthony Neal identifies as "hiphop's gender problem." This even as the simple and most obvious way to read Kelis, or more specifically, "Milkshake", would be to call it out as typically and mindlessly bootylicious. It may be that, but it is also something else, an end run around those who would name and claim it, a series of word slippages and change-ups in possibilities that indict those who want to purchase, peer at, and possess black women's bodies. The performance on SNL could not be clearer in what such a song can signify.

Performing the fraught relations between self-expression and commercial savvy, invention and repetition, process and result, Kelis in these here performances, each attending to its setting, and each underlining the tensions between popularity and accessibility that so are often elided in analyses of pop music. Her performance of her many identities -- angry, adorable, street, sexed up, diva, affianced, and round the way, changing up within one number -- makes her much discussed lack of vocal range or resistance to pop niceties all the more complex.