What We Absolutely Must Talk About When We Talk About R. Kelly

“[Kelly] would go back in the early years of his success and go to Lina McLin’s gospel choir class. She’s a legend in Chicago, gospel royalty. He would go to her sophomore class and hook up with girls afterward and have sex with them. Sometimes buy them a pair of sneakers. Sometimes just letting them hang out in his presence in the recording studio. She detailed the sexual relationship that she was scarred by. It lasted about one and a half to two years, and then he dumped her and she slit her wrists, tried to kill herself. Other girls were involved. She recruited other girls. He picked up other girls and made them all have sex together. A level of specificity that was pretty disgusting.”

While this is a shameful thing to admit, I think that somehow it was easier to like R. Kelly if you were ever able to kid yourself that the number of his victims were limited to the two most famous ones. In the case of statutory rape, a lot of people are able to convince themselves that the rape isn’t real or that “maybe she really did want it.”

But that already weak excuse grows even weaker when you realize that R. Kelly’s victims are not just two teenage girls who possibly consented to having sex with an older man (if that was even legal — which it isn’t). The victims were dozens of girls who were manipulated, exploited and pressured into a sexual relationship that they legally, mentally and emotionally could not be prepared for and R. Kelly did not — R. Kelly does not — care one bit.

DeRogatis is reasonably enraged at the toothless media coverage that’s surrounded R. Kelly for the past 15 years. He famously fought with Pitchfork over their decision to have Kelly headline their festival in 2013 and even called out Jezebel for being unexpectedly flip about the songs off Kelly’s newest album. (I myself once did a light-hearted write-up of R. Kelly’s autobiography Soulacoaster. For my part, I am ashamed and deeply sorry, though I know that doesn’t mean much.)

There’s always the question of whether or not you can separate the art from the artist. Can you enjoy a Chris Brown and not feel guilty about his history of domestic violence? Can you watch a Michael Fassbender or Sean Penn movie, knowing that they, too, have horrifying stories of physically abusing their wives and girlfriends in the past? Can you sing “Ignition (Remix)” at karaoke without feeling the weight of everything R. Kelly’s done?

DeRogratis has thoughts on it:

“A lot of art, great art, is made by despicable people. James Brown beat his wife. People are always, “Why aren’t you upset about Led Zeppelin?” …Led Zeppelin did disgusting things…I have a couple of responses to that: I didn’t cover Led Zeppelin. If I was on the plane, like Cameron Crowe was, I would have written about those things if I saw them.

The art very rarely talks about these things. There are not pro-rape Led Zeppelin songs. There are not pro-wife-beating James Brown songs. I think in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, rock music, or pop culture people misbehaving and behaving badly sexually with young women, rare is the amount of evidence compiled against anyone apart from R. Kelly. Dozens of girls — not one, not two, dozens — with harrowing lawsuits.”

He also points out that few artists celebrate their indiscretions quite as openly as R. Kelly — who wrote the Aaliyah song “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” — does. Not only is R. Kelly unabashed about being a sexual predator, he is using it to sell records.

DeRogatis’ logic is a strong one to consider and perhaps a good guide for deciding when and how to support an artist with a violent past. Woody Allen never wrote a movie about going after teenagers (wait, nope, yes, he has) Michael Jackson never wrote love songs about children and, as DeR0gatis points out, James Brown never sang about beating his wife.

R. Kelly, on the other hand, makes music that’s almost entirely about his sexual kinks. He’s written songs with lyrics like “Age ain’t nothing but a number, throwing down ain’t nothing but a thang.” And when flat out asked about his predatory history, Kelly rarely denies it. Why? Because he’s proud of it and has never been held accountable.

When asked yesterday about the Village Voice story on Atlanta’s V-103 radio station, Kelly responded to the accusations with a series of bullshit bush-offs like, “Well I feel like I got the football man, I’m running towards the touchdown and stopping and looking back, mess around, I’ll get tackled,” and, “When you get on top of anything, it’s very windy. It’s about holding your balance once you get up there…You have to spiritually be a climber.”

No defense, no anything. R. Kelly is celebrating R. Kelly and no one — especially a group of black teenage girls with no power whatsoever — is going to stop him.

That is perhaps the starkest and most damning takeaway from DeRogatis’ investigation and the national media’s response to it.

“The saddest fact I’ve learned is: Nobody matters less to our society than young black women,” DeRogatis told Hopper. “Nobody. They have any complaint about the way they are treated: They are ‘bitches, hos, and gold-diggers,’ plain and simple. Kelly never misbehaved with a single white girl who sued him or that we know of. Mark Anthony Neal, the African-American scholar, makes this point: one white girl in Winnetka and the story would have been different.”

So it’s time we ask ourselves (if you haven’t done so already), is the right to guiltlessly enjoy Trapped in the Closet, Black Panties or “Ignition (Remix)” really more important than the bodies, minds and rights of the dozens of black girls victimized by Kelly? What you listen to is a personal choice, but one thing is for certain. It’s time to stop ignoring the facts and face the ugly, grim truth: R. Kelly is a serial sexual abuser of teen girls and there’s no “she probably wanted it” about it.

(For Jim DeRogatis’ full timeline on R. Kelly, click here.)

Image via Getty.