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R. Kelly Gets the JokeWhy Trapped in the Closet is a brilliant career move.

By Jody Rosen
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007, at 2:25 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

How else to interpret songs like "Sex Planet" and "The Zoo" from Kelly's latest album, Double-Up? The former has a poetic conceit that literally spins into outer space: "We'll stick a flag on the moon/ First couple to ever make love on planet Neptune/ And if time allow us/ We'll be gone for hours/ I won't stop until I give you meteor showers." "The Zoo" is even broader: "Girl, I got you so wet/ It's like a rain forest/ Like Jurassic Park/ Except I'm your sex-a-saurus baby/ You and me hopping/ Like two kangaroos/ Rattling and moaning/ Out here in these woods." No one who has seen Trapped in the Closet—or, for that matter, Kelly's live a cappella performance of "The Zoo"—could deny that such songs are meant more to amuse than to titillate.

But above all, R. Kelly's point is to keep things fresh. Boudoir pop was born the day that R&B singers stopped bothering with double-entendres and got explicit. That was a breakthrough, to be sure, but the act quickly became absurd: There's only so much talk of silk sheets and whipped cream even a hyper-sexed groupie can take before rolling her eyes. Kelly has managed to breathe life into sex music by embracing sexual farce. It's a clever move: He gets to keep his favorite subject matter and his louche backing tracks while disarming his critics. And he can let his erotic imagination run utterly rampant. Perversion goes down easy when delivered with a wink.

Trapped in the Closet is a riot, but it is also, in its way, profound. The real triumph of Kelly's meta-love-man routine is how it underscores something essential about sex and desire: the comedy and absurdity that so often accompany the desperate lurchings of our loins. This is where Trapped in the Closet (and "Sex Planet" and the "The Zoo" and dozens of other Kelly songs yet to be recorded) shades into autobiography. Kelly will stand trial this September on child pornography charges, stemming from a videotaped encounter in which Kelly allegedly is shown urinating on an underaged paramour. Who can doubt that the outrageous stew of sex, guilt, and violence in Trapped in the Closet reflects its creator's own outrageous legal troubles? R. Kelly knows as well as anyone that eros can be a farce, and a trap.

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Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Charlie Powell.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Absolute nonsense - the perfect example of how "intellectuals" can be led completely astray by their tendency towards analysis and synthesis. 'Trapped in the Closet' was obviously begun in absolute seriousness, and then it became quite apparent, by the myriad comments on Youtube, for example, that it wasn't being received in the intended spirit, and people were laughing their heads off. The smartest thing R. Kelly did was realize this, and then to make out that he was really joking all along. Go back and watch the early chapters - 1-5 were released as a package, and were serious. After the hilarity of their reception, Kelly began to cotton on to the ridiculousness, gradually, and so entered the midget. This drew a kind of hysterical delight from viewers, and Kelly then completely hedged his bets and so appeared Pimp Lucius, etc. Please don't be so silly as to use words like "profound" in discussions of guff like this, you pseudo-academics.

--Papadavidson

(To reply, click here.)

I like a little bit of everything so this isn't a rant against rap or R&B or hip hop or whatever the hell you want to call it but dear sweet eight pound twelve ounce baby jesus . . . ascribing the word profound to any music, much less an R. Kelly song, should be done carefully.

Jimmy Hendrix was a profound musician, Janis Joplin, and Pink Floyd were all profound as well as Tammy Wynette, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and Billy Holiday but to praise a man who not only allegedly likes to relieve his bladder on children for the sake of sexual gratification but makes his living by further demonizing and stereotyping men with songs that stretch the human imagination no further then the penis is not what I would call profound no matter how it's done.

No matter how the trial goes any one whose seen the video can have little doubt R. Kelly is indeed the man in question and while I am tolerant of sexuality and aware it's quite literally different strokes for different folks the fact that anyone still buys this mans albums after having watched the alleged video surprises me. His music just isn't that good to begin with and coupling that with his obvious fetish for sodomizing children what possible profundity or appeal can be left over?

--shawhan86

(To reply, click here.)

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