R. Kelly: The man, the artist and the art

 

In an interview with Aubrey Marcus, Jamie Wheal says ‘My default setting is hopeless romantic’. I could completely sympathize as that is my default setting as well. I have a tough exterior but my insides are goo therefore it should then come as no surprise that I have a favourite love song (The Scientist by Coldplay), book (Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez), favourite love film (Wicker Park) and favourite celebrity couple (Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu). Although Coldplay holds the number 1 spot, there is an entire top ten of love songs one of which being ‘I’ll never leave’ by R. Kelly. The year was 2013 when The Chocolate Factory graced our hearts and our speakers. If you know anything about me, I play my music forte much to the chagrin of my neighbours who probably think I’ll outgrow it but what they don’t grasp is that this listening-to-music-loudly thing is genetic and all I can say by way of explanation is that I am my mother’s daughter.

So one Sunday morning I stream it through my car speakers and recall a conversation I had with a friend earlier this year in Sunninghill. The topic of conversation was Ravi Zacharias, MLK and R. Kelly and he emphatically expressed how he would never buy R. Kelly’s music again because he and I quote ‘won’t support a child abuser’. This knee-jerk reaction is very popular in today’s cancel culture. When someone transgresses worse than we have done then we take a self-appointed seat on our high moral pedestals and cast judgment. This judgment is like that unforgiving monopoly card that says ‘go straight to jail, do not pass begin’ which plays out in modern day culture as being ‘cancelled’. At least in Monopoly you are able to re-participate in the game as opposed to our cancel culture that wants to pretend you never existed to begin with. No atonement. No ‘go back to start’. Nothing. You are torn out of all the history pages and there is a black ink blot wherever your name use to be. I hope this essay, more than anything, allows us to pause and reflect before detonating people and their life’s work with our thumbs.

In Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory, he establishes how social interactions amongst human beings culminate in sacrifice, time and time again; which is why sacrifice is an element of many different tribes around the world. Girard is often referred to as the accidental Christian because what his theory leads to ultimately is Jesus Christ who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Many gods have walked the corridors of Hades to bring someone back to life: Isis brought Osiris back to life, Semele brought Dionysus back to life and other gods who were brought back to life include Inanna, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Ba’al and Melqart. Even Jesus brought Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter back to life. The distinguishing factor between Jesus and the other gods is that Jesus Christ went to the worst place (Hades) and gave his life but in doing so, just as Samson brought down the pillars in the temple of Dagon, Jesus brought down the pillars of Hades thereby conquering death. So what does that have to do with R. Kelly? That basic pattern appears with events circumscribing R. Kelly’s downfall. R. Kelly became our scapegoat which Jesus was and which is the step that precedes sacrifice in Girard’s work. R. Kelly was ultimately sacrificed by being ostracized. R. Kelly’s presence in our society and the very acts he committed are those that happened in the societies that we live in, his transgressions are an indictment on the societies we have built. He mirrored our complicity to us in the ‘monsters’ we produce in society. And because a whole bunch of us are in denial of our shadow sides; whenever someone shows us this part of ourselves, we react with rancour and make attempts to repress these sides of ourselves by removing those who mirror them to us from our sight. We numb our guilt by engaging in a sort of collective amnesia and choose to form our identities through scapegoating.  

Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear) writes ‘One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children either with violence, neglect or humiliation (with the exception of people suffering from no-fault diseases).’ R. Kelly himself suffered at the hands of abusers when he was a child and this is precisely what we have chosen to forget in order for us to delineate between the bad man that R. Kelly is and the good society that we raise our children in. We choose to forget all about schismogenesis and that R. Kelly is a victim of said processes. He was a victim and he became a victimizer. Our reaction to his abuse has been to harden our hearts and become ever so indignant towards him. Whereas, we could have stood in a place of understanding and introspection into how we have allowed the society that he grew up to have existed in the first place. ‘Difficult childhoods excuse nothing but explain many things- just as your childhood does’ (Gavin de Becker). The healing he afforded the world through his art was sadly not afforded to him.

Speaking of healing, the word ‘pharmaceutical’ would conventionally invoke the spirit of the Hippocratic oath and has now become synonymous with the nefarious, iatrogenic, profiteering Big Pharma. The word ‘pharmaceutical’ is derived from the word ‘pharmakon’ which is Greek for drug (both poison and cure). In Plato’s Phaedrus, there are other similar words that are mentioned and I think these tie together in the deconstruction of R. Kelly’s fall. One such word is ‘pharmakos’ (sacrifice) and ‘pharmakeus’ (poisoner, sorcerer or magician). R. Kelly embodies all three of these ideas: healer (drug), sacrifice and sorcerer. I’ve elucidated on the sacrificial aspect of his persona in preceding paragraphs and will spend a bit of time on the other two.

‘I am a giant; I am an eagle, oh,

I am a lion down in the jungle

I am the people, oh, I am a helping hand

I am a hero…

I’m that star up in the sky

I’m that mountain peak up high

Hey, I made it, hmm

I’m the world’s greatest’

These are lyrics to an R. Kelly song I belted when I was a child and it was one of those songs that used to fill me to the brim with possibility. His music has been so empowering and healing. Through that song, we all tune into our inner hero and we enter the ring of life with the greats. We don our white Hero T’s and join R. Kelly in the boxing ring like in the music video. We learn to fight back despite the challenges we face. It is because of songs like his that we do not succumb but overcome. He also speaks a message of unity through that song. I am that little kid in the beginning of the music video who says to R. Kelly ‘Thanks Champ’ for allowing himself to be a conduit of such uplifting and inspiring music.

The third word mentioned is ‘pharmakeus’ which is the sorcerer which he unfortunately becomes. In Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the Egyptian god of Technology (Theuth) who is also the god of art. They discuss the positive and negative elements of technology and R Kelly himself is an illustration of both the positive and negative of technology i.e. art. R. Kelly aka The Pied Piper of RnB who in his words ‘put the R in RnB’ is a descendent of Theuth. R. Kelly becomes a sorcerer however, because he uses knowledge (gift) that he received, not to obtain more knowledge but to obtain power and yield this power inappropriately which has led to his global widespread condemnation.

W.B. Yeats describes Shakespeare as possessing a characteristic he calls ‘negative capability’, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs without suffering distress (cognitive dissonance) as a result. This is precisely the lens we should view art and artists through; we should be able to separate the art from the man the art came through. We cannot throw away the art because of the fallibility of the artist. They are not one and it takes someone with an opposable mind (Roger Martin) to wrench the two apart and keep them differentiated: To be able to buy R. Kelly’s music without it being enmeshed with ‘supporting a child abuser’ rhetoric. JF Martel and Phil Ford of The Weird Studies Podcast say in a podcast addressing this very issue, that if we are going to value or engage with art depending on the moral character of the artist then we’ll have no art left. And a life without art, I may add, would be akin to being thrusted into the wilderness-terra incognito- with no way of navigating the terrain, without cynosure to point the way and no way to make sense of reality spelling ultimate death.