The singer’s handlers did give me a brief statement for the story I wrote about Jerhonda for BuzzFeed News. “The allegations against Mr. Kelly are false, and are being made by individuals known to be dishonest. It is clear these continuing stories are the result of the effort of those with personal agendas who are working in concert to interfere with and damage his career. Mr. Kelly again denies any and all wrongdoing and is taking appropriate legal action to protect himself from ongoing defamation.”
“I know speaking out against Kelly, Kelly could sue me,” Jerhonda said, “but I’m really not worried about it anymore. I feel like this is a healing process for me, because I’ve been holding this in for so many years, and to see that he always gets away with it, it’s just not right.” She also had another reason for telling her story. She worried about Dominique.
After years without communicating, Dominique messaged Jerhonda via Instagram in December 2016. “She had told me that she needed help and she was, you know, drinking a lot, and she was just really stressed out. And she was living downtown in a high-rise.” After losing his mansion, Kelly rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower Chicago. Dominique didn’t mention Kelly by name in her messages, Jerhonda said, “but she was just, like, giving me so many hints. ‘You can’t tell anybody it’s him.’ So everything she said, I knew who it was. She was like, ‘You know, the guy we had in common.’ She said it was really stressful on her, and she just wanted to get out.”
For the first few years Dominique dated Kelly, she lived at home with her mother, Michelle Kramer. In 2015, she began living with Kelly, and her mother heard from her only via sporadic calls and texts. Kramer said some were “like prison calls,” and they often ended abruptly. When we talked in 2018, her daughter was one of six women living with Kelly in what some of their families called his “cult.” Kramer cried, and she had a message for Kelly. “Ain’t nothing in your life going to go right until you let these girls go home and face your judge, your maker.”
Jerhonda also cried when she talked to me about her friend, as well as the other girls living with Kelly and following his rules. “If I can speak out and I can help them get out of that situation, that’s what I will do. I didn’t have anybody to speak up on my behalf when I was going through what I was going through with him. He’s brainwashed them really bad, and it kind of reminds me of Charles Manson. He needs to be stopped.”
My friend and former Chicago Reader music critic Bill Wyman first wrote about R. Kelly when the then-rising star filmed the video for “Bump N’ Grind” at the Vic Theatre on the North Side in 1993. Bill had been an occasional sounding board for years whenever I needed to decompress and try to connect the dots in my reporting. In early 2019, I told him I would never understand Kelly’s Rasputin-like power to captivate young girls. Bill—echoing Jerhonda—said the better comparison might be Charles Manson. He recommended I reread the epic article David Felton and David Dalton wrote for Rolling Stone in 1970.
Like a lot of the alternative press at the time, the magazine had initially been skeptical of the accusations against Manson, suspecting zealous prosecutors of demonizing a culture they’d never comprehend. The accusations had just seemed too weird to be real. The reporters soon learned the truth, from digging into the story, and from talking to Manson himself. Charlie told them he sought out and liked having sex with a certain type, “girls who break down easier,” and music was part of his lure, because “kids respond to music.” Once Charlie picked a girl and went off into the woods with her, a member of the Family said, she was never the same when they came back, and she never left.
CHAPTER 13
“IT’S JUST MUSIC”
R. Kelly took the stage as the headliner on the third night of the ninth annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park on Chicago’s West Side on July 21, 2013, only a mile and a half from where I conducted an emotional interview in a source’s living room thirteen years earlier. I watched Kelly sing from the dugout behind the temporary stage set up in a dusty baseball field. I’d seen him perform only once since the show with the threesome in a jail cell that opened the Best of Both Worlds tour in 2004. The other gig also came in the wait before the trial, during but not officially part of South by Southwest, spring break for music geeks, in 2006. Kelly performed at Bass Concert Hall on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin while fifteen protestors from a group called Feminists of Color United stood in the parking lot chanting, “We love R&B, not child pornography.” They handed out leaflets detailing the charges against Kelly, as well as the horrifying statistics for all sexual assaults on women of color. Most fans heading inside ignored them. “Get a hobby,” one shouted. “It’s just music!”
The last words are the ones that made me want to scream. They always do.
No one protested Kelly’s performance at Pitchfork seven years later. The pain he caused so many girls and the families he destroyed had largely been forgotten, even in the hometown where many of them lived, even before a crowd of twenty thousand college-age music lovers who considered themselves hip, green, and woke. Published at the cusp of the digital revolution, none of the stories Abdon Pallasch and I reported before or during the wait for Kelly’s day in court could be accessed via the clunky website at the Sun-Times. It was as if our work had never existed. And even if it had been easily accessible, it seemed as if many wouldn’t have cared. There were always isolated pockets of loud, angry, often female voices like those women I met in Austin—two who always inspired me were Mikki Kendall in Chicago and Jamilah Lemieux in New York—but their voices were often ignored, marginalized, or mocked. Why did they want to bring the party down? Why did anyone keep bringing up all that unpleasantness? It’s just music.
Though I’d never loved any job more, I left the Sun-Times as its pop music critic in May 2010 after fifteen years, when the paper had its third owner during my tenure, and its fifth since 1980. Chicago financier and civic activist James Tyree bought the tabloid in 2009 as it teetered on the brink of extinction after the conviction of Lord Conrad Black. Tyree believed in the importance of journalism and the necessity of the Sun-Times to provide an alternate voice to the Tribune, but the mantra in dead-tree media had long been “do more with less.” Every newspaper lost revenue from classified advertising to Craigslist, display ads to online platforms, and paid circulation to free digital media. Extinction loomed.
“Disruption,” the techie utopians call it. As a punk-rocker, I’m all for out with the old, in with the new. Maybe the new models will be better, but I’ve yet to see many offer the level of institutional support that allowed us to do the sort of stories we did about R. Kelly. In an effort to staunch the hemorrhaging, Tyree trimmed staff and imposed an across-the-board salary cut in 2010. He died the next year, and things at my old paper and journalism in general only got worse after that.
Every journalist I know has dark hours when she believes the profession is dying. Some think it’s already dead. Many people I love, respect, and admire have left, including Don Hayner, who reluctantly retired, and Abdon, who went to work on the state budget as Gov. Pat Quinn’s Asst. Budget Director and then as director of communications for Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza (an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Chicago in 2019). Mary Mitchell is still at it, still providing a vital voice for many who don’t have one at a Sun-Times that somehow continues doing good journalism while on life support. I started teaching Reviewing the Arts as an adjunct at Columbia College Chicago, and when the English Department offered me a full-time position, I gratefully accepted. I continued doing music journalism and criticism with Sound Opinions and in a blog for the show’s home base at public radio, WBEZ, but it was time to pay the rent with a primary gig elsewhere.
The thing about teaching, as a brilliant artist named Sheperd Paine taught me, is that it forces you to think deeply about what you’ve spent your life doing, so that you can articulate how others should do it, or at least how you do it. I define criticism in my classes as the attempt to con
vey your analysis of a work of art and your emotional reaction to it. Head and heart, you need both, always, per Lester Bangs and Roger Ebert. Everyone who cares about art should be a critic, because, damn it, nothing matters more. Politics, sex, religion, morality, social justice—any issue you can name is in the art, so we’re never just writing about a play, a movie, a painting, a book, or whatnot. It’s never just music. Especially not music, the most powerful and most emotionally resonant of the arts, at least for me.
The tools we have for this daunting task are insight, evidence, and context. What do you think the art is about, and how does it make you feel? Back up that analysis and emotional reaction with evidence, plenty of it. And, finally, know where the art came from and where it fits in our culture. Give context, because nothing exists in a vacuum. Nothing is just anything.
Criticism of Kelly’s music after the first revelations about his predatory behavior had been, as my students would say, an epic fail. And it only got worse during the first nine years after his acquittal.
When R. Kelly walked out of the courthouse at Twenty-Sixth and Cal after hearing the words “not guilty” fourteen times, he had been a platinum-selling artist for almost two decades. Jive Records released his tenth album a year and a half later, in December 2009. Untitled became the first to fall short of a million copies sold. In fact, it didn’t do half that, never even going gold, despite generally positive reviews. Writing in SPIN, Mikael Wood noted that it “contains no shortage of fresh raunch. ‘Bangin’ the Headboard and ‘Pregnant’ (as in ‘You make me wanna get you . . .’) are bawdy even by Kelly’s considerable standards.” That didn’t bother him, and Wood gave the disc a rating of seven on the magazine’s ten-point scale. It didn’t unduly disturb Jon Pareles of the New York Times, either. “Call it focus, call it obsession, call it tunnel vision, call it formula: R. Kelly is consistent. Album after album he provides single-minded, slow-grinding songs about sex. . . . Still, even a routine R. Kelly song outshines much of the competition.”
The fans seemed to be growing tired of Kelly’s horny club grooves, however, or at least less accepting of them from a relentless, aging player now forty-two years old. Always adept at reading the market and the moment, Kelly shifted gears into a more mature, retro-soul mode on his next album in late 2010. On the cover of Love Letter, he donned a tuxedo, sported shades, and struck a Stevie Wonder pose, just like he’d done at the Kenwood Academy talent show in 1982. The album went gold, Kelly served as honorary grand marshal of the South Side’s Bud Billiken Parade, and critics once again applauded.
“His decision to ditch the club and retreat to a more conventionally romantic setting allows him to let his voice take center stage, which is where it should have been all along,” Maura Johnston wrote in SPIN. In the New York Times, Jon Caramanica heard Kelly channeling Frankie Lymon, Jackie Wilson, and James Ingram. (I’d have cited instead his longtime favorite Donny Hathaway.) “Never less than impressive, in places, it’s phenomenal, with Mr. Kelly singing as vigorously as ever, on songs that are some of the most elegant of his career. And Love Letter is notable for what’s largely absent: Mr. Kelly’s id, which has otherwise gone untamed—on record, at least—for the better part of the last two decades.”
Kelly’s biggest booster and benefactor during those two decades had been Jive founder Clive Calder, but in 2002, the South African music exec sold the label he launched during the New Wave era to the German media group Bertelsmann for $2.74 billion. Disruption hit the old-school music biz as hard as it did journalism. Consolidation ran rampant as what had long been “the big six” major labels became “the big three,” Universal, Warner Music, and Sony BMG, where Kelly became part of RCA/Sony Music.
In 2011, digital downloads topped the sale of CDs for the first time, and within the next five years, both would yield to streaming, and record companies would become less important than ever. (Marketers and publicists are a different story.) At the same time, the global concert giant Live Nation gobbled up Pac-Man-like the independent promoters that had been doing big business regionally since the sixties. The new shareholder-driven monopolies had no problem grabbing a piece of the revenue generated by Kelly. After all, he’d been acquitted.
Few mourned the loss of Jive Records. In addition to enabling Kelly for most of his career, the label had given another of its most profitable partners cover to commit myriad crimes. In a 2007 exposé for Vanity Fair, journalist Bryan Burrough reported that “until he fled the country in January, accused of embezzling more than $300 million, Lou Pearlman was famous as the impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. Turns out his investors weren’t the only victims, colleagues reveal: Pearlman’s passion for boy bands was also a passion for boys.” Prosecuted for fraud, though not the sexual molestation charges documented by Burrough, Pearlman died in prison in 2016. Jive had also presided over the hypersexualized marketing of Britney Spears since she signed to the label at age sixteen, and it kept profiting from her throughout her long, sad, and very public meltdown.
In 2012, a year and a half after Love Letter, Kelly released his first album for RCA/Sony Music, Write Me Back, an uninspired sequel that continued in the retro-soul mold. It didn’t sell in any format—few albums did anymore by then—and it signaled to me an aging artist in decline and devoid of new ideas. Other critics disagreed. “It’s slightly less drenched in retro tropes, but it’s no less of an enjoyable listen,” Maura Johnston wrote in the Village Voice, but she added that where Kelly really delivered was onstage. The concert she’d seen a year earlier during the Love Letter tour had been “one of the most impressive live spectacles I’ve been witness to in my two-plus decades of attending big arena shows.”
Johnston and Kelefa Sanneh, both of whose work I often admired, were leading lights in a new wave of music critics who called themselves “popists.” I’ll spare you the internecine debate, but it’s important to understand that many (though not all) critics in the first two decades of the new millennium thought like that editor with whom I’d strongly disagreed at the Sun-Times, the one who didn’t want to upset Michael Jackson fans by mentioning the accusations that had been made against him. It’s just music. Try to listen from the perspective of the fans who love it, these critics contend. Just write about the music, and go easy on the cultural context.
Kelly released more than just music in these years. June 2012 saw the publication of Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me. The cover depicts its hero standing in his shades and retro-soul tux, striking a Christ-like pose while surrounded by dozens of microphones, symbolizing both his crucifixion by the media and the act of recording the music he offered like a sacrament. Publisher SmileyBooks was part of the media empire started by the entrepreneurial PBS television personality Tavis Smiley, who first trumpeted the book in a press release years earlier, noting his excitement about Kelly joining a roster of authors that included Dr. Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. “We are thrilled to be the conduit through which R. Kelly will tell his own story,” Smiley said.
The press release also quoted Kelly. “I’m writing this book as Robert, not R. Kelly. I’m tired of being misunderstood. I will show you the tears, fears, and sweat. I will open my heart and reveal the good in my life as well as all the drama. I want to tell it like it is.”
SmileyBooks delayed Soulacoaster several times, apparently because of legal challenges. In late 2017, Smiley became embroiled in his own sexual harassment scandal, leading to his termination by PBS, which had distributed his nightly talk show.
Like his albums, Kelly’s book garnered embarrassingly positive press, despite the many troubling aspects of the singer’s actions it never addressed. “A tell-all, this is not,” Jesse Washington wrote in a review for the Associated Press. “Instead, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me recounts the creative and family life of a once-in-a-generation performer and musician.” Despite the omissions, Washington concluded the book charts “an entertaining journey that reveals much about the musical engine of a true artist.”
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One line in Soulacoaster resonated with me through 2013, the most notable year of Kelly’s post-trial career. After he’d tapped the retro-soul well dry, he returned to unleashing his id, and the sexual Superfreak reached out to a new, younger, mostly white audience. In his book, Kelly brags about the especially cartoonish sex songs on Double Up becoming “a big hit with indie-rockers.” Now, his manager, Derrel McDavid, worked with Jonathan Azu of Red Light Management, whose other clients included Phish and the Alabama Shakes, to boost Kelly with the jam-band and indie-rock crowds during a series of high-profile festival appearances.
In April 2013, Kelly made two “surprise” cameos with the French dance-pop band Phoenix, joining its members to sing “Ignition (Remix)” during their headlining slots on two consecutive weekends at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California. In June, he appeared as a headliner at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. And in July, the singer performed as the closing act at Pitchfork.
Meanwhile, cable’s IFC showed Trapped in the Closet, now with ten new chapters, in heavy rotation, and Kelly continued to write for, produce, and collaborate with other artists, none seemingly troubled by the years of accusations about his sexual predation. His long-anticipated pairing with Whitney Houston finally came with the 2009 duet “I Look to You,” and Kelly appeared with Houston again on the soundtrack for the 2012 film Sparkle (a remake of a 1976 movie about a girl group, not the singer who’d testified at his trial). In February 2012, he sang “I Look to You” at Houston’s funeral. At first hesitant to embrace him, attendees responded with thunderous applause when Kelly finished the moving ballad on the altar.
During the nine years after the trial and before his next major scandals, Kelly also collaborated with R&B singers Jhené Aiko, Kelly Rowland, Jordin Sparks, and Chris Brown (years after Brown made his own headlines for assaulting pop star Rihanna); rappers Young Jeezy, Migos, Ty Dolla $ign, and fellow Chicago superstars Kanye West and Chance the Rapper; indie-rock and alt-country darling Will Oldham (for whom Kelly was, according to a profile by Kelefa Sanneh, “a living hero”), and pop stars Robin Thicke (whose hit “Blurred Lines” some critics excoriated as a paean to date rape) and Justin Bieber. Hardest to fathom, Lady Gaga scored a Top Ten hit with Kelly on “Do What U Want” in October 2013.
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