https://twitter.com/chrstnavelli/status/1222875473476235264https://twitter.com/JessiTaylorRO/status/1222916712309362688Excerpt:
The story of the music industry is one of young artists getting ripped off, again and again, because they are too young to understand the contracts they have signed until it is too late. What is different in Kelis's case, she says, is that it was her friends who ripped her off.
"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". As a result, she says she made nothing from sales of her first two albums, which were produced by the Neptunes. But she did not notice for a few years, because she was making money from touring, "and just the fact that I wasn't poor felt like enough", she says. She sighs: "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.'" (Pharrell and Hugo did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
And they were your friends so you trusted them, I say.
"Yeah, it's amazing," she shrugs.
She doesn't sound angry. "No, I'm just stating the facts," she says. I ask why she isn't angry.
"To be honest with you, I think if it were not for my faith, I feel like that would probably be the case. It's very clear to me, especially being on a farm, that whatever you put in the ground, that is what's going to come back to you," she says.
Things eventually came crashing down, she says, when she made her third album, Tasty, and decided to work with a variety of producers, not just the Neptunes, "and I could tell they were really offended".
But she has seen Pharrell. A few years back, he was performing at an industry event and she was in the audience. "And he did that thing to me that he's notorious for, which is making a nod from the stage [to someone in the audience], so it seems like there's mutual respect, when in reality ..." She throws her head back and laughs. "I'm like, OK, I'm not going to yell back: 'You stole all my publishing!' So you end up nodding back and everyone thinks everything's great. Like, whatever."
Would she work with him again? She looks at me as if I have asked if she would jump into a shark tank: "Ummm, at that point there's having faith and there is also just stupidity."
