“Milkshake” by Kelis

This is essentially a slightly dirty novelty song built around a suggestive pun on the word “Milkshake”. It’s actually a fairly funny joke, and would have worked quite well as an individual punchline in a Rap song, but as the foundation for an entire song, it’s not much to build on. It’s still a single joke that takes only one sentence to tell, and it’s not that funny…certainly not funny enough to carry an entire song on its own. It doesn’t help that this thin one-joke premise is set to some of the worst music of the decade…the Neptunes were normally one of the better producing teams of their era, but the production here is dull and obnoxious in a very 2000s manner, and the vocals are done in the same staccato, talky style the same producers would use for the equally terrible “Hollaback Girl” a year or so later. The result is a song that, like “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, is more of a sung punchline or meme than an actual song…and say what you will about it, at least “Who Let the Dogs Out?” had an actual hook. This is just trash, and sadly, it’s a pretty good indicator of what most mainstream Pop music sounded like in the 2000s.

Verdict: Bad.

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