Critical Noir: R. Kelly Meets Marvin Gaye

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While R. Kelly is no Marvin Gaye, the recent release of Gaye's I Want You (Deluxe Edition) and Kelly's The R. in R&B Collection (Volume 1) places their tortured Soul in striking proximity of each other.

The music of R. Kelly has always been rife with blatant contradictions. It has often been difficult to coalesce the man responsible for the '90s motivational anthem "I Believe I Can Fly," with the man responsible for songs like "Sex Me," "Bump and Grind" and "Feelin' on Your Booty." But a close listen to Kelly's formidable body of work evinces that of a tortured soul, linking him to the Soul Man tradition — a tradition that has produced a litany of talented, even brilliant, men who often lived tragic and tortured lives. When one thinks of the lives and deaths of figures like Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway, Walter Jackson or the tragic-comic dramas of Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, Rick James and Wilson Pickett, to name just a few, a pattern seems to become clear. Some have suggested that these men, all products of black church culture, paid a price for their willingness to sell their gifts from. "God" to the highest bidders, be they record companies or adoring female fans. None of these men though, can match the impassioned contradictions that were Marvin Gaye — a preacher boy, at odds with all forms of authority, including the women in his life and the father who eventually took his life — who shamelessly and shamefully explored the intersections of sex and spirituality with a clarity rarely achieved in any form of expressive art during the 20th century. While R. Kelly is no Marvin Gaye, the recent release of Gaye's I Want You (Deluxe Edition) and Kelly's The R. in R&B Collection (Volume 1) places their tortured Soul in striking proximity of each other.

Janis Hunter was a 16-year-old high school sophomore when she walked into a Los Angeles studio in March of 1973 with her mother Barbara and was introduced to a then 33-year-old Marvin Gaye. Gaye was recording his 1973 classic Let's Get it On and by all reports was immediately smitten by the mature teen-age girl. The full impact of Hunter on Gaye can be heard on the deluxe edition of Gaye's Let's Get It On (2001), which contains versions of the title track recorded before and after Gaye's initial meeting with Hunter. It is the post-Hunter version of the song that has become the classic ode to soulful ecstasy. By the time Gaye released I Want You (a sexual ode to Ms. Hunter) in mid-March of 1976, he had fathered two children with Hunter, Nona (born in September of 1974) and Frankie Gaye. The duo finally married a year later, once Gaye's divorce to Anna Gordy Gaye (sister of Berry) was finalized.

Throughout his career Gaye escaped intense scrutiny of his relationship with Hunter, which began while he was still married to, though estranged from, his first wife — the kind of scrutiny that has dogged Kelly since his marriage to the late Aaliyah Houghton in 1993. Granted, Gaye was never implicated in acts of child pornography and unlike Kelly, he didn't have to confront a 24-7 media glare — there was no Electronic Urban Report, Tom Joyner in the Morning Show, BET or Wendy Williams for Gaye to contend with, only Jet Magazine, the still ghetto-fabulous digest of choice in many black homes. But there's no denying that he was sexually involved with an under-aged woman-child, 17 years his junior, when he sang lovingly in 1974 on "Jan" (from Marvin Gaye Live), "Janis is my girl, in all the world, there is no one as lovely…"

Virtually all of the tracks on I Want You were co-written by Leon Ware with T-Boy Ross (Ms. Di's brother) and Gaye. Most of the songs were intended for Ware's album Musical Message (just issued for first time on CD), but after Gaye heard versions of "I Want You" he asked Ware to produce a whole album for him. Much of I Want You is focused on the nuts and bolts (no pun intended) of hot sweaty sex. Songs like "Come Live with Me Angel," "Feel All My Love Inside" and "Since I Had You" are all explicitly sexual tracks, but it is the exquisite "Soon I'll Be Loving You" that ranks as the most sexually explicit song in Gaye's oeuvre. The tension begins at the beginning of the second verse where Gaye sings in a straight falsetto "Oh, no I never gave up no head" while his layered tenor affirms "I never did that before," referencing his first trip "downtown" with the object of his affection. An enjoyable experience apparently, as the song's closing refrain finds Gaye singing "give you some head baby/I'm gonna lock you right up woman…I want to give you some h-e-a-d…oooh I love to get it/`cause I know just what to do with it" as he closes` the song with a whispered "Soon I'll be lovin' you, oh Janis…"

It's hard to believe that R Kelly didn't have "Soon I'll Be Loving You in Mind" when he playfully sings "boot-e-e, b-o-o-t-e-e" over and over on the remix of his song "Feelin' On your Booty" and yet the fact remains that Kelly has never recorded anything as sexually explicit as Gaye's "Soon I'll Be Loving You." R. Kelly's notoriety has really had less to do with his music, but really the conflation of his celebrity persona, extralegal exploits and the overtly sexual themes of his most popular songs. Understand, Kelly deserves all the scrutiny and scorn that he has received in recent years, but his music doesn't place him outside of a tradition — as many pundits would like us to believe — but as the most exemplary example of that tradition since the death of Marvin Gaye in 1984. And yes titles like "Bump N' Grind" and "Sex Me" and "Feelin' On Your Booty" are perverse, but very much representative of hip hop generation colloquialisms about sex and sexuality and thus no different than colloquialisms like "Jellyroll," "Roll With Me" or "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" exchanged by previous generations.

Kelly is a product of an era when the private and the intimate in black life and culture came into the full view of the marketplace, a process that had already begun in 1975 when Gaye, Major Harris and Minnie Riperton all recorded songs with feigned orgasms in the background. For Kelly, part of that new terrain, meant sharing not only his perceived sexual exploits, but the demons that have haunted him as a young black man coming of age in the full view of the public in a way that has only been experienced by young black male athletes, singers, actors etc. who have come of age in the era of MTV, ESPN, CNN and AOL-Time Warner. For all of the political significance and cultural weight attached to figures like Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jack Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain and Nat King Cole, with the exception of Ali, none of them lived in the constant media glare that even second rate rappers and third-string point guards often face today. This doesn't excuse Iverson with a gun or Kelly with under-age girls, but places their indiscretions in a broader context than "what's wrong with the hip-hop generation?" Imagine the media coverage today if a prominent rapper or R&B artist was murdered and one of his boys — his protégé — married his widow months after the murder, as was the case when Bobby Womack married the widow of Sam Cooke months after his murder?

While it is admittedly unfair to compare the obvious mourning process of Womack and Barbara Campbell (who were dealing with complicated feelings of longing and loss) alongside those of Kelly or anyone in the hip hop generation, my point is not to compare "sins" but to highlight how contemporary culture's coverage of those sins unfairly depicts the sins of the "sons" (and daughters) as worse than those of the "father" (and daughter). R. Kelly is no Marvin Gaye and nor should he be. But he is a Soul Man, who seemingly, for lack of any other recourse, has chosen to share his demons with us through his music as so many tortured Soul Men of the past have.

First published: Novemeber 13 2003

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