Kelis Quotes

One of my biggest fears with 'Coloring Book' was that it would be labeled. I hate labels. I never sought out for people to recognize it as a gospel album.

The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?

Even for the people in the business who are real music lovers it's really about putting things in the right boxes, and my style doesn't fit into a box.

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

I hate labels because it should be just music. I don't see anything wrong with disco. Call it anything. It's music.

I hate how things must be classified. How this is applied to musicians implies that they somehow contrive their products and have studied the demographics of the audience.

I think music will thrive where it wants to.

When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before; it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later: now she's an R&B singer.

I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.

I'm just going to go out there, and if people want to put me on the front of their magazine or whatever, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine as well. I'm just going to go out there and make my music.

Today, music is great for entertainment, but it is lacking soul; it's lacking substance, and it's difficult to find good stuff. There are too many corporate interests. It's not about the actual music because it's about the corporation, and music just becomes part of a package.

I associate creativity with independent music.

The fun of being in the pop world is you can really play with people's perceptions of what the word pop means.

And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

My focus is anything that allows me to express myself. Rap, dance, photography. Those are my forms of expression.

You can say battle or war or whatever, but in the end, it's music. It's not really violent in intent at all, it's really just about expression and celebrating that in itself.

The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting creativity.

I think it's always a mistake when you start connecting a band to a personality. You begin to limit what you're able to do.

It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression.

Thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise.

We went through an era of big dance records, an era of hip-hop being the biggest thing on the planet. The people who really break through are the people who are not afraid to express themselves in how they feel.

I think I'm just doing me, my music, my shows, and my stories.

I know that I'm freer as a hip-hopper than as an executive. Even as a black man, I enjoy more freedom as a hip-hopper than as a black man. That, s controversial to say, but it's the truth.

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

It's unfortunate that a lot of people think African-American female artists are monolithically R&B this-or-that, don't have to do anything by default.