Kelis shares success story behind single 'Milkshake': 'Big for my career'

Even now, 20 years later, Kelis' Milkshake still draws crowds to the yard.

The musician and chef considered the evolution of Milkshake since its debut in 2003 in light of her collaboration with Lactaid on the "It's Dairy" campaign and the song's 20th anniversary.

"It's really cool to be able to talk about it now because it's one of those things that when people see something successful, they just assume that it's always been successful or that it's always been easy," Kelis, 44, tells People magazine exclusively.

"'Milkshake' was a record that when I decided to make it my single and put it out, we couldn't get the radio to play it. There was nothing else like it at the time."

"If you look at music the year prior to that versus music to the year after that, it's completely different. It changed the course of music for women and for hip-hop, R&B, it was a real merging in a way that we hadn't seen before. It changed the rhythm and the cadence of how we did things, especially as female artists."

The Bossy singer concludes, "We didn't look this way. We didn't sound this way. And so it's iconic now, but at the time, it was rebellious and it was important. It made a difference."

On Friday, the song will have been 20 years since it was first released by Kelis as the lead single from her third studio album Tasty.

"I had no idea that it would be big for my career. You can only really understand something like that in retrospect," she says.

"At the time you're just like, 'This is who I am right now and this is what I'm doing, and this matters because I feel like this is right.' And my sentiment was not so much about what it would look like 20 years from now, but it was more like, 'This is important. This is who I am, and I want people to look at female artists a certain way, and I want to be a part of that.'"