Review
Genre and Mood
Kelis’s Stick Up is R&B with a hip-hop producer at the desk, bold and playful at once. It comes from Tasty, her 2003 album, and it is a deep cut rather than a single: never released on its own, it sits thirteenth of fourteen tracks, after the hits have had their say.
Song Summary
The song’s premise is a robbery. Complex, in its 2003 cover story on Kelis, called it one of Tasty’s standout cuts, “a love story masked in a thug anthem”: the language of a hold-up used to talk about wanting someone. Kelis wrote it with its producer, Damon Blackmon, better known as Dame Grease, and it runs just under four minutes. The credits add that Glen Marchese recorded and mixed it, with Geoffrey Rice assisting on the mix, at Lot Musik and Sony Music in New York.
Musical Breakdown
The sources say what the song is about and who made it, not how it unfolds section by section, so this breakdown is short.
The Story
Kelis takes the robber’s role, and the threat is the frame for the love story Complex heard underneath.
The Production
The beat is Dame Grease’s; how it is built, and how it changes from section to section, is not described in the sources.
Outro
The sources do not describe how the track ends either; listen for whether the character drops the mask.
Concepts in Focus
Stick Up is built on a stage persona. A singer does not have to sing as herself: she can take a role, and the role can say what a plain confession could not. Here Kelis plays a robber, and, as Complex heard it, the toughness of the part is a mask for a love story. It is one of several characters on Tasty; Blender heard her as a “hair-twisting, gum-popping tart” on Kelis – Sugar Honey Iced Tea.
The credits also show what mixing is: a separate job from writing and producing. After the parts are recorded, the mixing engineer balances them, sets their levels and places them in space so the voice and the beat sit together. Kelis told Complex she cut her first Tasty sessions with Dame Grease in “the most ghetto studio I’ve ever seen––but I loved it”; the mix is the stage where a raw session becomes a finished track.
Artistic Context
Kelis Rogers was born and raised in Harlem and studied at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art. Tasty, her third album, came out in December 2003 on Star Trak and Arista, with Kelis as executive producer. “For Tasty, I literally went and got everything myself,” she said, and she gathered the Neptunes, Raphael Saadiq, Dallas Austin, André 3000, Rockwilder and Dame Grease. Grease came from New York hip-hop: he had shaped the sound of DMX and Ruff Ryders and was the main producer of DMX’s debut.
Impact and Reception
Critics praised Tasty as an improvement on her first two albums, with a Metacritic score of 80, and it reached number 27 in the US and number 11 in the UK, her highest album placing there. Stick Up was never a single, but it shows the album’s range. Listen for the moment the robber in it starts to sound in love.
