Performing to a sold-out Wang Center last Friday night, soul singer R. Kelly, wearing a jeweled wristwatch and a black T-shirt, mesmerized his audience, even dominated them. It was difficult, at first, to know why. The style of Stevie Wonder pervaded his reedy, high tenor. James Brown’s techniques underpinned his stage gimmicks, right down to fainting and being dragged off-stage by two valets at the end of “Sex In The Kitchen” from his new CD TP.3 Reloaded. He rapped to hip-hop beats, and added some dancehall, neither of which is a Kelly signature. He even used a rhetorical device that goes all the way back to classical Roman oratory, praeteritio. He may not have had Cicero in mind when he said “my backstage people told me not to curse on stage,” as he, well, cursed on stage, and “they told me not to feel myself in this area,” as he, well, felt himself up in exactly that area. Cicero’s technique worked well for Kelly. The crowd shared the joke, and raised their hands, embracing him.
No question that Kelly is the era’s most inspired writer of sexy soulful croons. He sang them sexually and even a cappella. He brought a small rhythm section and three singers with him, and they joined him for the up-tempo numbers. But when it came time for Kelly to get soulful with his body, he did it unaccompanied. Alone, his tenor felt full of flesh and sinew. He sang several of his mattress-sex seductions, all of them luridly daring yet oddly vulnerable. Then he sang a song he said he’d written in high school, full of sexy allusion and animal howls, that recalled Otis Redding and led directly to “Sex In The Kitchen.” Here, he beckoned a plump, pink-pantsuited gal in the audience to step on-stage into his arms; he sang sweet everythings into her ear and strode across the floor, humping his loins with insouciant relish. What did it matter that the song might bring to a musicologist’s mind Robert Johnson’s 70-year-old “Come In My Kitchen”? Humping and then fainting, “doing my show,” as he put it, Kelly reincarnated and reinvented a tradition as ingrained in his fans as the lumps and joys of their own ancestry.
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