Following the Pied Piper of R&B

‘ve been a fan of R. Kelly’s ever since I bought his 2003 album Chocolate Factory. But since I don’t have cable and am apparently the last person alive who hasn’t seen his purported sex tape, I had never seen him in action until recently, when I saw a screening of his newest project, an “epic urban soap opera.” One of the first shots is a close-up of his face — he has pale eyes, cornrows, the standard thin goatee. He looks normal enough, everything seems to fit, but at the same time something about him is off. If you look in his eyes, you can see he has the slightly addled gaze of the lunatic — part Brian Wilson, part Andrew W.K. Only instead of the Beach Boys’ mystical dreaminess about being warm, safe and loved or Andrew W.K.’s incredible enthusiasm for physical exertion, what R. Kelly has on his mind is filthy, and yet also absolutely absurd, sex.
    For the uninitiated, R. Kelly’s new album, TP.3 Reloaded, out July 5, is a perfect introduction to the world of R. Kelly. Most of the potential singles on the CD are radio-ready — from “Playas Only,” a fairly standard duet with the Game, to the great reggaeton number “Burn It Up”. But the new album contains something everyone from the urban stations to VH1, from hip-hop die-hards to indie rockers seem to be excited about: a soap operatic song cycle, “Trapped in the Closet,” that is acted out by R. Kelly and others on an accompanying DVD.
    The song cycle is unbelievable. It starts out with R. Kelly waking up in the Chicago bedroom of a woman who’s not his girlfriend. The new woman’s husband comes home, forcing Kelly to hide in the closet. (Lyrics include: “And now I’m in this dark-ass closet trying to figure out, just how’m I gonna get my crazy ass up out this house.”) Soon, Kelly is discovered by the husband, who is a pastor, and several other characters present themselves in the course of the next four songs. Each is driven by lust, and everyone is doing wrong, but the overall vibe is so enthusiastic and genuinely funny that the sinning seems beside the point.
    Kelly is exhaustive in his narration, making the most of second-to-second details, like actually singing the word “click” when one of the characters hangs up the phone. It’s totally engrossing — the twists, the great, wacky dialogue, and the tension in the music. This last ingredient is something R. Kelly singularly excels at. He never settles for a moderate build, instead choosing to build and build his songs to an ecstasy of keyboards and guitars and screams of “Say My Name!!!!”.
   It’s remarkable that his ongoing legal trouble (spurred on by the existence of a reportedly incriminating

video involving an underage girl) hasn’t stopped R. Kelly from making dirty records. But it’s also worth noting that on this new album and in most of his songs about sex, there are actually less explicit sexual depictions than you find in most hip-hop. R. Kelly is no NWA. But neither is he John Mayer. Rather, his sex songs are funny and weirdly realistic rather than sensational or exploitative. “Sweat socks and house shoes” are what he chooses to wear during an encounter in “Thoia Thoing.” In the single “Sex in the Kitchen” from the new album, he does it with his girlfriend on the counter “by the buttered rolls”. And as he sings in a latter chapter of “In The Closet,” his girlfriend is thrashing so wildly on his lap that he gets a cramp in his leg.
    But he’s passionate, too: he’s very likely to tear up during sex or to get so worked up about Women (as a group) that he screams, “When I think about the woman, I just get joyful inside! And I just wanna break down and cry!”
    This is a far cry and welcome relief from most pop songs, which usually treat sex as either tediously vague or so voyeuristically explicit that you feel like a gynecologist, bright sodium vapor light illuminating the cervix for your inspection. In their effort to appeal to as many people as possible or to simply relate a “sexy story”, most singers, R&B and otherwise, boil the act down into something that loses any resemblance to reality (like Mayer’s “Your body is a wonderland”) or something with so much reality it’s kind of gross (like NWA’s “Get in the pick up and suck the dick up till you hiccup”).
    R. Kelly, on the other hand, treats sex much the way a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy would, with an all-consuming lust that sees erotic potential in even the most asexual things. On the new album, Kelly associates sex with marijuana in “Sex Weed,” a title which might float mistily across the mind of a languidly masturbating youth whose eyes just happen to rest on a High Times pin-up. Then there are the curious, not-quite-realistic females that inhabit this world, women who thrash about on R. Kelly’s lap and scream that they are “about to climax” (health-textbook phrasing that springs from the mouth of Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” character’s girlfriend).
    But in his perpetual adolescence, R. Kelly completely understands the blunt comedy of sex. He’s not afraid to sing about that phase in a sexual relationship when things get silly silly, that phase beyond the roughhouse open-mouth kisses and against-the-wall groping of Hollywood films or the awkward, tender, all-elbows sex you find in novels. Both of these are dramatic and evocative, but what’s innovative about the sexuality in R. Kelly’s world is that it’s pleasurable and comforting in its sheer, sincere goofiness.
    Europeans seem to get this kind of sexuality, at least as evidenced by the talking penis tips and butthole humor found in their advertisements for ice cream and Citröens. In America, we don’t see it as much, or we haven’t until now. So thank God for R. Kelly, who never misses a chance to invoke that stage of a physical relationship where you start talking in weird voices or greet your lover at the door with an erection, wearing only white sweat socks and house shoes.
    “We’re at my house,” as he sings, “so there ain’t no rules.” n°

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© 2005 Neal Medlyn and hooksexup.com.