Kelis doesn't shake much milk on her first record in four years. Instead, she brings it to a slow boil. Flesh Tone is a foray into the percolating house, moody electro and hard trance grooves that pump up airplane-hangar-size Euro clubs. She's always had an impressionistic vision of R&B, but this isn't just a curveball for the hell of it; she uses escapist tracks (written with guys like David Guetta and Jean Baptiste) to realist ends, exploring her recent divorce from Nas and life as a single mom. It's the classic throb of disco liberation.

“Karma Chameleon”

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."