"Blindfold Me" is a hip-hop track by American singer Kelis from her fourth studio album Kelis Was Here (2006). Sean Garrett and Polow da Don wrote and produced it. A remix featuring her then-husband Nas went out as the album’s second U.S. single on October 3, 2006. The Neptunes had been Kelis’s long-time collaborators; this was the first album without them, after she assembled a wider producer bench that included Garrett and Polow. The lyric is sex talk—blindfolds, bedroom taunts, a refusal to take a bite until the blindfold is on. Critics tagged the sound as pop-rap and club music as much as hip-hop. Reception split: some called it a highlight and loved Kelis’s sexual persona; others hated where it sat in the track list, hearing a jarring jump after a sentimental song. Marc Klasfeld directed the video, which has Nas tying Kelis up. It premiered September 6, 2006 on the documentary series Access Granted with a behind-the-scenes feature. A 12-inch followed on October 3. The song peaked at number 91 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. For kink listeners this is a mid-2000s radio-adjacent bondage single: a pop-R&B star and a rapper husband playing kidnap-and-tie-up on camera, then arguing in print about whether the voyeurism was hot or just uncomfortable. The solo album cut and the Nas remix are not the same object: some copies of Kelis Was Here carry one, some the other, and radio got the tied-up-wife version.
Writing, Neptunes breakup, Nas remix, and the 12-inch
Garrett and Polow da Don (credited in the liner notes under his legal name, Jamal Jones) wrote and produced the cut. 2006 pieces in Billboard and Vibe treated Polow’s work here as part of his rise as a hitmaker. Kelis brought in new producers for Kelis Was Here after splitting from the Neptunes, the team behind her since debut album Kaleidoscope (1999) and the duo who had used her as their "diva of choice" for hooks on other artists’ records. In a 2020 interview she said collaborating with other producers on her third album had already cracked that professional relationship.
The single remix adds a verse written and performed by Nas. The couple had already shared four other songs: "Hey Nas" (2002), "Popular Thug" (2004), "In Public" (2005), and "Not Going Back" (2006). Some editions of Kelis Was Here carry the remix; others keep the solo original. Garrett called working with his idol Nas a dream, and said being able to meet those people, work with them, and have them respect the craft had been great. Doug Wilson recorded the track at Westlake Recording Studios in West Hollywood and Battery Studios in New York. Brian Stanley mixed it, assisted by Mike Makowski, at Chung King Studios in New York.
Jive and LaFace put "Blindfold Me" out in the U.S. in September 2006 as the album’s second single. The October 3 vinyl 12-inch includes instrumental and a cappella versions plus two callout hooks. Rhythmic radio got the record a week later, on October 10. It peaked at 91 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart dated November 11, 2006. Despite the single push, the song did not appear on Kelis’s 2008 compilation The Hits—an omission AllMusic’s Andy Kellman criticized. Credits to keep: Jamal Jones in the liner notes, Doug Wilson at Westlake and Battery, Brian Stanley and Mike Makowski at Chung King, Jive and LaFace as the labels, rhythmic radio on October 10, chart date November 11, 2006.
The video: parking-lot grab, panther, rope
Klasfeld, who also directed the other Kelis Was Here singles "Bossy" and "Lil Star," shot the clip in Los Angeles in September 2006. Nas ties Kelis up. He takes her from a parking lot; a black panther is used as part of the foreplay. The video premiered on Access Granted on September 6 with a making-of. Press read it as sexual fetishism. Yahoo!’s Lyndsey Parker put it on a 2018 list of the kinkiest music videos of all time and, with another Yahoo! writer, praised the chemistry between Kelis and Nas. Desire Thompson, writing in Vibe in 2013, was unconvinced, calling the video a failed attempt at sexy.
Sound and lyrics
The song runs three minutes and 48 seconds. Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times grouped it with "Bossy" as "space-age hip-hop." Clover Hope at Billboard filed a review under R&B, then in another piece called the single pop rap. Other writers heard club music. The track uses synthesizers, synth horns, sirens, and drums. A Rap-Up writer noted that sirens are a Polow trademark; Clark Collis in Entertainment Weekly thought it sounded more like Timbaland. Doreen St. Félix at MTV News heard a "skeletal beat"; Hope described "tick-tock percussion." The sex talk is blunt. Critics kept quoting the line about refusing a bite before the blindfold goes on. Brett Johnson of the Associated Press called it a "naughty bedroom romp." T’Cha Dunlevy for CanWest News Service said the lyric is full of "bootylicious taunts." Several writers, St. Félix among them, compared it to 2003’s "Milkshake," with St. Félix calling this one "more sexually literal." Hope likened Kelis’s delivery to panting; Collis called the voice husky. Hope also described a "half-rapping/half-singing affair" and said Nas adds "his own kinky quips" on the remix.
Who loved it, who didn’t
A run of critics treated it as a peak on Kelis Was Here. Jonathan Keefe at Slant put it among 2006’s best singles, joking that Kelis and Nas singing about erotic asphyxiation and mummification would still work if the beat was this good. Lauren Nostro, in a 2012 Complex list, filed it among Sean Garrett’s "classic records." Quentin B. Huff at PopMatters, even while criticizing Kelis’s rapping elsewhere on the album, singled out "Blindfold Me" and "Aww Shit!" as places she "excels with her rhyme schemes." Steve Hands at musicOMH told readers to play both songs more than once to catch "the subtle lights behind the braggy bushels."
Others praised the sexual persona. Collis called the track the "perfect launchpad for the singer’s sex-object-on-her-own-terms persona." Johnson said few songstresses can match her "hot-blooded sneer." Tim Finney at Pitchfork found the single "urgent and almost crude" and the moment Kelis is at "her most brazenly confronting." Hope and Stylus Magazine’s Mallory O’Donnell disliked the remix, reading the lyrics as uncomfortably voyeuristic about Kelis’s sex life with Nas. O’Donnell shrugged it off as a "rote club-banger." Hope doubted it would get much airplay outside sweaty clubs. Sia Michel in New York magazine panned it as a failed grab at old glory, "far less catchy and witty" than "Milkshake."
Several reviewers hated the sequencing: dropping this after the more sentimental "Living Proof" felt like a lurch. Kellman disliked jumping from the song’s "anthemic kink" into a ballad like "Goodbyes." Other writers treated those swings as proof of Kelis’s range. Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times wrote that few artists could line up an ode to bondage next to a love song sweet enough for a wedding. For BDSM and pop-fetish listeners, "Blindfold Me" is the 2006 bondage radio object: Polow sirens, a Nas verse, a Klasfeld video of rope and a panther, a #91 R&B peak, and a critic pile that could not decide whether Kelis-on-her-own-terms sex talk was a highlight, a club throwaway, or too much information about a famous marriage. The critic roll call is the point of a quote-heavy single page: Sanneh, Hope, Collis, St. Félix, Johnson, Dunlevy, Keefe, Nostro, Huff, Hands, Finney, O’Donnell, Michel, Kellman, Powers, Parker, Thompson. They do not agree. They do agree the song is about sex with a blindfold on, that Nas tying Kelis up is the video’s thesis, and that placing an ode to bondage next to wedding-sweet material is either a sequencing crime or proof of range. For this site that is enough: a 3:48 club-kink single, a panther-and-rope clip, a #91 R&B peak, and a 2006 argument about whether a married couple’s fetish talk belongs on a pop-rap single.
