(Or perhaps the most self-aware person alive. Kelly is passable R & B because it’s “ironic.” (Because God knows, calling a hipster ironic is like calling a chauvinist sexist.) But R & B at its truest, most basic form is all about integrity-and R.
Which is, of course, why one gets out his gun whilst being trapped in the closet, etc cetera, etc cetera. Sometimes even the things that should happen, like having sex with your wife, don’t. And at the best of times (when Kelly isn’t-ew!-hooking up with an actress in a coordinated terrycloth jumpsuit), we relate to the constant confusion that baffles even his most simple decisions. Kelly’s Sylvester (the artist was born Robert Sylvester Kelly in 1967) is like a Kafka with cornrows-in that he fully believes in an absurdist reality. But more importantly, it’s an escape from one mindless canal to another-like the best of Dali with the existential angst of Martin Scorcese’s After Hours. Yes, it does feature a midget that shits himself. The now-infamous 13-part video saga cum opera “Trapped In the Closet” is a Dadaist endeavor that is, as Sasha Frere-Jones recently commented in The New Yorker, worthy of at least one graduate seminar.
What’s fascinating about Double Up, Kelly’s brashest, sexiest album to date, isn’t the “ironic potentials” of say, recording a song entitled “Sex Planet” that promises a trip to a loved one’s “Uranus”-but the undeniable potential the artist holds in his unrelenting id. Personally, I was too busy listening to the new Spoon record to notice. Remember “I Believe I Can Fly,” the song you clutched your 7th grade crush to, playing over the closing credits of Space Jam? Well, if you anticipated that 2007’s most seminal album would be recorded by a nowpedophilic corn-rowed rapper with a mug that looks like it might have been smashed one too many times with the back end of a shovel-congratulations, you’re a pop culture Nostradamus.
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