‘My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’. Admit it. It’s there in your head. It might be there all day now.
Kelis’s Milkshake is one of the most instantly catchy songs of the 21st Century. It was the New York singer’s biggest hit and represented one of many artistic peaks for its authors – Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams aka The Neptunes. Yet it’s a track with a strange, bitter aftertaste. Milkshake isn’t quite as sweet as it sounds.
Much of that is due to the falling out between Kelis Rogers and the Neptunes. The singer was introduced to the duo at the age of 19, became friends, and, with their support, signed to Virgin Records. “I thought it was a beautiful and pure, creative safe space,” Kelis said in an interview with the Guardian in 2020. But it ended up not being that at all. I was told we were going to split the whole thing 33/33/33, which we didn’t do… (I was) blatantly lied to and tricked.”
Kelis only found out much later, but when she asked Williams and Hugo about it they brushed her off: “Their argument is: ‘Well, you signed it.’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, I signed what I was told, and I was too young and too stupid to double-check it.’”
The upshot was that Kelis didn’t earn anything from her first two albums. Both Kaleidoscope (1999) and Wanderland (2001) were produced by the Neptunes, but they hardly caught fire. Kaleidoscope is probably best known for Caught Out There, the early 2000 hit which introduced Kelis to the UK audience, via its unforgettable shouted chorus: ‘I hate you so much right now!’
It reached Number Four in the UK charts and the album, but in the States Kaleidoscope flopped and Wanderland, despite featuring some of the Neptunes' best work up to that date, didn’t even get a release.
But by this time Williams and Hugo were well on their way to becoming the most successful (and prolific) production team of the decade. Though they had started out working with hip-hop and R&B artists, by 2001/2002 they were extending their range.
First, they produced I’m A Slave 4 U, the lead single from Britney Spears’ third album Britney. Then they worked with N-Sync on a track from their final album Celebrity. This led to a gig producing the bulk of Justin Timberlake’s solo debut Justified, which went on to shift 10 million copies and transform Timberlake into a superstar.
In the same eighteen-month period, Williams and Hugo also wrote and produced Hot In Herre for Nelly, Snoop Dogg’s Beautiful, Excuse Me Miss for Jay-Z, and found time to kickstart Williams’ own solo career with Frontin’ – all Billboard Top Tenners. Increasingly, the boundaries between pop and hip-hop were dissolving and the Neptunes played no small part in that.
How did they do it? In a 2014 NPR interview, Williams wasn’t in the mood to reveal the secrets to their first imperial phase. “We just kept using the same sounds. We didn’t know what we were doing. We just... we had fun and that’s mainly how it ends up being cool.”
It was a bit more than that. The Neptunes’ sound was built around space, with often just a few elements in each song – bright, sharp synth lines, often played on the Korg Triton, punchy quantised drums and unconventional chords. Together they developed a melodic but funky sound that worked as well on radio as it did in a club. And it devoured pop – in 2003 a whopping 43% of songs on US radio were Neptunes productions.
It also helped that they were signed to a label sympathetic to their idiosyncrasies: “We were lucky enough to be on Virgin Records with Ashley Newton (then co-president of Virgin’s US arm). They were really open-minded. They didn’t lock us in a box, like ‘ok you guys are black, where are the throwback jerseys?’
"They were like ‘oh you guys are a bunch of weirdos – sounds good though’. And that came from making Kelis’s album (Kaleidoscope).”
When, post-Wanderland, Kelis was dropped by Virgin US, her mentors provided a safety net and signed her to Star Trak Entertainment, their new Arista-backed label. Kelis though wanted to diversify for her make-or-break third album – in the end, the Neptunes produced just five tracks on Tasty.
One of those, though, was the crucial lead single and for this Williams and Hugo looked abroad for inspiration. “We went to Brazil to shoot (the video for) Beautiful and we went to these clubs there and they had this music that was akin to ‘bootie shaker’ music just in Portuguese,” said Williams. “We were like ‘yeeah’, because we had never heard anything like that.”
“So when we came back, I was like ‘man, I want to do something that evokes that kind of feeling’. But instead of doing bootie shaker music I tried to use more Middle Eastern sounds and completely just twist my intentions as much as I could so that even in Brazil they would go ‘ok oh we like the rhythm of this, we like the feel of this. But this is from somewhere else.’”
Thus Milkshake ended up incorporating a darbuka drum, which is most commonly found in Egyptian music, a sample of an Indian instrument, a manjira bell and atonal synths. Not the sort of combination that immediately screams ‘pop hit’. But the catchiness resides in Kelis’s sing-song rapping in the chorus and one of those inimitable Williams’ bridges – the ‘la la/ la la la (warm it up)’ part - that end up residing in your head for weeks.
Then there were the lyrics, which, it must be said, leave nothing to the imagination. Even a 7-year-old would be able to understand what Milkshake was really about, especially when they saw the video, set, inevitably, in a diner, which involves much bootie-shaking and breast-jiggling from Kelis and the female members of the cast.
From the standpoint of 2025, it all looks a bit naff, and it’s hard not to feel queasy now, knowing that the words ‘my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’ were written, not by Kelis, but by a man.
When asked about that by NPR, Pharrell intimated that his idea at the time was to create something innocent and celebratory. “When I made that song, it was for the intention of women moving, dancing, enjoying themselves and having a good time, without judgement.
"Had I thought about it, had someone been in the studio, maybe, I don’t know if I would have said that lyric in the same way. At that time, it wasn’t seen that way. I definitely... it was in the spirit of dancing and having a good time and nothing more.”
Whatever their intentions, it did the trick. Milkshake reached Number 2 in the UK and Number 3 in the US and revitalised Kelis’s career in an instant. At the end of the year, it was there or thereabouts in all the major single of the year polls. It topped the Observer list for 2004 and came in at Number 8 on Pitchfork. But Kelis and the Neptunes would never work together again.
Milkshake has since cropped up in films such as Mean Girls and in adverts from Gap to dairy products, specifically Lactaid. Then in 2022 it was sampled on Energy, a track from Beyonce’s Renaissance album. However, just as swiftly, the sample then disappeared. Permission, it seems, had not been sought.
“No, it’s not a collaboration,” Kelis said on Instagram. “It’s called thievery. Because the definition of collaboration means that we are working together.” She went on to add: “All of the stuff she sings about, all this empowerment stuff, I don’t talk about it. I am about it. Because the reality is, all this female empowerment stuff, it only counts if you really do it. If you’re really living it and walking the walk. Don’t just talk the talk.”
Beyonce did not reply, but could easily have pointed to the male-written lyrics of Kelis’s biggest hit. In a further Instagram message, Kelis then reiterated she wasn’t annoyed at Beyonce so much as Williams and Hugo for having “swindled” her during the early stage of her career.
Pharrell Williams, with or without Chad Hugo, went onto write, produce and perform many many more hits. When the sands of time fall through, it’s likely he’ll be remembered as one of those figures like Spector, the Beatles and Madonna that changed the course of musical history and reshaped how we define pop.
Kelis has released three more albums since, each different and with something to recommend them. Fleshtone (2010) saw her work with European EDM producers such as David Guetta and then 2014’s Food saw her switch styles again and incorporate classic soul influences into her music. By then she had retrained as a chef and embarked on a new culinary career.
Most recently, she’s relocated to Kenya and is said to be working on a seventh album. Still only 46, she’s already enjoyed a fascinating life and career – when she does get around to that memoir, she won’t be short of material.
And whilst there is still clearly bad blood between her and the Neptunes, she doesn’t appear to resent her biggest hit. Speaking in 2014, she said of Milkshake. “I love that song. I’m not saying I single-handedly did it, but you know it played a huge part in where music went.
"I’m aware of that, I don’t regret it or resent it at all, and I’ve found new fun ways to perform it and to do it and make it enjoyable for people. I don’t put too much thought into it.”
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