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Rated R. Kelly for sex, race and power
When the talk is all between the sheets, what's to read between the lines?
By Ann Powers, Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2007



Out there
click to enlargeWHATEVER view one takes of R. Kelly — that he is obscene, insane, outlandish, played out, musical kingpin or joker — one thing is irrefutable: America deserves him. Five years after being indicted on charges of child pornography, dozens of hits into a career spent raunching up R&B, Kelly's enjoying yet another climb up the charts with his eighth solo album, "Double Up." Defenders of morality and good taste must wonder how the honey-voiced potty mouth remains so successful, or at least hope that his flamboyant tastelessness represents the endpoint of sexually explicit pop.

On "Double Up," Kelly comes up with doozies like "Sex Planet," an intergalactic lovemaking tour that makes a memorable stop at Uranus; "The Zoo," in which Kelly's "heated animal" jungle visions give way to monkey grunts; and "Sweet Tooth," a sugar-soaked ode to orality. The album's 15 other tracks offer much groping, shaking and licking, with only a few inspirational ballads puncturing the flow. Even the song about having a baby earns an R rating. It's hard to imagine anyone going farther, outside the exiled realm of pornography itself.

It's difficult, that is, unless one hears Kelly's music as a particularly warped contribution to a musical conversation about sexuality and power in a racist society that certain African American artists have been engaged in for at least 150 years.

Such a reassessment doesn't diminish the shamefulness of Kelly's alleged personal behavior. Nor does it earn him forgiveness for the musical laziness that mars the predictable club bangers on "Double Up" — likely hits that show guest stars Nelly, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg working harder than their host. (One exception is the excellent "I'm a Flirt," featuring T.I. and T-Pain; Kelly's fully present in this understatement of the hip-hop year.) But it does provide some clues to the Kelly mystique and suggests that his work is only an outpost on a path that just keeps extending.

Take those three much-talked-about songs based on extended metaphors. "The Zoo" is the most shocking; what African American man in his right mind would compare himself to a wild animal? The act opens a Pandora's box of racist "jungle bunny" references, stretching back to the days when P.T. Barnum exhibited a man with a strangely shaped head, William Henry Johnson, as "a Man-Monkey … found during a gorilla-hunting expedition near the Gambia river in Western Africa."

Yet African American performers themselves have been tackling these images since at least 1902. That year, "In Dahomey," the all-black musical staged by the pioneering vaudeville team of Williams and Walker, featured a carnivalesque jungle fantasy starring actors dressed as amphibians, performing a duet on a song called "My Lady Frog." In her book about early black American performance, "Bodies in Dissent," Daphne A. Brooks describes the colorful scene as "bodies out of swamps, swamps into bodies" and discusses the shock it generated among audiences. The critical huffing and puffing surrounding the musical foreshadows the fuss that surrounds Kelly today.

As for Kelly's journey into space, that's been a theme since Sun Ra declared space to be the place in the 1950s. George Clinton and his P-Funk crew launched their influential funk Mothership in the mid-1970s. Betty Davis, the undeservedly obscure funk queen who set the stage for female transgressors such as Lil' Kim and Kelis with her recordings of the same period, wore a modified spacesuit; her signature song was entitled "He Was a Big Freak." There's enough of this stuff that a term has been coined to describe it: "Afrofuturism." Kelly may not have heard Davis or read the work of Samuel Delaney, whose science-fiction tales explore frankly sexual themes, but "Sex Planet" adds to their legacy.

Kelly has also attached himself, again perhaps unwittingly, to classic blues. Critics have singled out Kelly's reference to his conquest's "black hole" as particularly gross, but is it really any worse than Blind Boy Fuller's "Sweet Honey Hole" or Charley Lincoln's "Doodle Hole," both recorded around 1930? As for the lip-licking "Sweet Tooth," it's not even worth listing all the foods that have been compared to women's privates in blues songs.

What Kelly's output shares with dirty blues is an obsession with racist stereotypes surrounding black American sexuality. "I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds," novelist and critic Ralph Ellison wrote in 1953, of the immensity and cultural power of the stereotypes. A major strain of popular music, from blues to soul to funk to hip-hop, has given voice to that giant: internalizing, caricaturing or raging against the assumption that to be black is to be hypersexual, primitive, in need of restraint.

Comedy has been a major tool in defusing this stereotype. The link between hip-hop and black humor stretches back to 1965, when Clarence Reid, a songwriter who pens off-color parodies of popular songs under the name Blowfly, recorded what some consider the first rap song, the slightly surreal "Rap Dirty." Blowfly's mix of self-deprecation and braggadocio resembled the beloved shtick of comics including Redd Foxx and Rudy Ray Moore, not to mention the king of transgressors, Richard Pryor.

Early rappers such as Too Short and Slick Rick modified Blowfly style, weaving elaborate tales of priapic adventure with a dash of silliness to temper the bluster. The tradition was carried on in the 1980s by Oakland's Digital Underground and Miami's accidental free-speech icons 2 Live Crew and later by Kelly's pal Snoop and many a rapper from the "Dirty South." Less comically inclined artists have transformed hyper-masculinization into a hero's burden. The late Rick James is a prime example of this approach; songs like "Superfreak" and "Fire and Desire" set the stage for Kelly's grandiosity by turning funk into opera. The New Jack Swing era took gangster attitude into the bedroom, as groups like Guy, Jodeci and Dru Hill brought gangster cool into the bedroom.

Kelly borrows from both of these schools. His albums confound critics, in part, because he sees no contradiction between humor and romance; he can make a fool of himself, as he does on the sprawling-drunk "Leave Your Name," then turn around and declare himself a king (that's on "I'm a Flirt") and turn again in all earnestness toward an anthem, like "Rise Up," dedicated to the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. He's an unsettled, unintegrated soul, bizarrely attuned to the most difficult contradictions contained within African American culture. That's why, despite his violent objectification of women, overuse of baller clichés and frequently clunky depictions of the very sex act he so reveres, he still fascinates so many. He's an id born of history that no superego can tame.

In "The Champ," the strangely powerful if wholly unconvincing introduction that begins "Double Up," Kelly briefly invokes another king of pop and alleged pervert: his former collaborator, Michael Jackson. The final evidence that Kelly will survive is provided by the fact of Jackson's own exile after being accused of child molestation.

Jackson, a far greater musical innovator and cultural icon than Kelly, has likely been permanently felled. Neither man's alleged actions are excusable, but is it a coincidence that Jackson is effeminate, has modified his looks to appear more white and was accused of molesting boys, while Kelly is virile, is proudly "chocolate" and stands accused of molesting girls? Stereotypes die hard, and we've all absorbed them. R. Kelly may not consciously grasp that, but he's reaping the benefits, whether he calls himself a monkey or a king.


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ann.powers@latimes.com

I simply don't get how this muthafucka is popular. I just don't.....

bboy87 said:

Me either.....never have.

Hate to say it but there's a lot of people that connect with his music. I personally don't care for him but he was the man in the 90's.