R. Kelly - Black Panties

oh R. Kellypaws: http://www.eurweb.com/2013/11/r-kelly-reveals-cover-art-tracklist-for-black-panties/

Can't decide if I'm more excited for the K. Ro, Future, or Migos/Juicy collabs.

Well some things don't change.

I read "K. Ro." but my brain interpreted it as "K. Lo." which is just terrifying

If you're referring to Kathryn Lopez, then yes, I am kinda masochistically wanting to hear her singing voice.

Join us!
POLL IN THE KITCHEN, OVER BY THE STOVE — R. Kelly artist poll RESULTS

real solid review

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/94149/black-panties-drops-the-nearly-perfect-new-r-kelly-album

"nearly perfect" okay

that was awesome, I'm in on this

For more than a decade, lust and carnality have been the women's prerogative — Missy Elliott and Khia and Lady Gaga and Rihanna, with Madonna as the living legend and Peaches as high priestess.

Stopped reading here

haha I did too

staff writer for Grantland, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his work at the Boston Globe. would love to wall-fly sex talk between those two

wesley morris is gay so his sex life is prob p cool

anyway i really like this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6u6242Q4YU

love this album

ehhhh album is middling imo, there are 4-5 songs that are super dope tho

describes his last couple

i just wanna know who thought this needed Migos/Juicy J and DJ Mustard joints bc those are the most worthless

His voice has changed. It's really distressing.

R. Kelly is 46, of course his voice has changed

I wonder what part of it is age and what part of it is surgery. Did you'll read that New Yorker article?http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/04/130304fa_fact_colapinto

To my ears he doesn't sound different in that he's old, he sounds different in that there are shades of sounds missing where there used to be lively.

i think it's a stylistic choice, he still sounds great live

his voice sounds pretty good here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoahTTMK2E0&noredirect=1

Jordan's review of this is wonderful: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18812-r-kelly-black-panties/

Totally otm about circa-2009 The-Dream influence here. The record is ever-so-slightly dated, so it falls into that uncanny valley where's it's not quite with the times, but not quite consciously revisiting old styles. It's a good listen though; if he'd released this in 2009 instead of Untitled I would have gone nuts over it.

This is the power of R. Kelly: it will be impossible to eat an Oreo for a while without thinking of cunnilingus. He has fundamentally altered your existence.

is it possible to write a positive review of r kelly without saying shit like this

No

dude is the walking embodiment of an unholy amalgamation of Mandingo and The Magic Negro

yeah, it's really not. That'd be like reviewing a Fast and Furious movie and not mentioning cars

There is also something undeniably great about a song like “Marry the Pussy,” in which Kelly gives the song’s subject an entire persona: “Pussy talk to me/Pussy sing to me/ Yeah, so much joy it bring to me.” With a song like this, Kelly allows himself to be more human than the rest of us. It is not ridiculous that he wants to marry a pussy—that level of carnality exists somewhere in all of us, male or female. His brilliance is in routinely bringing out into the open the things that—with good reason!—stay in the darkest corners of our minds. In disrupting the social order, maybe his music helps preserve it as well.

this is more like reviewing a fast and the furious movie by saying vin diesel represents the essence of man

i guess its hard for r kelly enthusiasts not to make cartoonish sexual proclamations themselves, like how people praising greg dulli tend to slip into a jive talk reverie

tbf, as a fan of a plenty of r kelly's music, i don't envy anyone trying to write positively about him professionally, as those are pretty choppy waters even if you can keep from writing "Sex Four Star Review"

glad sarge made so much of Double Up.

really enjoyed j0rd's review and also jason king's review in spin http://www.spin.com/reviews/r-kelly-black-panties/

it will be impossible to eat an Oreo for a while without thinking of cunnilingus.

idk about r's method but much liked the fabled oreo i also dip my lady in milk and take a solid bite out of her

and you fill her with artificial sweeteners.

just realized that if we compare the careers of musically talented, exuberant statutory rapists adored for batty sexual bravado and grandiose ballads (though tbf r kelly married aaliyah where steven tyler became his girlfriend's legal guardian), the number of years between 12-Play and Black Panties is the number of years between Aerosmith and Get A Grip.

so basically this oreo line is r kelly's "i'd rather be od'in on the crack of her ass"

lol everyone scared as hell to touch DJP's post

i was listening to the morning show on a local alt-rock station today where one of the guys who listens to a lot of pop/R&B/etc. was talking about Black Panties and there was a brief exhange like "is it getting good reviews?" "it got a 6.8 on Pitchfork."

i guess while a couple of bores itt are rehashing some of their favorite half-baked reasons not to like r kelly, i'll link to this post i read the other day that's actually somewhat interesting:

http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/why-i-wont-listen-to-r-kelly

ultimately i guess i take less of an issue with his moral transgressions as outlined in this post than some, though the points about the relative lack of widespread outrage, and why that's the case, seem valid

i admit the praise for kelly seems considerably more baked than the criticisms

There are no protests. No demands for a boycott of his music. Instead of wanting no more R. Kelly, the world wants more of what R. Kelly offers. In fact, loving R. Kelly has become one of these ironic hipster trends that are emblematic of the things many of us despise about Hipsterism.

Sad, but true.

R&B stations have continued playing the guy's music around the clock in the face of the controversy for over a decade but oooh WE MUST STOP THE HIPSTERS

ftr that quote isn't representative of the post as a whole, actually i thought that was one of the more eyerolly parts

yeah true, i read the whole thing. but the whole DeRogatis-led crusade that implicitly holds white R. Kelly fans more responsible on some "YOU should know better, Pitchfork reader!" tip is just...

that xojane post is really good and does nail my...conflicted feelings about continuing to rep for r kelly as an artist (and not in a distanced way either). i don't think anyone's required to defend enjoying his music in a low-key way but going out of one's way to praise him (as i have done)...hmm.

helps that the latter is not especially required for this album, sorta telling that most of the positive reviews focus on the comedy sex lyrics which i guess are all very amusing and whatever but it's almost like they disguise the lack of strong songwriting - can't help but think kellz deliberately ramped up that side of things after dropping the near-flawless love letter to tumbleweed. this probably fits with DJP's assessment of his appeal too :(

Questlove tweeted a picture of Chris Rock rolling on the floor, in tears from laughter during his first listen to this.

It's easier to feel moral revulsion when an artist makes a mediocre album.

i checked out "throw money at you" or whatever after my wife showed me that pic, and honestly i was a little disappointed at the relative lack of batshit. maybe the grand keyboard intro made him lose it.

relistening and i don't find this album crazy-sounding at all and the lyrics alone aren't enough because r kelly is not a comedy skit to me. it's kinda workmanlike tbh. not awful by any means though, better than untitled but the heavy-handedness of reinforcing the r kelly persona makes it kinda characterless to me

"shut up" is far and away my favorite thing on here and i think it's because its melodic sensibilities remind me of older kells

the stuff he was doing right before The-Dream's career started (specifically all the piano-heavy stuff on Double Up) is so close to The-Dream's sound that i find it kinda suspect when people compare this album so much to The-Dream

Dreams whole career is indebted to Kellz sound obv but Ive always thought one of the ways they are different is in Dreams drums/synths sounds. And a handful of these just feel too similar to that partic sound.

Was just about to say Crazy Sex sounded like a Cardo beat... then I looked it up. Good on him.

Ha I had no idea it was cardo I just knew I liked that beat a lot

I

the stuff he was doing right before The-Dream's career started (specifically all the piano-heavy stuff on Double Up) is so close to The-Dream's sound that i find it kinda suspect when people compare this album so much to The-Dream

― some dude, Wednesday, December 11, 2013 4:00 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

i dunno, nothing on here sounds like that -- i think some of the-dream biting is pretty blatant

but there were tracks like that on untitled too

they did a bunch of stuff together that never came out, & was gonna be split between like ... the next kells record before he did the retro two, & the last dream record. rip.

i keep thinking about people telling you how the beach boys never actually liked surfing, apart from dennis, & wondering what it would be like if middle aged kells had actually lost interest in sex, infrequently pursued women, hadn't talked to anyone for a couple of weeks prior to the cover shoot for this record, just asked dutiful questions about the girl's career & was kinda glibly professional, only concentrated on pussy as a distillation of his muse

big free-associative spider diagram on a flipchart in his office exploring pussy metaphors

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2013/12/read_the_stomac.php?page=all

there's a lot in that piece i didn't know, including that derogatis was the journalist who broke the story in the first place.

What's creepy is that everytime I try to read this story on my phone i get yanked out of it - it's as though the page is changing and Google can't handle it

i think that might just be your phone, not creepiness

never understood why people give a flying fuck about this asshole or his shitty music

because his music isnt shitty?

Plenty of it is.

ok

It's going to be interesting to see what happens after this

Damn, what a piece. Jessica deserves props

It would easier to ignore him if his music was uniformly shitty.

Yeah, that's the tough part. Sometimes he's really good.

I haven't found it too tough.

what's the split, like 80 percent shitty, 15 good, 5 percent great?

Does it matter?

Can we just specify what percent of your music has to be great for you to be allowed to rape underage girls?

85% great 10% awesome and 5% shitty.

That way we can channel our disgust at this dude and at ourselves for liking his music into yet another "I think he's underrated!" "Well I think he's overrated!" ILM clusterfuck.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens after this

Damn, what a piece. Jessica deserves props

agree 100%, also i liked the part where they talked about journalism and responsibility
i can't imagine how hard it must be/must have been to carry all of this psychologically heavy shit around and have no one listen to you

yeah, sorry. this isn't about his musical output. props to JH and JD. sorry ... rewind and pretend i said nothing.

agree 100%, also i liked the part where they talked about journalism and responsibility

^^
like i feel lost even beginning to think about this & the idea that critical organs could get into it feels like a super positive thing to hope for

It's going to be interesting to see what happens after this

Damn, what a piece. Jessica deserves props

Can't they both get props

who got the props?

re: the question "but his music's still good" -- I don't even think this is the problem so much as the meme. how many people who read that article and tsk-tsked still half-ironically stan for "Ignition"?

I read that article and was disgusted but my love for the Ignition remix doesn't have anything ironic about it. The song is vastly, toweringly better than R. Kelly the man. It is so good that it withstands even this horrific shit.

Does it now

Tell me more about this song that is so good it excuses child rape

wonkaface

Well it..... hey, wait a minute!

lol waterface

Stop polluting this thread people who don't get the difference between a human being and a song.

Stop polluting this thread people who don't get the difference between a human being and a song.

Are we referring here to the human being who wrote and sang the song, or the multiple human beings raped by that singer-songwriter?

without delving too far into the "good art by bad people" question, there are a number of things going on: people appreciating R. Kelly as a classic R&B artist in a year where classic R&B as an institution was incredibly beleaguered, people appreciating the act of liking R. Kelly as a sign of good taste in a taste-oneupping landscape (this might be a media thing mostly, but, say, think of how "Do What U Want" was greeted versus how ARTPOP was greeted), people appreciating R. Kelly as a reliable generator of lulzy memes and wacky sexual metaphors to distance oneself from, and (the layperson view) R. Kelly as lol pee jokes. the problem is that most of these resemble the other at times, and often on purpose.

one thing going on across the board, I think, with R. Kelly and certain subsets of R. Kelly fandom: turning real things that happened to other people into camp. (R. Kelly is in on this, of course, arguably since day one.)

Whereas Lostprophets songs are unrecoverable,... because they are rub?

the world of ian watkins apologists is a lot worse than the r kelly world, i did a bit of digging and it was like http://img.pandawhale.com/post-14883-Penny-shutting-and-throwing-he-Tizl.gif

I remember going to the GazGlit website about a year after he got first found out. The levels of denial amongst the fans..

(best gif ever there, btw)

this writer's tweets from yesterday are a must-read:

https://twitter.com/Karnythia

you have to scroll down a bit, but basically she witnessed r. kelly picking up a teenager at a mcdonald's when she was 12, and two years later he tried to pick her up.

am sorta into "right there", its basic but i feel like i can pair it w/ hood pope & have a joyous crying jag or something

Stop polluting this thread people who don't get the difference between a human being and a song.

― sisilafami, Tuesday, December 17, 2013 12:48 PM (3 days ago)

i think dero's point that one can't just choose to separate the man from his music is on point; to paraphrase orwell, expecting criticism or art to be devoid of political agenda is itself a political attitude. i really had no idea up until very recently the extent of these allegations, and really it disgusts me. and dero is completely right in his condemnation of the music press's negligence and he should be lauded for his heroic reporting work he's done here that's gone largely unnoticed. i guess i'll have to read the dero thread now, assuming that's what this is about

i think this is already kinda underrated, ive been jamming 'right back', 'tear it up', 'throw this money' & the kel rowland a lot