The Joycean Composition in R Kelly's "Sex Weed"

Not since Joyce’s Ulysses has an author bestowed as much abundance and unity to his metaphors as R Kelly bestows upon the extended metaphor of his song “Sex Weed” from the third installment of his Twelve Play series, the fourth of which comes out this fall. In the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses Joyce presents the idea that a truly successful metaphor consists of “obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast,” in that he replaces the essence of one thing with that of another, and vice versa, thinks about it, and then looks at things more carefully to see what it means for one thing to be, at the same time, something else. What occurs in this concept of a metaphor is that reality1 (i.e. the blood of Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom) and reality2 (i.e. the universe) are described simultaneously in a single moment (“the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies”), which thus makes the reality of the text (the consolidation of reality1 with reality2) an amorphous ambiguity that could be called “the protagonists’ blood” while being considered “the universe,” or the other way around or any combination of the two.

The hallucinogenic experience heavily informs this mode of thinking, and indeed Daedalus’ state in the chapter is the product of drinking a lot of absinthe and losing his grasp on typical conceptions of reality, and, in the case of Kelly, one half of the “obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast” of “Sex Weed” is marijuana, a substance that has far more psychoactive properties than it did when it, paired with LSD, was the cornerstone of traditional psychedelic music. “Sex Weed” is not smoking weed and then having sex, nor is it having sex and then smoking weed, nor is it having sex while smoking weed, nor smoking weed while having sex—all of these, in some way, would put the two concepts in some form of hierarchy. Instead, through its Joycean word play, the metaphor succeeds in uniting the psychedelic experience with the sexual experience to the point that simply smoking pot is “Sex Weed” and romancing a lady when sober is also “Sex Weed.”

The apostrophe to the “Girl [who has] got that Sex Weed” begins as a fairly simple metaphor: he wants “to hit it all the time” because “it” is “sex so good that it gets [him] high,” using the ambiguity of the idiom “hit it” to begin the destruction of the segregation of Sex from Weed. Double entendres characterize the song as a whole, addressing the girl as “Mary Jane” at the end, for example, though the exceptions give the most interesting moments. The use of a simile seems ridiculous in the face of Kelly’s level of figurative language, yet we have two at the beginning of both verses as though we need to be reminded of the simplicity of his project: “How did yo[ur] sex make me feel this way / Like I been smokin’ purple haze?” and “Girl it’s like a dime bag of [hy]dro[ponic marijuana] / The way you movin that cush real slow.” The latter simile seems silly because “cush” is another way of saying weed, so of course it would be “like a dime bag of dro,” because it IS. But of course “cush” means something else here. The motif is reversed in the line “Sex give me the munchies / And now I wanna eat it up oh,” because “Sex” is understood to be Weed, and “the munchies” are the not to be understood to be anything other than the desire to do something explicitly sexual.

The dependence upon “Sex Weed” comes up in the second verse, that Kelly is “a bud head when it comes to [the girl with the Sex Weed] / Cuz Can't nobody drop it baby / Bounce it baby, stroke it quite the way [she does].” He wants her like a drug, yet at the same time, unlike a drug, nobody can create the effects that she does. What therefore is at stake is not the immediate physical sensation, but what, a step further down the causal line, what that sensation causes, for the a psychedelic does not take its user away from the world into the senses, but rather overwhelms its user with the world by liberating the capacities of the senses. Sex, then, is therefore is a process of instigating mind-blowing experiences in another person while they reciprocate, as symbolized by "do[ing] a shotgun." "Sex Weed" is the beginning of a greater experience that becomes the beginning of a psychological dependence—“Girl I’m addicted to everything / That you do to me / Your sex got me open baby.” “Open” can mean simply “high,” “hazy,” “silly,” “flying,” “buzzing,” or “about to explode,” as he has stated, but can also mean readiness for it to all happen again, as the singer first politely requests towards the song’s end—“Let me hit that in the coupe / Girl, let me hit that in the jeep / Girl let me hit that at the crib / Girl keep bringing me that heat”—with a kind of urgency and appreciation of an adolescent hot boxing his parents’ Camry for the first time or smooching a girl for the first time in the backseat, or both. Kelly insists on the legitiamcy and thoroughness of his metaphor, that it's too heady to pin down and explain, by descriptions of his own befuddlement in the face of his dependence on "Sex Weed," that it's "about to explode [his] brain," that it's "about to drive [him] insane," and that he's "about to go up in smoke / because [her] Sex Weed ain't no joke." One cannot ultimately put either the psychedelic nor sexual experience into words, which would be to explain these contradictions in a joke that allows us to move past it; one can merely construct a text to parallel how inexplicable it is, as Kelly has done, to make "Sex Weed" the song something that'll make the listeners go up in smoke as they listen to in the coupe, the jeep, or the crib, hitting the Sex Weed. Which only makes sense if we read the apostrophe literally as Kelly addressing us, his listening audience, describing how wonderful it is to be on his side of the listening experience, getting "blowed" by the fact that so many people understand the significance of desegregating Sex and Weed, and always wanting more.