
But there’s a small hitch in its plans to mingle gustation and audition into one celebratory dish, and it’s that it represents the weakest music of her career, a recurrently insipid mélange of MOR pop, MOR R&B, and MOR AOR that’s been sieved of pretty much every flavor that installed the New Yorker as a harbinger for so many of the names (e.g., Rihanna, Lady Gaga) who today stand at the intersection between electro, dance, R&B, and pop.

Or at least that’s what her sixth album might persuade you into believing, with its song titles that read like the menu from some po-mo restaurant and lyrics that tenderly quote her storied musical biography. Music may be the food of love for Shakespeare, but for Kelis, food is the love of music.
