R. Kelly went on HuffPost Live today to promote his new album The Buffet to the program’s hundreds of viewers. Within 20 minutes, he walked off the set, due to insistent questions about past sexual abuse allegations against him.
This raises the question: If R. Kelly can’t handle questioning about his history of statutory rape accusations, why does he still do interviews? He is making the least good and visible music of his 25 year career. The only thing that’s presently interesting about him is that he’s a living case study in how people negotiate the horrifying actions of talented and/or otherwise lovable artists.
It would be fascinating if R. Kelly wanted to talk about this balancing act, but you can understand why he doesn’t. Fine. There are people who are willing to do the heavy lifting for him—with minimal help from R. Kelly himself, New York published a thorough exegesis on the subject last month. But what exactly does R. Kelly think people want to talk about?
It can’t be that he’s taken aback when interviews inevitably turn away from his music and towards his alleged behavior. “I didn’t come here for negative, I came here for positive,” he says at one point in the HuffPost Live interview. He’s done enough of these now to know where they eventually lead, yet he seems to think he can shoo away the questions by giving deflective answers. From New York:
Kelly isn’t overly concerned with what people think. “You never know who they gonna get next,” he says nonchalantly when I ask if he feels hounded by the press. “I haven’t heard anything negative about me in I don’t know how damn long.
Today, Kelly repeated that sentiment to HuffPost Live host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. Via Noisey:
People find it difficult to not think about the lawsuits and the allegations,” said Modarressy-Tehrani. “What do you say to those people who find it conflicting?” “I don’t hear it from anyone else,” said Kelly, further burrowing his head in the sand. “But I would say fuck that. I’m a man that believes what I see, and anywhere I go—and I’ve been around the world multiple times—and I get nothing but love. Unless all of those people are tricking me and acting.”
As the host tried to steer the conversation back into a dialogue and not a monologue, Kelly became defensive, demanding hard statistic of people who don’t like him. “People are conflicted?” Kelly pondered dubiously. “Can you count them?”
But even anecdotally, R. Kelly knows that people have been conflicted about his music because of his personal life. Even dating as far back as 1995, when Vibe used his marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah as a frame to grapple with his art in a cover story, this discussion has been publicly visible. That he fielded interview questions and posed for photos for the aforementioned New York story would indicate that he was aware of the scope of that article.
When he tells Modarressy-Tehrani that he doesn’t “hear it from anyone else,” maybe he’s indicating his belief that questions about his sexual history are concerns of the media only. But in promoting his 2013 album Black Panties, whoever ran R. Kelly’s social media decided to field fan questions on Twitter, a gambit that went predictably awry when the attendant hashtag was overrun with comments and jokes about his alleged sex crimes. One figures that R. Kelly’s handlers take steps to insulate him from public opinion, but he would have to be unimaginably dense to not know that he has fans who struggle to listen to his music in light of the reexamination of his past.
Maybe he has convinced himself that the public’s wrestling with the allegations against him—down to him being kicked off the bill of a music festival in Ohio
[image via Getty]
Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.