by R. Kelly
My mother used to always tell me “meet greatness where it is,” which meant we all walk on the ground. I tried to remember her words when I was hanging with Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan. But every now and then I had to pinch myself. One of those times was when I was playing a game of one-on-one with Jordan. I was inspired by the fact that he was so approachable and down-to-earth. The score was to 32-to-l. I might have lost pretty badly but I won a chance to play against “the man!”
Years later, after the movie came out and the song started soaring, I kept thinking about that first time I met Michael Jordan outside his mother’s house on a Chicago street.
“I Believe I Can Fly” traveled all over the world, won three Grammys and so many other awards I can’t remember them all. It launched me into a new orbit. Until then, I’d been seen as a sexy R&B singer. I could talk about the crotch on you; I could get the ladies to sex me, to hump bounce and go down low. I could sing pretty ballads asking you to step in my room. But before “I Believe I Can Fly,” if someone had asked a music critic if R. Kelly could write a purely inspirational song, the answer would be, “You kidding? Not R. Kelly. He’s too busy with the bump and grind.”
Maybe the only one who wasn’t surprised at the success of “I Believe I Can Fly” was me. I say that because these kinds of songs had always lived inside my soul. I call them faith anthems. They’re songs that affirm my faith in God, God’s faith in me, and my faith in myself. They were as deep a part of me as “Homie Lover Friend” or “Seems Like You’re Ready.” I knew I’d be writing these kinds of songs for the rest of my life.
I knew that my next album would have to go to a whole other level. I had lifted the bar higher—which is just what I wanted to do. After all, that’s what Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali did. They all went for the gold, and they got it. Whether I liked it or not, my blessing and burden were to try to outdo myself every time I stepped into the ring of fire. That ring burned brightest in my studio.
In the mid-’90s, something else was happening in music studios across the country—something as hot as the hottest R&B, the deepest faith anthem, or the most seductive dance groove. Rap had taken its place at the center of the musical universe. Some singers started complaining about that; some said that rappers only rap because they can’t sing. I didn’t see it that way. I’d grown up with rap music from the earliest days, I appreciated rap just like I did all music, and, I recognized the stories. I was influenced by the Sugar Hill Gang, Grand Master Flash, and Kurtis Blow. Everybody knew those lyrics. Times change, and musical styles started to merge.
I get upset when I hear a rapper say, “I ain’t no R&B singer.” They want to say “that’s soft.” I’m not the guy that you want to say, “Oh that guy’s soft, he’s an R&B guy.” I’m not a fight starter, but I am a great finisher.
I wouldn’t say R&B and rap belong together, but sometimes they can be a great match if the collaboration is right. I understood that rap was an art form. The challenge became clear: How can rap and R&B come together?
While I was standing in front of a hotel one sunny afternoon in Beverly Hills, the idea came to me. It came in the form of a drop-top Bentley convertible.
I was able to marry music with rappers …
Put together and you get the best of both worlds
“YO PAC! YO BIGGIE!”
It was 1996; I had just left the lobby of the Hotel Nikko (We called it the Hotel Negro because so many rappers and music business folk liked staying there.) I was standing out front, waiting for my ride to arrive, when I looked up and saw Tupac Shakur driving by in a bad-ass Bentley He was alone, and I thought to myself: “Man, this nigga got some balls to be rolling by himself like that.”
“Yac!” I yelled at the top of my voice.
He made a U-turn and jumped out of the car.
“What up, baby?” he asked.
“Just wanted to holla at you,” I said. “Just had to tell you that I love everything you do.”
“Hey, man,” said Pac, “coming from you that’s a helluva compliment.”
“Lots of cats say rap and R&B live in different parts of the planet, but I don’t see it that way, Pac. I see us all coming together. You feel me?”
“Been feeling the same way. It’s all the same thing. Beats, words, stories.”
“Man, we need to do an album.”
“Would love it.”
“I’m talkin’ about a whole album. A whole concept. A big game-changing record.”
“You got it, Keils. Teil me what studio and when to be there.”
“Gonna send you some tracks,” I said.
“Don’t need no tracks. Just need to know you wanna work with me. That’s enough. We’ll just let it do what it do.”
“God is good.”
“All the time,” said Pac.
We hugged and Pac went on his way.
As the year went on, we made tentative plans to meet, but the plans got messed up when his schedule or mine suddenly changed. That didn’t change our hearts, though. Every time we talked, we talked about how this marriage of rap and R&B had to happen in a big way. We figured we were the two artists to pull it off. Pac understood that we came from the same ’hood. We had mutual respect and mutual love. I’d go around saying, “No one is better at the rap game than Pac.” And Pac went around saying, “Kells is the most serious R&B thug out there.”
Come September, and it looked like my schedule was opening up just before the holidays. I set up a meeting with Pac for us to plot our strategy, get firm dates, and make the musical bomb that we both knew would explode all around the world.
But another bomb exploded that no one saw coming.
I woke up on Sunday, November 8, to the news that Pac had been shot in Vegas the night before. He’d been rushed to the hospital. It didn’t look good.
Six days after the shooting, on Friday the 13th, Pac died.
I was numb from the news. Didn’t know what to say or what to do except praise God for giving him a gift that he gave to us—brilliant true-life stories, beautiful real-life poetry, words that will keep on living as long as there are eyes to read and ears to hear.
On many different singles, I was able to marry my music with rappers who understood the natural bond between us. Even though our approaches were different, we complemented each other. Put them together and you get the best of both worlds—a term that stayed in my mind when I decided to put together the master plan that got postponed after the death of Tupac.
I can never think of Tupac without thinking of Biggie. Because the very next year we lost another rap icon for whom I have the deepest respect.
Biggie was a lyrical genius, he was a musical painter with words. As he rapped, you would see the picture come to life as you heard his story. You hear a lot of rappers rap, you hear a lot of singers sing, but you don’t see the movie in your head the way you do when you hear Biggie rap. We related in that way because I’m into painting the picture and showing you the movie of what I’m singing about, so it was natural thing for us to collaborate. Something would have been wrong with the Earth if we hadn’t done something together. When I got to Biggie’s studio in New York, Biggie was in the backroom messing around with his lyrics on the track; then he came out and showed me the first verse on “Fuck You Tonight.” While I was listening to his verse, I was already hearing the chorus in my head. I didn’t say anything and kept grooving to the track. And I had the chorus immediately.
Soon as I sang it: “You must be used to me spending and all that sweet wining and dining …” He stood up, he was tripping. “That’s it! That’s it right there.” He loved it, just as much as I loved his verse. There was such a mutual respect between us. I didn’t feel like I was working with just any rapper; I felt like I was working with someone who had a heart, someone who understood the significance of his own gift and of mine, and what it meant for them to merge together and for us to get together on the song. Biggie loved R&B music. He never felt that he was too tough for R
&B.
As with all the other rappers I’ve worked with, Biggie and I shared common ground. Even though Biggie grew up in Brooklyn and I grew up in Chicago, we came from the same 'hood. We knew the same characters. We’d been through a lot of the same shit.
One time we were on tour together and we were staying at the same hotel in Detroit. It was late and the after-party was over. The hotel-lobby party was over. The hotel-room party was over. There were still people hanging out in the lobby. And I was back in the lobby where they had this piano. I had just recalled that childhood dream with the cartoon characters chasing me. I remembered the melody from that dream and was trying to figure out the rest of the lyrics, working on what would become “I Believe I Can Believe Fly.” Biggie and his crew came in the lobby about four in the morning.
“What’s up, baby! Great show, baby! What you doing?”
He came over to the piano, and I started to play it for him: “I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky . ..” but so far that’s all I had.
“I’m gonna tell you right now, B, that’s a smash. That’s a big hit right there. That’s a Grammy winner, Rob.”
When I was playing it for him, I was thinking—he’s a hardcore rapper; this is gonna be too soft for him—but when I got through and looked up, his face was wet with tears.
“My brother,” he said, “they gonna be playing that when you and I have moved on to the other side of time.”
I was blown completely away because here was one of the greatest in rap, recognizing a song that was about humanity, about uplifting people and feeling the power of the song that took me beyond Biggie the rapper or Biggie the writer. That connected me with Biggie the man. Biggie was the first person to hear me sing “I Believe I Can Fly.” That was a great moment.
The death of Biggie in 1997 hit me just as hard as Tupac’s death the year before. Another genius went down for reasons I never understood—and still don’t. Just a couple of months after he was killed, his album Life After Death dropped that included our collaboration on “Fuck You Tonight.” Biggie was among the first hardcore rappers to understand that mixing in pretty R&B with his raps made them more radio-friendly. He also understood—as I did—that a club cut was different from a radio cut. Profanity had leaked from streets into rap, and then into R&B. We all got caught up in it. I didn’t mind singing a lyric like “I’m fucking you tonight” in a club jam. I thought it fit into that slot perfectly, and so did millions of fans who bought the record.
After that collaboration, rapper after rapper came knocking at my door. And I was happy to open that door and let them in. I took it as a compliment that they thought I could contribute to their art form.
When Fat Joe, for example, came to see me in a studio in Miami, he came with deep respect. Thug as he was, street as he was, the man was all heart.
“Kells,” he said, “you got to write me a hit, Bro.”
“I’ll do my best, Joe.”
Fat Joe didn’t come alone. His posse must have been 20 deep, all hanging in the studio, watching and waiting for me to come up with a killer jam.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I do better when I work alone. Y’all take a walk or go to the beach. The ocean out here is really beautiful. Give me an hour, and I’ll come up with something.”
“No problem, Rob,” said Joe.
Half-hour later him and his boyz were back.
“Got something, Kells?”
“Matter of fact, Joe, I do.”
Played the track, sang the chorus, and Joe was all smiles.
“It’s a monster, baby,” he said.
“I like it myself,” I said, as I kept singing the chorus:
We thuggin’, rollin’ on dubs …
The jam, “We Thuggin',” hit big in late 2001. Soon all the big-time rappers were coming around. Got to the point that a rap with a Kells chorus gave you even more street cred. Slick Rick, Doug E. Fresh, The Game, T.I., Elephant Man, Li’l Kim, Missy Elliott, Wyclef, Snoop, Twista, Do or Die, Young BloodZ, OJ Da Juiceman, Swizz Beatz, Chamillionaire, T-Pain, Ludacris, Huey, Kid Rock, Ja Rule, Big Tigger, Nelly—we all worked together. “Supaman High” and “Reggae Bump Bump” and a slew of others became club classics. These songs became part of my identity.
Both as an artist and a businessman, I liked that identity. As an artist, I was working with other serious artists. As a businessman, I saw club tracks as a new franchise that could be profitable for years to come. It was like being McDonald’s and realizing that even though cheeseburgers and fries sold big, you could also make money serving up McRibs, which are always available for a limited time only.
Beyond the fact that marrying rap and R&B made good artistic and business sense, the marriage was good for music lovers. It gave them what they were looking for.
What are music lovers looking for?
First thing is romance. Life can be boring. Romance is exciting. The thought that you might find real love is a beautiful thing. And if a song brings you that thought and helps you strengthen that hope, I say, Amen.
Music also needs to speak to your spirit, your inner core, that part of your soul that can get drowned by the drama of daily life. Don’t matter if it’s a romantic ballad or a hot sexy song, music—at least the kind of music I do—has got to get all over your soul.
And then there’s escape. Everyone needs escape. I need escape. Come Friday and Saturday, Kells is gonna party. You can’t have a party without music. I don’t care where you go around the world, you will see people—in Africa or England, in Jamaica or Japan—looking for a way to let off steam. During the week, we walk around all stiff and uptight. We have to be careful what we say to our boss, or our teacher, or our co-workers. We have to watch every step we take and every word that comes out of our mouths. Come the weekend, we’re tired of holding it in. We got to let it out. We need release. We need relief. We need the club and all the good feelings that the club brings.
Being up in the club, in the VIP with the greatest rappers who ever rocked a mic, made me proud. Made me feel like I was living right where my people were living. Like I said in my first album, my career was born in the '90s. I wanted to be part of my times. And it was—and remains—a great blessing that I could swing back and forth between two cultures. Maybe I could even contribute to a conversation between those two cultures.
When it came to music, there was no shame in my game. I’m at my best when I am wanted, and whoever reaches out to me is going to get my best.
Bring on the rappers, baby. Let me keep dreaming that big dream where R&B and rap share the biggest stage in the world. Where R&B and rap go on the biggest tour in history.
That dream was deep in my soul.
It was going to happen. It had to.
I wanted to be part of my times.
Let me keep dreaming that big dream where R&B and rap share the biggest stage in the world. Where R&B and rap go on the biggest tour in history.
SEMI-PRO
My love of basketball is serious—so serious that I can’t imagine life without it. Playing professionally was something that I’d always wanted. It was my first and only dream before I met Ms. McLin. Basketball is in my blood. When I get old and decrepit, I’ll be shooting outside the arc from a wheelchair
My career was blowing up so big until I needed a break from the craziness.
I was doing too much too quick. Taking off three or four nights a week to hoop wasn’t enough. There were too many gigs, too many videos, too many artists wanting me to produce them, too many songs playing inside my head. I had to stop. I wanted to play ball full-time to prove to myself that I could do more than one thing professionally.
I did it. I put my career on hold for a season while, in 1997, at age 30,1 signed up with the Atlantic City Seagulls, a semi-pro team in the United States Basketball League. This was no public relations stunt. I was doing it for myself.
Two months before the try outs, I started getting in serious shape through a demanding program designed b
y Coach. Man, it was torture. We got to the gym at the crack of dawn. Did those suicides, running up and down the court like my life was on the line. Did drills for hours on end. When it came to conditioning, I didn’t play around. I got into the best shape of my life. If it weren’t for the hard-ass direction of Coach, I would never have made it.
When tryouts rolled around, I was there. I performed at the top of my game and made the team.
Some folks said I made it only because I was famous—that the team thought it would draw bigger crowds with me on the team. That might have been part of their thinking, but I know damn well I wouldn’t have been selected if I didn’t have game.
When reporters got on our coach for putting me on the team, he said, “Rob showed up in great shape. He has an effective open jumper. He can dribble, he can read the defense, and overall he has a fine skills set. He’s also a worker. He hasn’t missed a practice. Some of the guys thought he’d act like a star, but he hasn’t. Rob has become one of the guys, a teammate who everyone likes. He’s come to play and to win.”
In our first game, the highlight came when I went up on defense and smacked the ball away as the opposing forward, Nathan Morris—the singer from Boyz II Men—was going to the hoop. The crowd went crazy.
The crowd was usually with me when I was put into the game. In our home opener, we crushed the Connecticut Seahawks by 30 points. I only got five minutes of playing time but was able to draw a hard foul and make both my free throws.
I soon realized that my opponents were playing extra tough against me. No one wanted to have his coach say, “I can’t believe R. Kelly took you to the hole” or “I can’t believe you let R. Kelly shoot a jumper in your face.” Guys wanted to make me look bad. I can’t say that I was a league leader, but I hung in game after game, I stayed in shape, I hit a few hard shots, and, mostly, I avoided humiliation. I believe I did myself proud.