This one goes out to Kellz.
Last summer R. Kelly put out perhaps the most thematically cohesive, yet polyphonically rich album of the present decade; he incorporates his now fully developed style of multi-voiced versified storytelling, and brings in
distinct, well-known personalities, though still having Kelly providing the voices for different characters and even singing an apostrophe to a girl on the other end of a cell phone call. The themes of doubling in the lyrics align very well with the dynamic voicings of the record. Kelly let's us know very explicitly that he is taking everything he's ever done to the next level in his headier-than-thou intro to the title track: "Sixteen years, nothing but hits,
and they still don't believe. There's only one thing to do, and that is, double up." However, his purpose ultimately has little to do with the weight of these songs, and thusly he makes a turn, "Now that we got that out of the way, let's double up," and drops the beat, letting us know immediately that everything said at least means two things, playing with this binary of weight and lightness, and asserting that doubling can mean anything as heady as realizing he and his friend Usher are in love with girls who seem to be identical in every way ("Same Girl"), to simply having a threesome with two girls (the title track that features Snoop Dog as a second character who also doubles up).
Dostoevsky's novels are most famously attributed with the narrative device of "doubling," a term conceived by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. He termed the novels polyphonic, in that a large number of different, often combative, characters possess distinct voices in the work. These voices are then, "not an object of authorial discourse, but rather a fully valid autonomous carrier of his own individual word." The disagreement of "Real Talk," for example, not only tells the livid story of a break-up, but presents a genuine expression of polyphonic ambiguity, the kind of "catastrophe of disunited consciousnesses" that results from putting "closed" or "autonomous" consciousnesses into dialogue. "Real Talk" complicates the interaction of these personalities because we only have Kelly's side of the conversation and the implied presence of his girl on the other end; though by the end we are by no means convinced the Kelly is right in this situation, for his voice is so consistent in the album that we can assume from "I'm a Flirt," "Hook it Up," "Sex Planet," "Freaky in the Club," and from what we know of the singer himself, that Kelly in all probability "was with those other girls" in the club. We see through his blatant hypocrisy when he tells his girl to "watch her mouth" because he has already set a profanity-rich precedent with idiomatic gems such as "how the fuck she knew I was with them other girls then when the whole club packed—?" Our sympathy for his girl in spite of her lack of voice alienates Kelly from his audience because the song gets so "real," as it declares itself to do.
That "Real Talk" manages to assert an implied second character puts the song in a distinct category considering an album with ten songs that feature other singers, with several songs with more than just two voices, and the use of the phrase "Double Up" finding it's way into so many songs, while absent in "Real Talk." The persona of Kelly reaches a sort of purity in this context, for the clash of consciousness occurs between Kelly and the listener his or herself. "Leave Your Name" furthers this monologue-as-dialogue concept, which, while still addressing an implied girl on the phone, is not a live performance, i.e. talking in this moment on the phone to someone, but a recorded one, that is his outgoing message ("You have reached R Kelly unfortunately I am asleep"). The song is characterized by a more internal-thinking Kelly that represents the shift from an oral, live form of storytelling to that of a recorded, textualized form that is concerned with a more introspective tradition. The doubling of the vocal track by Kelly reinforces the self-doubt and self-examination, in a soliloquy of sorts much in the spirit of Hamlet's
inner-made-outer dialogue, Shakespeare also being cited by Bakhtin as a very effective user of doubling in his narratives.
However, the song presents a curious concept of the outgoing messaget: the recording describes why he is asleep, that is, the experiences of the night before. "You have reached R Kelly unfortunately I am asleep. [I've] been out partying all night, and I'm blasted off that Hennessey." The tense here moves to a present tense that indicates a more habitual feeling about the song and the singer's predicament: "I hop to hotel lobbies, going to them after parties, throwing up and carrying on, bout to have somebody drive me home, I get through the door, fall on the floor, get up. I'm staggering. [I] look upstairs. Shit is blurry because I'm real bent." An outgoing message makes sense because anytime someone calls he will be recovering from being overly intoxicated. This confessional honesty becomes "real" in the same vein as "Real Talk" with his desperate honesty about his alcoholism, sex addition, and enthusiasm for marijuana: "And now I don't know whether I'm coming or going." We are told then right before the chorus to whom this mechanical apostrophe is addressed: "And this goes out to all of my honeys that's calling." Kelly directly addresses his condition of being in dialogue with one's self in the next verse: "Drinking Belvedere, 7-Up, and gin, I told myself never again, sleeping while the club is crunk, don't make no sense to be that drunk. Arguing through the night, pushing on people and starting fights. I was fucked up: I confess, people saying Kellz is a hot mess. Even after that I was taking shots, shot after shot, shot after shot. Then I couldn't even open the door to my Benz. Dropped off and I get in the door now. Lying on the stairs snoring now. Why you calling me calling me calling me?" The verse gives an image of the "real" R Kelly, a self-destructive "hot mess." The repetition of "shot after shot" reinforces the habitual, potentially infinite extent to which Kelly is describing how he ends his nights.
What makes it appropriate as an out-going message is its repetition, how many times the evening is doubled, and then doubled again. However, we don't know what R Kelly does every night, and therefore we don't know the extent to which
it is a satire on unspontaneous, structured, and un"real" recordings, or if it's a sincere diversion from his spontaneous, highly idiomatic, and "real" performances. For every time the out-going message plays it reinforces the habitual character of its story and its existence as a mechanized performance (i.e. the production of a record), becoming less of a polyphonic voice. That he ends the song saying "Damn, 200 missed calls" is a joke about how the ambiguity of one's consciousness, the polyphony of a single person, does not allow an unequivocal interpretation, that is one that does not assert the implausibility of others. Here we can see the essential quality of R Kelly's project: describing two poles at once and inhabiting the ambiguity that lies between—me and/or you, improvised and/or meticulously crafted, from the heart and/or from the head, hot mess and/or king of R & B, flirt and/or alcoholic, doubling up and/or doubling up. This sophistication is what brings us back to Crime and Punishment, Hamlet, and, now, Double Up, for the experience with the works is a dynamic one, the listener always challenging and re-thinking what the work is accomplishing, for is it about "believing" in R Kelly's profundity or his levity, can we even call him profound, or does his switches between the two describe our generation so well that we can't call him light. That he ironizes his characters and flips over their interpretations, even when the character is himself, makes me over a year later amazed at these songs.
The present question is then, how will Kelly follow up, or potentially double up this record with the impending "12 Play: Fourth Quarter," whose release was delayed by Kelly's court dates and inability to promote it. Will it, like the hypothetical "bad motherfuckers that look like her, act like her" in "Hook it Up," that will it provide us with a doubled version of what is known to be "bad." From "Hairbraider," a song about "doing [his] hairbraider" we get more of the self-referential discussion of what it means to be R Kelly, but the context does not provide us with anything as brilliant as "I'm a Flirt"—the apostrophe that warns potential victims of his magic—, U and K having a cell-phone conversation in "Same Girl," or the genius of "Leave Your Name" and "Real Talk." "Skin," the second single is also disappointing for the most part. Double up has its defects, and so I don't wish to judge the fourth installment of 12-play yet, but if it acts like its predecessor, Tell her girlfriend [double up's double] to holler at her future boyfriend [me]." I have heard snippets of other songs since the album was leaked in July. "Might Be Mine," for example, is a great example of Kelly's polyphonic, spontaneous compositions, beginning "Gather round, this is a true story," creating a scene of Kelly performing to a group at his feet, like a veritable Greek prophet, and presenting an ambiguous binary between whether the kid is his or not ("there's a very good chance that it might be mine"). It is a "good chance" that it "might" be his kid. What the hell does that mean? He's already got me guessing.
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