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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/r-kellys-revealing-auto-hagiography.html
Posted by Andrew Marantz
In his twenty-year exploration of the limits of the R. & B. sex ballad, R. Kelly
has often toed the line between satiric and satyric. In his song “Sex Planet,”
he made the obvious joke about Uranus; in his song “Sex In the Kitchen,” he made
the obvious joke about salad-tossing; in his song “Pregnant,” male backup
singers (ominously? chivalrously?) offered to “knock you up.” He has referred to
himself as a “sexosaurus” and a “lesbian R. & B. thug.” He has attempted
onomatopoetic renderings of cunnilingus and of flesh skidding down a stripper
pole. He has yodeled, twice, in the songs “Echo” and “Feelin’ on Yo Booty.” (To
perform the latter song in concert, he donned a top hat and cape for an extended
operatic remix.) And then there is his unfinished magnum opus “Trapped in the
Closet,” a series of twenty-two songs (and counting) featuring a gay pastor, a
stuttering pimp, and a woman named Bridget whose husband is a midget.
All of which inspires the inevitable question: he’s kidding, right?
In one sense, the answer is a straightforward “yes.” No one rhymes “Bridget”
with “midget” by accident. R. Kelly knows he’s funny, no less than Gene Simmons
knew he was wearing makeup. Some of his songs are sincerely sexy; others would
cause any amorous embrace to dissolve into giggles. Yet Kelly’s lyrics sometimes
overshoot farce to reveal a hint of menace. In the 2009 song “Echo,” after
describing what sounds like a punishing regimen of carnal contortions, he sings,
“When you need a break, I’ll let you up, I’ll let you breathe / Wash your face,
get something to eat / Then come back to the bedroom.”
“Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me,” Kelly’s breezy, competently ghostwritten
memoir, raises as many questions as it answers. Even the author’s bio (“R.
Kelly, the king of R&B, makes music of epic proportions”) can be interpreted as
a self-aware joke or a cocksure statement of purpose. A boxing fan, Kelly knows
that what a fighter does outside the ring—trash talking, maintaining a stylish
fur collection, appearing only tenuously sane—can destabilize the competition.
As sublimely campy trash talk, “Soulacoaster” succeeds, if only by reminding the
reader of the depth of Kelly’s résumé. Various scenes find him writing hooks for
Jay-Z and Michael Jackson, palling around with Muhammad Ali, visiting Celine
Dion in Canada, privately serenading Biggie Smalls and Nelson Mandela.
But for a work of auto-hagiography, the book contains a number of revealing
details. Though the phrase “sex addiction” does not appear in “Soulacoaster,”
Kelly is surprisingly candid about his Augustinian struggles of the flesh. He
admits that his infidelities helped destroy his marriage. He invokes (and
denies) the charges that he filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. And
in a childhood memory that should inspire Freudian analysts everywhere to book
flights to Chicago, he recalls drinking from his mother’s lipstick-stained
coffee cup: “Because I loved my mother so much, I always turned the cup to where
she had left that red mark.” (If I hadn’t known all this about him, I might have
felt less conflicted when I heard him sing “I like her / I like her too / And
her friend too / And her cousin too / And her sister / and her mother / and
her—and her—and her big grandma.”)
Robert Kelly grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He never knew his father, and
he was a victim of repeated sexual abuse by family friends. Severely dyslexic,
he was often disoriented in class. (To this day, he has trouble reading.) In
happier moments, though, he and his mother listened to records: Al Green, Donny
Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, and Sam Cooke, all of whom could deliver a song about
seduction as if it were a gospel hymn. When Kelly wanted to hear a vocal run
more clearly, he would slow the record by weighing it down with a nickel.
In the ninth grade, he recalls, “my shyness had me acting strange.” A music
teacher persuaded him to perform Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky” in a school
talent show. To overcome his stage fright, he wore sunglasses and pretended to
be blind. “I started to wear the sunglasses all the time at school, hiding
behind them…. I’d walk down the hallways, practically hugging the wall, dragging
my head against it like I was crazy.” He cut class and spent his days in an
empty music room, fooling around on the piano. Eventually, he dropped out of
high school and began busking underneath the El train. He sang songs by Jeffrey
Osborne and Luther Vandross; some days, he says, he earned hundreds of dollars.
More importantly, “having heard me sing a little, the girls were showing me
serious love.”
In 1990, his group won the TV talent contest “Big Break” (sometimes called the
black “Star Search”), which led to a deal with Jive Records. The trendy sound in
R. & B. was new jack swing, so R. Kelly wrote a new-jack-swing album: tinny drum
machines, honking synthesizers, basso profundo raps about fly guys and their
tenderonis. In place of his smooth tremolo, he used the bright, brassy vocal
timbre that was in fashion, as if he were singing through his soft palate. Two
singles from the album reached No. 1 on the R. & B. charts. In the music video
for “Honey Love,” Kelly affixed a flashlight to his head as if it were a miner’s
helmet. For the “Slow Dance” video, he selected a strange garment that looked
like a hybrid of overalls and a corset. In both videos, he wore dark sunglasses.
Like Little Richard, James Brown and Prince before him, Kelly was staking out a
compromise between musicianship, exhibitionism, and pure weirdness.
He went on a national tour, opening for the journeyman R. & B. singer Gerald
Levert. The audience reception was kind, but not electric. “I needed a gimmick
to take my show to the next level,” Kelly writes. The gimmick he settled on was
a time-tested one, and he would exploit it often in the subsequent two decades.
It was a lewd joke. “I would start talking to the audience,” Kelly recounts.
“‘Can I tell you about a dream I had last night? In this dream, it was more than
foreplay—it was 12 play.’”
“12 Play,” Kelly’s 1993 album, topped the R. & B. charts for nine weeks. Fans
may have associated the album with other African-American music built on the
number twelve, such as twelve-bar blues and the dozens. Or perhaps listeners
admired Kelly’s double entendre, which, on tracks like “Freak Dat Body” and “I
Like the Crotch on You,” quickly devolved into single entendre. In any case, his
swagger had obscured his shyness. On the gospel-tinged “Interlude,” Kelly sings,
of the ladies, “Now that I’m all that / You see, they used to call me wack / But
now they say, ‘Yes Robert, come over right now.’”
The album was a bridge between new jack swing and what would come to be known as
neo-soul. It lodged itself so firmly in the canon that, sixteen years later, the
R. & B. hitmaker The-Dream wrote a meta-slow jam called “Kelly’s 12 Play.” (The
lyrics describe a couple, you know, “doin’ it to Kelly’s ‘12 Play.’”) Though
Kelly would go on to write inspirational mega-ballads (“I Believe I Can Fly”),
elevator-ready schlock (“I’m Your Angel”), adult contemporary reggae (“Slow
Wind”), and sock-hop proto-rock (“Party Jumpin’”), he recognized that his true
calling was to facilitate human procreation. Last summer, after recovering from
a throat abscess, he issued a defiant comeback anthem called “Shut Up” (target
audience: the haters), in which he touted his “twenty-two years of a blessed
career” and “all these hits and melodies.” But those were just preambles to the
boldest boast of all: “Come on dawg, now let’s be honest—how many babies been
made off me? O.M.G.”
So, is he kidding? Perhaps it’s most accurate to say that, even when his music
is intentionally funny, he is not merely kidding. “I like to laugh and make
people have fun,” Kelly writes. “When you go to church, if the pastor at some
point doesn’t make you laugh, he probably ain’t gonna make you join.” Kelly
knows his first duty is to entertain; but no matter how silly his sermons get,
some part of him sees music as a ministry. In “Soulacoaster,” his mother tells
him about Sam Cooke. “He came out the church, but took the church with him.
That’s why you hear God in every note he makes,” she said. Young Robert took
this lesson to heart. A gospel song doesn’t have to be about Jesus; a
transcendent pop melody can be holy per se, even if the lyrics are about
twistin’ the night away, or knockin’ boots, or nothing at all. If secular music
can be sacred, it is no wonder that Kelly takes his comedic gift seriously.
And he does have a gift. Some of his best songs are simple, in the way most
immortal pop songs are simple; others approach mid-seventies Stevie Wonder
levels of complexity. “Exit,” one of my favorites, is a thick copse of virtuosic
vocal runs and neck-snapping syncopation. The beat is funky but off-kilter, a
dance song with a stutter step. The lyrics are a brash and bizarre attempt at
seduction: the speaker compares himself to a professor who “gives sex seminars”
before telling the object of his ardor, “You’ve got pretty teeth.” The first
twenty times I listened to the song, I was too distracted by the nimble
harmonies to appreciate any of the punch lines. By the time I understood the
lyrics, I was already a convert.
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