Leslie Gray Streeter Interview

We're leaving today and entering a world of Mickey Mouse Waving. Princess meeting and greetings. Lightsaber clashing the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror dropping ! Banshee Flying ! Space Mountain launching galaxy rewinding galaxy rewinding fireworks igniting worlds of other worlds for whatever you love infinite worlds await at the most magical place on e arth, Walt Disney World Resort. 5 a.m. I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink. Running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change, and head to work. Meetings. Workshops. One more Celsius, no slowing down. Working late, but obviously still meeting the girls for a little dancing. Celsius. Live, fit, go. Grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at Celsius.com. It is imperative . It is extremely important to me personally that you person ally enjoy this clip of Khalise covering Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit at the Glastonbury Festival in the year 2000. Everything about this is perfect, including any inadvertent musical imperfections . Yeah, that biffed guitar chord right at the beginning there, perfect. That's a little something called punk rock. It is June 2000, and your Glastonbury Festival headliners are uh let's see here, Travis, David B owie, Moby, the Chemical Brothers, the Pet Shop Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Fat Boy Slim, and Willie Nelson. Etc. A lot of dance music is the new rock and roll energy here , other than Willie Nelson. Forget all those guys, though. Here we have Khalise, the Harlem native and wily unclassifiable, mononymous, ostensibly RB oriented young pop star. Khalise is dressed all in white in a blondie crop top, and she is pumping her fist maniacally amidst a sea of delighted fans with outstretched arms in the Glasssenbury dance tent as her all-black band launches into the rowdiest and most vivacious nirvana cover I've ever heard in my life. Dig the jittery double-time drumbeat here. Dig the eerie, glorious vocal harmony that takes a simple two-note guitar riff you've heard a billion times, burner , and unfolds it into hundreds of ecstatic new dimensions. Wow, that is a super florid description, but screw it, man. I'm excited. Let's get excited. I dig that the crowd here is huge, but not dehumaniz ingly huge. Right? A lot of classic live Glasssenbury footage, you get the giant waving flags, you get the infinite roiling sea of humanity, you get the sense that literally all of England is physically present. Usually there's way too many people. And all those people look disconcertingly CGI generated. Whereas here with Khalice, the crowd is robust and yet you can pick out individual delighted electrified people bouncing around more or less by themselves. What I sense in this footage is individual lives changing permanently. And the most life-altering factor here is Khaleese's voice, the low end of Khaleese's voice, the rasping, carving colossal depth of it. The way it can make the words load up on guns , bring your friends, feel like an opening line you haven't heard a billion times before. This smells like Teen Spirit cover is not the song that first made Khalice famous. It is not the song for which Khalise will be most famous. This is not the musical genre to which Khalice is generally thought to belong. But where anybody else thinks Calice belongs is none of her business. In nineteen ninety nine, Khal ise released her debut album called Kaleidoscope, praised in the NME as quote: a futuristic, visionary, multi-layered work of RB funk, soul, and rap, furnished with an inspirational psychedelic spirituality, rarely seen but desperately needed in these cynical times. Dude, if you think the times are cynical in nineteen ninety nine . You better brace yourself. This review also says, quote, they're calling her the new Lauren Hill. She's better than that, though. End quote. Okay, hold on. Everyone calm down. Rest assured in any event that Calice is majestically overboard and self-assured, and she knows plenty of dirty words . A fun way to watch this video is just to focus on Khalise's backup singers , the blissful swagger of her backup singers. It's like if you took the anarchist cheerleaders from the original Smells Light Teen Spirit video and let them sing the song. Uh Khalise is approaching the chorus , and the chorus is going to be quite loud and raucous and perfectly imperfect and absolutely glorious. And there is a rich historical musical lineage to that un categorizable gloriousness. Talking to The Guardian in 2014 about the fresh, new, ostensibly RB sound she debuted with in the late 90s and early 2000s, Khalis says, quote, I was never an R and B artist. People coined me one, but that's because, especially if you're in the States, if you're black and you sing, then you're R and B, end quote, will allow her to retort. Khalise in the year 2000 covering the hugest recent rock and roll song imaginable on the hugest concert stage imaginable, she is not so subtly making a statement about what else a black singer in the year 2000 might wish to be. Police is not so subtly making a statement about, you know, identity And so if we're talking about the rich historical musical lineage of uncategorizable gloriousness that eventually leads us to Khaleese, we might as well start with London punk rock legends X-ray specs. We might as well start with fabled iconic X- ray specs lead singer Polly Styrene, bellowing a punk rock song from 1978, literally called Identity. Pollystyrene, widely credited as the first woman of color to lead a big whoop capital P punk rock band. I dig the pink and yellow bow in Polystyrene's hair tremendously. I dig Polystyrene's braces tremendously. I dig tremendously the ferocious candy-coated dissonance of Polystyrene's whole vibe. A vibe best exemplified by the very famous first 10 seconds of X-ray specs's 19 77 debut single, which if you'll recall is called O Bond age Up Yours . Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think O BI GUP YORS! One, two, three, four! Oh bondage up yours exclamation point. Polly Styrene's braces really are tremendous. Her braces make her look infinitely more overboard and self-assured. For lots of people, for lots of young people, for lots of current young people, Polystyrene is a revolutionary figure. She is a complicated but undoubtedly life-changing figure. As explored in the 2022 documentary Polystyrene, I am a cliche, co-directed by Paul Sung and Polly Styrene's daughter, Celeste Bell. Talking to the New York Times in 2022 about that movie and about getting into punk rock, Allie Loggout, the lead singer of the great current New Orleans punk band Special Interest. Allie says, quote, My original exploration with music in general was a sadness that I didn't see any black bodies occupying that space. I remember very clearly seeing a picture of Polly Styrene and her braces and being like, what? I felt the otherness that she encapsulated by just being fully herself. Whenever I heard that song, O bondage up yours, I knew that it was the attitude that I have to present myself in every single day. End quote. You know who else loves Pollystyrene and talks about having her life changed by polystyrene, this lady. Nena Cherry. Born in Sweden, raised mostly in London, daughter of the painter Monica Carlson, stepdaughter of the jazz trumpet great Don Cherry. Nena Cherry, she of the unfathomably phenomenal 1988 hit single Buffalo Stance. Some days that's my favorite sequence of six words and eight syllables in pop history. It's sweetness that The video's bright colors, the ferocious playfulness, the anarchist cheerleader exuberance of Buffalo Stance. This is one of the best pop songs of the 80s, one of the best rap s ongs of the 80s, and one of the best punk songs of the 80s as well. You can hear polystyrene in Buffalo stance as clearly as you can hear, say, salt and peppa. Talking to the New York Times in 2022 about Polystyrene, Nena Cherry says, quote, Inside of hers is how I found my own voice. I also started listening to her when I was at a space in my life where I knew who I was , but I didn't always know how to be who I was or how to feel that great about it. End quote. I gotta hear the full chorus to Buffalo Stance. If only to make clear that the most cal ice-like line in this song is when Nena Cherry says, So don't you get fresh with me. It's a threat you can't refuse . We always hang in a buffalo stands. We do the dive every time we dance. I give you love, baby, not romance. I make a move, nothing left the chance. I'll give you love, baby, not romance is a fantastic line, too. And I knew who I was, but I didn't always know how to be who I was, is a great way to sum up the perils of being a hard to classify black female pop star and or RB star and or rock star in the late eighties. Nena Cherry nonetheless found a path to modest stardom. Q Lazarus had a tougher time with it . But smoke it away for This is Goodbye Horses, another absurdly great single from nineteen eighty eight by Diane Lucky, the New York City singer and cab driver best known as Q Lazarus, two Z's in Lazarus. Perhaps you recognize Goodbye Horses from this song's inclusion in multiple huge Jonathan Demi films. Most famously The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. This song's play ing when, you know, the bad guy's dancing around and whatnot, and the dogs about to fall in the well. Goodbye Horses should have been the first song in a decades-long, varied de,fiant, reliably unpredictable career. Goodbye Horses is a red, noirish, late eighties synthpop jam. But what strikes me most about it is the low end of Q Lazarus' voice, the silky carving colossal depth of it. He told me a scene er ase. She could have sung anything and been anybody. In fact, when the song Goodbye Horses could n't get her a record deal, Q Lazarus moved from New York City to London and started a legit hard rock band. Listen to her sing the word baby amidst righteous electric guitars like nobody's ever thought to sing that word before. That songs called Don't Let Go. And if Hart or Cher or Lita Ford had put this song out in the late 80s, you'd have seen the video on MTV three times an hour. This song did not make Q Lazarus famous either. Alas. Most people only heard any original non-Goodbye Horses Q Lazarus song for the first time in 2025, upon the release of the very sad but pretty fantastic documentary , Goodbye Horses, The Many Lives of Q Lazarus. And in that movie, Q Lazarus says explicitly, quote, as far as the rock industry in the United States, in New York, they weren't ready for a black rock and roll singer. End quote. You would think the rock industry would be ready and know better in the late eighties, given that Janet Jackson existed. This of course is Janet Jackson doing black cat from her massive 198 9 album Rhythm Nation 1814, which sold 12 million copies worldwide and spawned seven top five singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Black Cat is one of them. The rock video iconography is really important here. The fist pumping in the crowd and the blinding lights and the leather and the sweatiness. Yes, but more importantly, you get Janet Jackson doing the thing where she points down at her feet and her righteous doodly guitarist kneels down in front of her, and Janet, you know , lightly gyrates. Meanwhile, boom, dum, dum, boom, dum, boom, dum, d- Black Cat is primo headbanger's ball shit. Let the rock industry in the United States tell Janet Jackson that America can't handle a black rock and roll singer. Let them tell T For your reference, while Khalise is kicking ass at Glastonbury, here's what Tina Turner is up to in the year 2000. Ah, fascinating. Tina Turner's doing the same thing she's always doing: kicking ass. Tina's doing proud Mary yet again and kicking ass yet again for an infinite roiling sea of humanity at Wembley Stadium. That's in London and literally all of England can fit into it. Here also you can see the lives of individual Tina Turner backup dancers changing permanently, such as their aerobic exuberance at getting to do Proud Mary with Tina Turner. In 2021, The Ringer published a fantastic piece called Tina Turner and the All-Too Radical Existence of the Black Woman Rockstar, written by our friend , the musician and former 60 songs producer Devin Ronaldo. And Devin talks about how Tina Turner still doesn't fully get her due as the queen of rock and roll. Tina spent years trying to convince record labels that she could make it as a rock singer, that she wasn't just an RB singer or a pop star. Tina Turner spent her whole career personifying rock stardom every bit as much as Elvis Pres ley or Mick Jagger. To quote the great Bob Chrisgow, Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home. End quote. Bob was talking about Prince, but the point stands. Tina Turner had been confounding notions of genre since the early 60s. And by the mid-90s, cutting-edge pop music has gotten even more splendidly confounding. Quick question for you , what genre is this ? They hold it me for the other whatever Here we have Tricky, the mononymous rapper and producer and trip hop pioneer, delivering a phenomenal cover of the phenomenal public enemy song Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos on Tricky's 1995 debut album, Max and Kay. And on lead vocals here, we've got Tricky's then partner and crucial collaborator, Martina Toppley Bird, rapping with ferocious anarchist cheerleader exuberance over righteous doodly punk rock guitars. Also, there's a giraffe here in the Black Steel video, wandering around for what I assume are profound thematic philosophical reasons. Picture that giraffe giving a damn. What genre is this? Better question, what genre does this song want to be? One option when you hear 90s trip-hop singer Martina Toppley Bird channeling classic pummeling 80s Chuck D over screeching 70s Sex Pistols type guitars is to describe this Black Steel cover as Afropunk, which of course is a sound that has existed basically forever, though the term Afropunk does not fully emerge until 200 3, when filmmaker James Spo oner debuts a documentary called Afropunk, interviewing dozens of young black punk rockers who feel somewhat out of place, but are working hard to gradually feel less out of place Afropunk quickly becomes a whole movement, becomes a Brooklyn music festival, then a series of music festivals. And as with most entities with punk in the name, Afropunk gets a little less classically punk as it goes on. Then again, the whole point of the 2003 movie was to interrogate and redefine what and who qualified as punk. In the documentary, a Brooklyn singer-songwriter named Tamar Khali says that the punkest person she can think of is Nina Simone. Here is a 2005 Tamar Khalid song called Boot, in which she expands on the question of who qualif ies as punk. The most important line here is probably her eyes ain't blue. And Boot, to my mind, is a festival-sized rock song . An Afropunk festival sized song, sure, but also potentially, ideally, a Glastonbury sized, fist pumping, blinding lights, sweaty leather, infinite roiling sea of human ity type song. Here, like this . Here we have the British hard rock band Skunk Ananzi , led by the ferocious mononymous lead singer and songwriter known as Skin. This song is from 1995 and it is called Weak, and Skin really bellows the hell out of it. This is Glastonbury 1999. And if you're watching, you maybe get what I mean about Glastonbury being way too many people. Plus I'm not positive about this, but I suspect there's a giant raging bonfire in the middle of the crowd here, or maybe it's an English dude wielding a flamethrower. I don't know. I am delighted that Skunk Ananzi can attract and command and electrify a crowd this absurdly huge, but I don't want to be around like two percent that many people at one time, personally. Never mind that though. There is precedent stretching back decades to seventies punk to sixties rock to the blues spanning decades before that. There is a long, proud, defiant, ongoing, confounding, misunderstood, misidentified, intermittently appreciated, but never fully respected lineage of what you might call afropunk, what you might call heavier RB, what you might simply call rock and roll, if you're, shall we say, nasty. And somewhere in that roiling crowd of musical pioneers, there is Calice in 1999, debuting as a solo artist with a song called Caught Out There, the song that first made her famous. The most important line here is probably a so much right now I hate you so much right now I feel bad for whoever's record collection that is that Khalise is destroying in the caught out there video, though it would appear that he deserves it. That's what you get for getting fresh with her. Yes, caught out there, the delightfully and terrifyingly angry lead single off Khaleese's 1999 debut album, Kaleidoscope. Wow, this person is bombastic and outrageously versatile and awesome. And furthermore, this person feels and sounds unprecedented, despite decades of famous, important, beloved, semi-well documented precedent. So maybe now let's finally let her sing the goddamn chorus . It is extremely important to me, personally, that you personally enjoy this video of Khalise covering Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit at the Glastonbury Festival in the year two thousand. That you observe the crowd leaping up and down in ecstatic unison . Please observe that you can tell just from their respective outstretched hands that every individual life in that crowd is changing permanently. Please observe the lovely vocal harmony as Khalice and her backup singers sing the words, I feel stupid. Please observe the carving colossal depth of the low end of Khalice's voice as she sings the words, a mosquito. Please observe the way Khalise joyfully stares down the camera as she sings the words, my libido, yeah. Please observe that at some point here the super distorted electric guitar shorts out and disappears , or at the very least, the guitar is now mostly inaudible. Perhaps because the guitarist is crowdsurfing now, or she's been raptured or something. Something cool and very punk happened to the guitarist. And frankly, that's the coolest and punkest part of this whole thing. And suddenly that's my favorite sequence of nine words and seventeen syllables in pop history. A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido.. Yeah Smells like Teen Spirit, of course, is not the song that first made Khalice famous. It is not the song for which Khalice will be most famous. And as for that, as for the song for which Khalice is most famous . Well, let's just say that outrageously, delightfully, and you might even say unprecedentedly, Calice contains multitudes . My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, and their life is better than yours. Damn right, it's better than yours. I could teach you, but I have to charge. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 37th episode of Sixty Songs That Explain the Nineties, Cole in the 2000s, and this week we are discussing Milkshake by Calice from her third album released in 2003 and called Tasty. I have a vague and yet very strong and distinct memory of hearing this song for the first time and just thinking, what ? It is one of the historically great and underappreciated feelings in pop music. When you first hear something that leaves you legitimately flabbergasted. 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With the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is always yes . Yes to adventure. Yes to escape. Yes to performance. Yes to comfort. Yes to right now . Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all-new Audi Q3 made for the Yes Life . I can't believe I started this episode with the person the episode is about. I don't want to check, but I suspect I literally have not done that in years. Since the Mac arena episode, possibly. Yikes. I hardly recognize myself. This show has become so reliant on rambling surprise misdirection that the greatest possible surprise is when there's no misdirection at all, and I just talk about what I'm supposed to be talking about. That's a good thing for the show, right? That's a positive development, I assume . And now here's a song by the gravediggers When I see the fairy fairy tale. And this is until I'm home and take a Here we have young Khalise Rogers singing the hook on fairy Tales, a nineteen ninety-seven song by the famed Macabre rap supergroup The Gravediggers. Fairy Tales, one word, tales with a Z. Khalise turned 18 years old in nineteen ninety-seven, but she convincing ly sings this chorus like she's old and gray and malevolent, and stirring a giant boiling cauldron in a cottage in the woods, etc. Khalise is born in New York City on August 21st , 1979, and raised in Harlem. Her father is a jazz musician and Pentecostal minister. Her mother works in fashion. She has three sisters. Talking to New York magazine in 2006, Khal is says, quote, My mom was concerned that us four little black girls have a really well-balanced life. She wanted us to be around people like us, but we also went to private school and traveled all the time. Now I fit in most places because I've been most places. End quote. Up to and including Glastonbury. Growing up, Khalise plays violin and saxophone and sings in the girls' choir of Harlem, and studies theater, and she starts an R and B trio called Blue, B L U, that's Black Ladies United, and she attends high school on the Upper West Side at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Arts and Performing Arts . And yeah, somewhere in there she sings the hook on a gravedigger song. And this song, Fairy Tales, it may not be the biggest, the brightest, the radio friendliest hook she will ever sing, but it's the first Khice hook a lot of people heard. It's the first song featuring Khalice that a lot of people heard. Fortunately for both her and us, this is the second one. You give me a number, I call you up. You act like your pussy on interrupt. I don't have no trouble with you fucking me, but I have a little problem with you not fucking me. Now, did I internally debate whether or not to play you old dirty b astard rapping that part specifically? Yes, there was some debate. It was a short debate though. Is it a hundred percent necessary that I play you that part of the nineteen ninety nine old dirty bastard hit Got Your Money? No, it is not necessary, necessarily, and yet I do feel compelled to say out loud, and not for the first time, that my favorite sequence of 20 words and 25 syllables in pop music history is I don't have no trouble with you fucking me, but I have a little problem with you not fucking me. There was a time in my life when I thought about that line daily . It's more of a biannual thing for me now. I'm busier now than I was in my 30s, but I do still think about it. My second favorite part of Got Your Money is when old Dirty Bastard yells, sing it, girls, even though there's only one girl singing. It's the nuances, right? Hey, say it , sing it, maybe I got some more . And yes, here we have Khalise singular singing the hook on Got Your Money with a beguiling combination of warmth and iciness. There's a jump rope, double dutch, sing-song-y taunting edge to her voice. Even when she literally sings the words, don't you worry, you can't help but worry a little bit. Khalise's going places. And you, the beguiled listener, will struggle to keep up with her as she openly mocks the futility of your efforts to keep up with her. Got your money is, of course, produced by the Neptunes, the Ascendant Virginia Beach Super star Production Duo of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who starting in the late 90s, will proceed to generate many of the best songs on the radio and elsewhere for the next uh five, 10, 15, 20 plus years. The best Neptune's production is still Take You Home by Bow Wow. I checked. More importantly, for our purposes, in 1999, the Neptunes produced the debut solo album from Khalis in its entirety. It is called Kaleidoscope. Its most famous and influential song is called Caught Out There, which, if you'll recall, is the song where Khalice goes Ah hey you so much right now I hey you so much right now I hey you so much right now! It bears repeating. That chorus bears repeating. It bears repeating because the production on Caught Out There is vintage Neptunes, the rubbery janky funk, the insidious hookiness, the decay ing arcade blip meteor shower going boo boo boo in the background, but the scream is all khaleise. The rage, the malevolence, the gargantuan charisma is all khaleese. You can imagine Khalis singing really any of the hugest early 2000s Neptunes songs. You can imagine Khalis, for example, having a huge hit with Hot in here instead of Nelly. No offense to Nell y. But you can't imagine Nelly doing caught out there. No offense. You can't imagine anyone other than Khalise summoning this precise level of seductive ferocity. My favorite part of caught out there is her ad libs, the deadpan indignance of Khalise's ad libs. The most important and the most threatening words here are no , oh no, and man what is this I see now you don't come home to me oh now you don't come home to mi man can't feel can't bear it takes a very angry person to be this funny while being this angry. Years later in 2006, on another excellent hit single called Bossy, Khalice will brag in the chorus about being the first girl to scream on a track. And that's arguably true, or at least it's arguably truer, if you're talking specifically about screaming on a mainstream pop song, on an RB-oriented song. You know what popped into my head the other day? A rad mid 90s alternative rock hit that just struck me out of nowhere? Tracy Bonham, 1996. The song is called Mother Mother. The most important words here, of course , are everything's fine . I'm hungry, I'm dirty, I'm losing my mind . And this song also struck me at the time as both deliberately terrifying and deliberately very funny. So there's a great book from 2025 by the culture critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a book called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves . She means roughly Khalise's generation. This book's about a lot of honestly, tremendously dismaying cult ural trends, including pop music adopting the aesthetics of pornography. But Sophie Gilbert writes a lot about the unpleasant transition from Riot Girl, the early 90s Pa,cific Northwest femin, ist ultra punk rock movements, bikini kill, and so forth, heavily influenced by Polystyrene, by the way, the transition from riot girl to girl power, as preached by the Spice Girls, starting with our ginormous 1996 debut single, Wannabe . Sophie writes: quote: Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then , just like that, they were gone, replaced by girls. The backlash that banished them would reverberate across all forms of media, so relentlessly and persuasively that people of my generation would hardly think to notice what we'd lost. End quote. So the nineties start with Riot Girl, with Courtney Love, with Alanis Morissette. And as we approach the end of the 90s, you get the backlash via the Spice Girls, via Britney Spears. The Lilith Fair gives way to post Mickey Mouse Club teen pop. Girl power exists to sell you things, not to actually empower you. These are broad strokes, culture critically speaking, but it's both a dismaying and a convincing argument when Sophie Gilbert just lays it out like that. And I really dig the way Khalise interrogates and complicates that argument. She is a turn of the century genre flouting pop star who is undeniably angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. Now might be a good time to mention that Khalise did caught out there in the year 2000 on HBO's The Chris Rock show and she pulled out a pink gun halfway through the song . Oh wow. Talking to the Fader in 2020, Khalid says, quote, I got in trouble because I pulled this gun on the Chris Rock show. It was not a real gun, by the way. It was a pink rhinestone gun. I thought it was adorable. End quote. We can say with confidence that caught out there is the screamiest song on the first Khalise record, on Kaleidoscope. But even when she's not screaming, Khalise finds ways to hold your complete attention, even while working with arguably the most famous and immediately recognizable production duo in pop music. This song is called Good Stuff, and the most important words are H ell Your Mellboy And this once again is manifestly a Neptune's operation. The slinkiness of the bass line, the bossiness of the tambourine, but the interrogates everything, complicates everything, elevates everything. I should note that the uncommonly fruitful musical partnership between the Neptunes and Khalise will end eventually quite acrimoniously. Too many adverbs. Calm down. Talking to the Guardian in 2020, Khalice says that it took her years to realize that she didn't make any money off her first two albums, both of which were produced entirely by the Neptunes. She says quote, I was told we were going to split the whole thing thirty three thirty three thirty three, which we didn't do . End quote. That's theoretically 33% to Pharrell Williams, 33% to Chad Hugo, and 33% to her. She says she was, quote, blatantly lied to and tricked. And she blames, quote, the Neptunes and their management and their lawyers and all that stuff. End quote. Khalise says the Neptune's only response was, well, you signed the contract. Generally, the Neptunes have not commented publicly about this. Also, as of 2024, the Neptunes are no longer together. Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams are now estranged as well over what seems to be financial issues for what it's worth . So, yeah, those are more complications to consider. More immediate harmony, but eventual acrimony to hear in Khalise's music from the very beginning. Meanwhile, I have to say that the weirder this kaleidoscope record gets, the more I love it. This song's called Mars, and it's about going there and colonizing it. As for the most important words here, I'm going with send your black ass to Mars. I'm not a hundred percent on what she says in the last line there, and it's really bothering me. Money, science, space, and art is my best guess. In that article for the Fader in 2020, Khal id says, quote, I remember sitting in my tiny box of an apartment in New York in Harlem on 149th Street, watching this show about trying to colonize Mars. And I was like, that's crazy. And then we talked about what we wanted to write about. Like, yo, I want to write about the show. They're trying to colonize Mars. What the hell is that about? I was a huge science fiction fan, and I always felt like they tried to write us out of the future. They're trying to send everybody white to Mars. There goes the song. I opened my show up with that song for years. End quote. It's a great choice. That's a great opener. But my favorite song on the first Khalice record is called Roller Rink. I think it's about roller skating to distract yourself from the implications of the likely existence of UFOs. I can never thought there might be something out there . And I for one believe that we need more pop songs and RB songs and punk songs and art rock songs about UFOs. But even if there were thousands more UFO songs in the world, I don't think any of them would have a single line better than do you think you'd even know one if you saw one ? Do you think you even know one if you saw one ? Watch out , watch out, watch out, watch out . If you think the government just don't know nothing . Watch out . Watch out. Watch out. Seriously, do you think you'd even know one if you saw one is a fantastic and honestly quite troubling question. So Khaleese's first record has almost a choose your own adventure feel. You get scre aming. You get rapping, including rapping from pre-fame Pusha T of the clips, back when he was still calling himself Terror. You get a song called Mafia about loving a dude in the mafia. You get a song called Suspended about about floating in a black abyss. You get quiet storm type yearning, and you get much louder and stormier yearning. Plus, you know, pink firearms and UFOs and Mars. Both temperamentally and musically, this is all quite challenging to classify, which is awesome if you're listening to this record, but less awesome if you're a befuddled record company stooge trying to sell this record, or a befuddled radio programmer trying to figure out where to play songs from this record. In 2020, the Fader asks Khalise, quote, Did it sting at all when you were told your music was n't black enough to get played on R and B stations? End quote. And Khalis says, quote, I never felt like that made any sense. I always felt like you're wrong. How is a white guy going to tell me what's black enough? First of all. Secondly, how is anybody going to tell me what's black enough for that record? You know what I mean? I had no identity issues. So the fact that someone felt like they're trying to put these things on me was appalling. So I think that all of my responses and my rebellion started to come after the fact. It came from that. It came from being constantly someone trying to tell me what I was and what I wasn't enough of. End quote. She knows who she is, and she knows how to be who she is, even if nobody else can figure out who she is or what to do about it. England, and really all of Europe, figured it out first. Europe usually does. The second Khalise album is called Wonderland. It is once again produced entirely by the Nept unes and it comes out in 200 1 in Europe , but is shelved in the United States and it's not officially released here until 2019. Our loss. This song is called Mr. U FO Man . Speak to Jesus, tell him we're on the plan . Specifically here we are entreating a UFO flying alien to pass along an urgent message to Jesus. I have several follow-up questions, but I cannot ask them in 2001 because I cannot easily hear this song because Wanderland functionally does not exist in America outside of the lead single, which is called Young, Fresh, and New, and is very explicitly about getting the hell out of Dodge because you're way too cool to just hang around in Dodge. You know, sometimes you just got it. That's still the Neptunes, all right, orchestrating all that chaos. Except now the bass is heav ier and the decaying arcade blip boing, boing, boing, meteor shower is heavier as well. Go listen to Wanderland. Go listen to the second Khalice record sometime. Imagine a version of the early twenty first century that was ready for it. One more Wanderland song for now. This song's called Perfect Day. We got some distinct punk rock energy here. And I especially dig how in this universe anyway , the words happy and nasty are interchangeable . Only you and me , only you and me so happy, only you and me , only you and me something . If you got heavy into NERD, the Neptune side project rock band that put out a great debut album called In Search of in 2001, Perfect Day might really do it for you. Khalise is arguably the best part of that NERD record, by the way. But yeah, in real time, Khaleese proves elusive. Everyone flips for Caught Out There in 1999, but her second album gets absolutely unjustly buried. And much of the world is denied the full caleise experience until 200 3 , when suddenly this is happen ing brings all the boys to the yard and their life is better than yours damn right is better than yours I could teach you but I have to charge. That part bears repeating. The first 10 seconds bear repeating. Put on milkshake on headphones sometime and press them tight against your ears and just focus. Really internalize the demonic ultra fuzzed out bass that is threatening to go completely out of tune the whole time. The slashing guitar adjacent sound there da da da da I can't tell if that's violently processed acoustic guitar or what. The minimal drums here, the Darbuka goblet drum, primarily a Middle Eastern instrument. And most important ly, the rug that really ties the whole song together. The Manjira Clash Symbols from the Indian subcontinent. The bell-like ding every 10 seconds or so makes the whole song. In 2015, during a long onstage interview with Jason King of NPR, Pharrell explained that the real impetus for Milkshake was a trip to Brazil, the influence of what he called Brazilian booty shaking music. But Pharrell says, quote, instead of doing like booty sh aking music, I tried to use some more Middle Eastern sounds and completely just twist it, my intentions, as much as I could, so that I would just be like something that even in Brazil, they would go , okay, we like the rhythm of this, we like the feeling of this, but this is from somewhere else. And that somewhere else ideally is Mars wanted the thing that makes me what the guys go crazy for We gotta switch to the milkshake video for just a second. We gotta switch to the milkshake video, if only for the part, where Khalise throws the extra cherry in the dude's milkshake in her necklace gleams right when the Manjira symbol hits ding and the dude leans back like ooh. Just a preposterous music video. Cartoon slapstick lust. You know how an old carto ons, when a cartoon wolf is sitting in a nightclub and a pretty lady appears on stage and the wolf makes protruding heart eyes and his tongue unfolds and becomes star staesirs. That's the vibe. Her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, and then once they're in the yard, the boys just look absolutely ridiculous. This is the warrant cherry pie video from the cherry pie's perspective. If that's too gen X of a reference for you, cherry pie, okay, fine. This is my humps by the black-eyed peas, but uh uh uh more uh prestigious. Never mind . Have some pity for the boys in the yard. Okay, in a 2006 Vulture profile of Caleese, the great New York City cabaret singer Justin Vivian Bond says, quote, I've seen a lot of lip syncing to milkshake in clubs. Milkshake is a big wink about the way you can reclaim your sexuality. It's about making the person who's objectifying you the weaker one end quote. Mission accomplished Watch if you're smart. The boys are waiting, blah blah blah , no . The boys are waiting. And then there's the moment in the milkshake video where Khalise goes into the kitchen of the diner, right? And she bends over and Khalise removes from the oven what I must sheepishly describe to you as a butt cake . A distinctly butt-shaped cake. I'm very sorry, but that's what she does, and that's what that is. The butt cake is a great moment in musical history , in American history, in baking history. She gives you love, baby, not romance. And it's a great moment in rock and roll history, too, speaking broadly, speaking expans ively, speaking with a triumphant disregard for genre that exemplifies our greatest artists. Khalise sings La Boys are waiting. In the same low, deep, husky voice, the same colossal carving depth with which she sings the words Load up on guns, bring your friends. Rock stardom is a state of mind. Pop stardom is a state of mind. Punk rock is a state of mind. And Khaleese's mind encapsulates simultaneously all of these states of mind, and many more states of mind besides. I'm going to stop now. I'm going to stop now for a few reasons. First reason, I just played you the whole song, basically. Milkshake is basically those three parts repeating a bunch of times. That's not a complaint. I say that in admiration of the maximalism that milkshake generates via its minimalism, via its repetition. I'm also going to stop now because I don't want to talk about a lot of what happens personally to Khalice from here. Milkshake is a huge hit. It peaks at number three on the Billboard Hot 100. It's easily her biggest hit ever. But this is gonna be it for Khalice and the Neptunes. The Neptunes only produced five songs on Khalice's third album, Tasty, and then that relationship implodes for good . It's years before Khalice talks publicly about the contracts she signed and about feeling ripped off by the Neptunes, but these wounds are always present and these wounds don't ever heal. When Beyonce interpolates Milkshake on a song called Energy from Beyonce's album Renaissance, Calice loudly objects to Milkshake being used without her permission, but Pharrell eventually publicly interjects to say that it's his decision because it's his song. Milkshake is credited to Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo. It's ugly. The music industry sucks sometimes. There's a Hunter S. Thompson quote you're probably familiar with, but if not, it bears repeating. Quote: The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dog s. There's also a negative side. End quote. On the tasty album, Khalise also does excellent work with Andre 3000, with Rafael Sadi q, with Rock Wilder, and with Dame Grease. Nas also shows up. Nas raps on this album, and Nas and Khalise will later get married and later get divorced, and Khalise says that Nas mentally and physically abused her, and Nas denies these statements, and that's also why I'm stopping now. Milkshake is track three on this tasty alb um. Here is track four . Some that kids they tried to get with me . This song is called Keep It Down Part 2. It is produced and co-written by the super producer Dallas Austin. And the drums and the electric guitars have a distinctly punk rock type snarl to them. And Khalice' dousble-dut ch jump rope chanting about getting hit on after a Beastie Boys concert. It's fantastic. When Pitchfork reviewed this album, Tasty, in 2004, Pitchfork called Khalice, quote, one of the unlu ckiest women in pop , end quote. Because Khalise doesn't get the number one hits that she deserves. She does not get the respect she deserves. She does not get the credit she deserves, but the playful , the masterful, the unbothered lilt of her voice on this song, as she considers getting with the kid who's hitting on her outside the Beastie Boys show, something in Khalice's voice makes clear that Khalice will triumph anyway. She will survive. She will transcend. She will keep innovating and keep confounding and keep electrifying. All the great rock stars do . We are so thrilled and relieved to be joined once again by Les lie Gray Streeter, columnist for the Baltimore Banner, memoirist, novelist, podcaster, and dear friend of ours. Her latest book, a novel, is called Family and Other Calamities. Leslie, hello. Thank you for being here once again. I am so excited to be back. Like I said, I was telling you right before we started recording that I have all these people, I have like fans now who are fans of yours. I think they're fans of yours, but but yes, it's we can we can talk about that later. But that's the people love you, Leslie, and we're all we're all thrilled to talk to you again. Thank you. Um, okay, so as far as Khalise is concerned, like did you get into her in the milkshake era or earlier? I feel like it makes a big difference if you first got into her in this era versus like caught out there, for example. When did you first become aware of police? Streeter, because my family's dope. Um that's dope. And the kitchen, probably with an iP od or something. I don't remember what. Walkman, disc man, something. 99. Okay. There's a few possibilities there. A few possibilities. And he says, do you know the song? I said, no, what song? And he shoves his earphones at me and it's I hate you so much right now. It's like, oh all right. And then he goes, because he's a nineteen year old boy, eighteen, nineteen year old boy, he goes, She's crazy. And I went, that tracks . That track. Right. Point him. And then she's crazy. Sure. What did you think? Did you think she was crazy, Leslie? I thought she was just the right amount of righteously crazy. You know, I'm from the nineties, so I You are. Angry lady chicks. And um I say that facetiously. Um everyone gets to be angry. Everyone else got to be angry. Why couldn't we? And I I loved it. I loved and I will also say in these angry ladies songs, it is always presented that there is a reason for them being angry. They're not just that's right crazy out of the box. They're crazy 'cause they got cheated on or you know, there was a woman who would not go down on them and a the dude in a theater and they felt some kind of way about that. You know, so there was always a reason and I think that for men and guys like my cousin, who were not used to having uh unbridled feminine rage directed at them or people like them as they were listening, without a caveat of, oh, but she's crazy. It was really weird. I thought she was great. I agree with you that I thought immediately of like 90s alternative rock, of Alanis Morissette, like you said, of Courtney Love, of garbage. Like she sounds, Khalise sounds on caught out there, like she's headline Absolutely. And here's the thing, and I'm just, you know, I'ma just say it. we talk about how I feel about, you know, rock and pop criticism of the day, of that day, and so much of it was sexist and racist and didn't even realize it. So there were a lot of people who uh as recently as 2019 in a story in The Guardian referred to her as an RB singer, which I don't think is accurate. And I think that because she looked like she looked , people assumed and did not listen. Also, because you know, it's so easy just to categorize people in the laziest way possible. And that's what they did. I think there's elements of rock and pop. There is some R and B. There's a lot of stuff that sounds like like milkshake reminds me of Slave for You by Brittany Spears. I mean there's a little Shakira in there. There's a jingle jingle jingle jingle jingle jingle jingle, you know, world music, global situation. And she has everything. She obviously has she's the daughter of jazz musician. She has a lot of different influences. The smokiness of her voice evok es jazz in some ways. I think that the problem with Khalise, which honestly is not her problem, it's everyone else's problem, is that no one knew quite how to put her in a box because she was not to be put in a box. Right. I agree completely. You mentioned to me, and I'm so glad that you did, Hit 'em up style, the blue Cantrell song from 2001. So this is a couple of years after Caught Out There. And that's a huge hit too. And they those songs are twinned in my mind now because like they're very, very angry righteously and very, very funny as well. Like what did it mean for caught out there? And the same thing with you ought to know, honestly, you ought to know is a very funny song in addition to being furious. Well, you know, because you know me and my writing, that's my kind of funny. Hit 'em up style. It's really sad in the the the bridge. Like there go there goes the dreams we sold. Here is, you know, it's just like there's an understanding that she's not just going buck wild, you know, and hitting up style. She's also nursing a broken heart and her anger is yeah, she's in mourning of this relations hip. But I think that these songs were clever. These songs were funny and the way that they were written. Listening to Caught Out There and her ad libs, you know, and she's like I love those. I love those you know, that kind of thing. And you imagine that she's both her friend and there is another friend that somebody is like in her head the go, that's right, girl. Those songs, all of those songs felt authentic. They did not feel like they were written by a Swedish guy trying to write like a an American girl. Sorry, Max Martin, but you know what I mean. Uh I do know what you mean. There there was an authenticity. There was no Swedish person trying to phonetically learn this. This was real. This was I was thinking of like Jane Childs don't wanna fall in love, you know. Yeah, there we go. Even Billy Myers kissed the rain. I'm dating myself and all this stuff. But there is a a passion that was aggressive to these songs. I mean, certainly literally like Jane Child with the big like blonde mohawk and she's like in the video stopping. You're like, oh, what the heck is this? You know? Um but it was needed for that. And I think once again it was too easy for people , men, people, critics, people, to put these people in a box because it was uncomfortable how righteous their their rage and their emotion was. Okay, so the early 90s, you have alternative rock, you have riot girl. You know, and as we move through the 90s, then you get to the spice girls, right? In the mid to late nineties, riot girl becomes girl power. And there's an argument, at least, that like we lost, you know, the corny loves and the you ought to know's. Like you don't see that as often from the late 90s on as teen pop kind of takes over, as TRL takes over MTV. Did you have a sense at the time moving from the nineties to the early two thousands that we had lost, you know, some of that alt rock rage other than Khaleese, other than Blue Cantrell. Like did you feel that loss in real time or do you see it now looking back? For sure. After Lilith, right? And uh I just listened to Sarah McLaughlin on Amy Poehler's podcast and about the reason that Lilith was ex isted because they refused to put two women at a time on the same bill. And then when they tried to do a little some time ago, they didn't it didn't sell because we don't need that anymore. Because somewhere in there, it became it was all about the money. They figured out what they could sell. So it happened and they go, Oh, it's just hippie chicks. I mean, that's not true because I saw Missy Elliott for the first time on that bill. This was not just as Sarah Beloxman said, white chick folk singers. Um, there was a lot happening, but then you get to Woodstock ninety nine and them , you know, telling Jewel to take her top off and trying to attack Ananda Lewis. The reac just like heavy metal was a reaction to disco because it was too black and too gay. I think a lot of the stuff in the late 90s, early 2000s was a reaction to women getting too much power, too much airplay , too much power . Um, and so then they had to say, Oh, look, it's it's girls. Like, and there's nothing wrong with Britney Spears. I love Britney Spears. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera who, you know, also a lot of Lolita crap happening. It was really gross, but guys going, Let's put this back in the box now, ladies. Let's package the spice girls. Let's put this back in the box. Let's make it a product again. Let's make it a thing that we control . And that was very disappointing. Right. Which brings us to Milkshake, I guess, which is 2003, which is Khaleese's biggest hit by far. And to me, like Milkshake is about, you know, a song where you're laughing at the dudes who are objectifying you, right? Like you're turning their lust for you against them. Like empowering is a really dorky , overused, like totally co-opted word. But like, did it have that quality for you when you first heard it? I've read um in preparation, because I always do my homework for this podcast, a lot and I remembered some of it, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't uh misconstruing her statements, that she felt it wasn't just about sexuality, it was about all of who you are. It's about being the dopest chick in the world and saying I this is my yard that I have created and I have lured here and I will decide whether or not you set foot in my yard because I have crafted this thing about me that is so powerful and so sexy and so smart and funny and dope in myself that I teach you how to do it, but I'd have to charge because I'm just a master at this. I'm a master at my thing. And I think that it was not necessarily once again because it's so easy to assume the cheapest, easiest thing about a song, so you can categorize it and move on. And so I think that because yeah, it's goofy, the milkshake thing, I think it was easy as a novelty or easy to dismiss it's just some silly thing that meant nothing. And it meant everything. Right. It's it's a f again, it's a very funny song Milkshake is. And I do think of it in the same breath as like my humps by the black eyed peas, or maybe even more so like Fergie, like London Bridge and all that when she went solo. Like these are very, very silly , broad, like body songs, I guess is how I would describe them. But like they're very smart and they're very pointed at the same time. Like does the silliness detract from the pointedness, or is the silliness part of what's so power I think you're powerful enough to be silly. And of course I think this is a much better song than my humps or London Bridge. And also there As powerful a singer as Stacey Ferguson is, there was still a male gaze to her . Yeah. That I do not feel in Khalise. Even though obviously she's singing about the male gaze. She's singing about it, but she's pulling it. And a lot of that her solo stuff, I mean The Duchess is a great album, but there's a lot of stuff and then unfortunately that brings me to Harajuku Girls, which is just ick. Um but it's that same Gwen had a journey. Cultural force as girl power thing. And I Fergie I don't think did that. But there's there's an edge to Khalise's work, even the silly stuff, that I think is different than what uh Fergie was doing. I would agree with you. I that does sort of bring up the Neptunes of it all, right? You know, like the the first two albums Khalise does are entirely Neptune's Milkshake is a Neptune song, but like this is the end of the line because Khalise, you know, as she'll talk about later in interviews, like she got ripped off. You know, she was promised one-third of the money from these records, these songs, and she didn't get it. And like she's estranged, I think permanently from the Neptunes. Like, does it she's not even fully empowered like financially on this song about how empowered she is , right? Does it make you hear it is and does it make you hear milkshake differently to know like sort of the ugliness of the behind the scenes thing or does the song when you hear it still sort of stand alone and apart, you know, from the backstory that's developed around it. I'ma tell you it makes me look at Pharrell in his pop Yoda uh l Lego movie you know sensei Yeah. It's the minions, but yeah, okay. Okay. Probably didn't you didn't know. Oh, that's right. It's their biopic and it's Lego. I didn't see that. Did you see that? Did you see that one? Yeah, there's a big buy-in on him. And I love all his minion stuff I have a 12-year-old child, so obviously I'm first all that stuff. But um it makes you look at that in his sort of Zen master thing a lot different. Where literally according to police, their response to her accusations were, well, you signed it. Right. Right. And she had a very funny story about being at a And she's sitting in the audience and he can see her. And she sees him, they see each other. And he 's being watched, because everyone knows they have beef, and he nods. And she said that it's meant to be that nod of okay we're cool but she said she wants to you stole my publishing I'm like yes and she doesn't do that, but I wish she had, because that would have been fun. Right. It would have been. Uh the other thing you mentioned to me, I'm so glad you did was the girls next door . Uh the Playboy the it was okay. Well it was a reality series about Hugh Hefner's girlfriends, plural, three of them, I think. I living in a Playboy mansion and like getting into wacky adventures. This is 2005 to 2010, and it's just an example of like what was in the air in the mid-2000s at Khaleese's peak. Like just what ostensibly sexy pop culture was like. Did you enjoy this show at the time, Leslie Absolutely never ever ever. And here is what and I'll tell you what. God bless you. God bless you. Okay. It's so gross. We talked about how there was too much ladies were getting too big for their britches and divining their own power sexuality and stuff. So what the two thousands did was recreate it with this catch twenty two that says, We're gonna put the grossest shit ever on TV. We're gonna do Girls Gone Wild and The Swallow Joe Millionaire and all this stuff because you said you wanted to be empowered, right? Here you are. You have a chance to to say that you're empowered. But you can't say you don't like it, because if you don't like it, then you're a prudent. You weren't telling the truth about wanting to empower yourself. So there were many who would say the line is you have to convince yourself that these hot blonde young girls could have anyone in the world. And they want Hugh Hefner's old ass. Yeah. Because that's what it wants you to do. So all this of girls going wild, all of the theory , like gross exploitative, like you know, that's the reign of Perez Hilton and putting the jizz on Britney's mouth and uh that stuff which was just so disgusting, but as a woman , you had to put on your von Dutch hat and your Playboy hat and go to a strip club and act like and some people like that. And that's fine. If that's your gig, that's your gig. But it was very much shoved on people. Right . That this is what you have to do to be in power. Cause you said you were like a man. You said you could go in the boardroom. You say you could do all this. I know people who uh went to who scheduled their board meetings or their staff meetings at strip clubs, knowing at lunch, knowing that their female counterparts were going to have to go and sit there. So this is what Khalise is facing. And I think that there is not only a misunderstanding of or willful under misunderstanding of female sexuality, but it's punitive. It was punitive. It was like, we've now got you. We got you where we want you. And I think that she was misunderstood because she was launching into a culture that was set to to misunderstand her . And so her getting through was even more of a triumph to me because I think people got her weirdness. I think there was a weird girl thing about her. Certainly she's like me, a weird black girl, you know, that, you know, defied um stereotypes or genres or whatever, very I'm wearing a shirt that says unapologetically dope. You are. I am very much myself. I forgot. People can see me. Hi, people. Um I forget too. It's fine. I'll remind you if you need reminding. There we go. Khalise and Macy Gray, who that's important . At a Palm Beach Party, wants people to like, is that Macy Gray? Much shorter than Macy Gray. But I was a black woman with big hair and there's gray in my name, so people just kind of assumed that I would be her. Um, there was an odd duckness to those women because they were so unapolog unapologetically themselves. And some people were not ready for that, but I think a lot of people were, which is why we're still talking about these people. Absolutely. And I think Khalise was always aware of how she was perceived as well. Like her next one of her biggest hits after Milkshake is bossy, of course, which is of course another historically, you know, overloaded word. You know, is she still ahead of her time at that point and sort of understanding the way that she's perceived and sort of flinging it right back at us? This slur of bossy, you know, that she reclaims for herself. It's interesting. I don't know if you brought up or it's something I read, talked about how Cheryl Sandberg of lean in fame at that time had she wanted to ban the word bossy because she was trying to distinction between the world the way that the word boss is used to men who like I'm in charge, I'm unequivocally the top person, I've earned the spot to bossy, which is cut sounds nitpicky and and punitive and meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. And so she wanted to eliminate that word, but I think it's a fine word because I think it defines um a feminine po wer and it doesn't have to be nitpicky if you don't want it to be. It doesn't have to be, you know, I like a word. Um it doesn't have to be cutting or you know meh meh meh meh I that's not even a word. Um no that's good. I I know exactly what you mean when you do that. Unless you want it to. So I I am reluctant to remove entire words without explanation. And I loved Khaleese's um, I love that song. And I loved her, as you said, reclaiming of it. The thing because the word is inherently feminine or used mostly to describe women and it's saying that I can still be the boss and be bossy. Right. Um I can be Diana Ross, the boss, you know, um, and still be Khalice with her big crazy hair. I think that's great. Yeah. And I agree with you completely and it's very important that like Khalice is weird. You know, even on her singles, but if you listen to a full Khalise album, like there's a lot of space. There's a lot of like interstellar, let's go to Mars, are aliens real. Like there's a science fictional aspect to her. Like, and you you never quite know what she's where she's going or what she's gonna talk about next. Like do you s do you view as I do, like the her unpredictability, you know, and the eclecticism of her albums, they make her hard to categorize, but that's her superpower, you know, that she can do anything or talk about anything at any moment . And I love that. I think that sometimes people go, I'm gonna do this to go, are you? And I think some people the are you is, but will it be accepted? Will people get it? Because you can hear her say say I there's a parrot often. Are you really? You know, but from Khalise's perspective , you know, I I think she was and is truly herself and had enough confidence . And once again, she was 19 when she started out. You know, just like a lot of just young person , just all of the bravado, the watch me now, the let me cook, as they say. And so I sound very old saying that. Sorry, my child, when you listen to this for saying that. Um, but she did not ask permission. And I I think that like particularly going into and through and past the Neptune's um era , it's like I got burned for working in collaboration with people or having people tell me what they thought. So I'm not gonna do that anymore . And that she it's okay for her to be kinda out there. Like people once again, Macy Gray were like, She's high all the time. Yeah, who isn't? Who wasn't? I'm not. Yeah, right. Me neither, but I know what you mean. Yes. Once again, women in a box. Women in a box. People of color in a box. And Khalise refused to go near the box. She's her own cylinder of space. She's not even there's not even a door on it. She floats. She comes back. She's her own situation. Right. And so when I look at her, you know, streaming numbers don't mean everything, obviously, but like milkshake is her biggest song now both chart wise and streams or whatever given how eclectic how wild her career has been these albums that she's made since the different people she's worked with post Neptunes like does milkshake still the one song that best represents her? Is that still a suitable entry point to Khalise if that's the only song you know, or you getting the full experience of her? I kinda and I I hate, you know, as a a snobby person, I hate to say that the biggest hit is the thing that encapsulates a an artist, but I think in many ways it does because she's at the height of her powers. Um you know when you're younger and you go, That person's popular now. They sold out. The person is usually not mad about that because they like money. People enjoy money. You get you never hear Bono going well no, I have too much money. Here is my album. On your music. Yeah. There you are on your apple music. But I think that there's a when we're younger , we think purity is not about money, and it's not, but it's also not about money, not about it's not not about success. Right. And I think I listened, I re heard a thing she said the other day that she said several years ago where she said um that she tries not to revisit her songs, but that she loves Milkshake. That it's she doesn't like to dwell on it, but she is very happy from Milkshake. She is very She is very happy that it was poppy and bouncy and it got in your head and it's a thing that stayed with you and made people happy. And it was very gracious because you know, the you know, the Mr. Jones of it all. Um, there are people who go, eh, my biggest hit. Um I get that. But yeah, she doesn't seem to have a lot of regret. Now so much has happened, you You know know., she was with Nas and they broke up and she alleged you know abuse and then she got married and then her husband died. Um Mike Mora, who's a photographer. And now she and her kids the last I looked are in Kenya uh on a farm. I knew about the farm. Yeah. That's the farming is a big part. In the co in the cookbook, you know, like there's there's an entire culinary sideline to her that's really fascinating. Once again, when you were an artist and you just say, 'cause you know there's a manager somewhere going, Is this the right time to put out a cookbook? Or then an album about all food? should we be doing this She's like, ah let it rip. You know? Right. And I really uh it's like David Bowie would go, I'm gonna be crazy today. And they'd go, you know what ? We don't get it. To go from Major Tom to a black soul album in Philadelphia with Luther Bandross, what are we doing? And he was like, this is what I'm doing. And I think obviously Khalis is not on that fame scale as Bowie, but I think she is singularly, and people are gonna go, I can't believe we're saying this, she is her own artist, just like Bowie was his own artist. She is the captain of her Infictus, um and she's just the funky chick and she does her own thing and I think it kind of falls where it does, you know. Um I I'm I love that for her. Yeah. Uh last question for you, Leslie. Did Khalis really date Bill Murray? Did I hallucinate this? And I wanted it to be true, it was not. So apparently they were photographs. Yeah, they were photogra phed at an event together and people were like, ooh, are they dating? What? And they weren't. Bill Mary said, look, that would be a several steps down for her if she were dating me. Um, I don't think she ever commented on it because, you know, woman of mystery. But uh no, they did not date. They just took a really cool picture uh together. They both look great. I mean it was like I don't know these people. Their personal life doesn't matter to me at all, but it's fun to think about. It's like that would have been fun. It wasn't. It would have been probably better off that it didn't happen, but it is fun to think about in the uh as always, Leslie. Absolutely wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here and come back soon, please. I will let me know. I'll be here . Thanks very much to our guest this week, Leslie Gray Streeter . Thanks as always to our producers, Justin Sayles, Olivia Creary, and Chris Sutton, uh, additional production by Kevin Pooler, animations and graphics by Chris Kallaton, and additional art by Matt James. Special thanks as always to Cole Kushner and, thanks to you for listening. And now let's all go listen to Milkshake by Calice . We'll see you next week.