Earlier this week singer R. Kelly was sentenced to thirty years on prison for federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges. The fifty-five year old performer, who was the dominant figure in R&B music throughout the ‘90s, now faces another federal trial in Chicago in August on child pornography and obsctruction charges. Kelly also has state cases pending in Illinois and Minnesota. While it’s true he was regularly sexually abused as a child, that fact is no excuse for the ways in which Kelly controlled and traumatized a legion of young women, using his celebrity and money to shield himself from prosecution until the 2019 Lifetime series ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ finally brought him to justice.
In light of his conviction I wanted to look back at Kelly’s role in the coarsening of black culture. I’ve always thought Dr. Dre, through his production of N.W.A. and his landmark ‘The Chronic,’ played an outsized role in unleashing the misogynistic tongue and nihilistic impulses of the hiphop audience, making gangsta rap’s nastiness palatable via exquistively recorded funk. The raunchiness that evolved out of hiphop’s “keep it real” aesthetics was capitalized on in R&B by Kelly, who released (or unleashed) that venerable genre from romance and took it straight into the gutter. He put the darkest side of desire on front street and made the euphemisms that R&B thrived on old fashioned. Gangsta rap had proven you could get away with saying anything and make money. Kelly used his vocal and melodic gifts to bring his own brand of demented misogyny to black radio, selling tons of records ,and creating generations of acolytes. Mainstream R&B has never been the same.
When Kelly wanted to paint within the lines of pop and R&B decorum, he could be romantic (“Half on a Baby”), sexy (“My Body’s Calling”), and after school musical inspirational (“I Believe I Can Fly”). These are all songs of quality that could have been successful in the more restrained ‘70s and ‘80s. But when you start digging deeper into Kelly’s catalog his dysfunction becomes clear. The song that made me realize the singer-songwriter was lowering the bar was “I Like the Crotch On You” from his 1993 debut album, ‘12 Play.’ The hook was “I like/I want/ the crotch on you.” Seduction and sex were the text, subtext, and the reason for existing for the majority of R&B singers. But this lyric stuck me as just crass, like something a juvenile kid would say and snicker with his immature friends. It was the kind of lyric I’d expect Eazy E to say, not an emerging R&B love man in the Marvin Gaye/Ron Isley tradition. Well, welcome to the new normal.
The dichotomy between spiritual elevation and secular lust has always been central to African-American musical expression, just as the black church had been the training ground for our singers and musicians. Kelly was a church boy too but, embolded by hiphop and trapped by his own pathology, he pushed R&B into an new explicitness. It was no the Notorious B.I.G. recorded “Fucking You Tonight” in 1997. It was when the biggest R&B singer of that decade crooned, “You must be used to me spending and all that sweet wining and dining/ Well I’m fucking you tonight.” Hiphop realness had freed Kelly from the restrictions of romantic metaphor and, in his wake, the next generation of songwriters and singers would strip away the old notions of what a “love song” was. Courtship, the challenges of monogamy, the complexities of adult relationships etc would recede as the central concerns of that musical culture as a rawer, more mercenary, and transactional attitude to love and sex took promience.
The commercial reality is that Kelly’s undeniable vocal and harmonic gifts, wedded with his personal worldview, was a huge success. For his millions of record buyers he was the R in R&B. It wasn’t until a tape of the singer pissing on an under age girl reached the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002 that there was the first serious dent in his popularity. Despite the ensuing indictments and controversy, Kelly’s career rolled on as he continued to mix classic soul (“If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time”) with straight trash. His 2013 album, ‘Black Panties,’ included songs titled “Marry the Pussy” and “Throw This Money of You.” It really wasn’t until the Lifetime series, anchored by producer/writer Dream Hampton, that his career finally went into free fall.
I’m not gonna dump on any individual singers and producers here for following Kelly’s lyrical lead. If you’ve been listening to music these past twenty-five years you’ve heard it and felt it. Moreover there’s an substantial audience for whom Kelly influenced R&B is all that know, having been reared on songs about orgies, blow jobs and pill popping with very little balance. Moreover the erasure of ballads, and slow jam dancing from black night life culture, illustrates a sad absence of sensuality in our music and bodies. Hot sex is great, but deep embraces will save your life.
In the last few years a new generation of R&B artists, people like H.E.R., Jazmine Sullivan and Ella Mai, have brought balance and romanticism to a genre that had once specialized in giving voice to the many intimate, contradictory and nuanced experiences of love. I’m very excited listening to these singers and hearing them evolve.
R. Kelly is in jail. Likely he will spend the rest of his life incarcerated. The question for all fans of this musical culture is "What do we do with his music?” One of his ‘90s hits is connected with a very important romantic relationship in my past. Will I never play it again? Is it too tainted by his creator’s actions to ever have musical value again? Right now the answer is “I’m not playing it,” though I can hear it in my head even as I write this. Perhaps the twisted legacy of R. Kelly will be of songs we never play, but that still haunt us like ghost?