Soulless

DeRogatis Jim DeRogatis

Description

The essential account of R. Kelly's actions and their consequences, a reckoning two decades in the making In November 2000, Chicago journalist and music critic Jim DeRogatis received an anonymous fax that alleged R. Kelly had a problem with "young girls." Weeks later, DeRogatis broke the shocking story, publishing allegations that the R&B superstar and local hero had groomed girls, sexually abused them, and paid them off. DeRogatis thought his work would have an impact. Instead, Kelly's career flourished. No one seemed to care: not the music industry, not the culture at large, not the parents of numerous other young girls. But for more than eighteen years, DeRogatis stayed on the story. He was the one who was given the disturbing videotape that led to Kelly's 2008 child pornography trial, the one whose window was shot out, and the one whom women trusted to tell their stories-of a meeting with the superstar at a classroom, a mall, a concert, or a McDonald's that forever warped the course of their lives.Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly is DeRogatis's masterpiece, a work of tenacious journalism and powerful cultural criticism. It tells the story of Kelly's career, DeRogatis's investigations, and the world in which the two crossed paths, and brings the story up to the moment when things finally seem to have changed. Decades in the making, this is an outrageous, darkly riveting account of the life and actions of R. Kelly, and their horrible impact on dozens of girls, by the only person to tell it.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 04 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683357629
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock
Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America s Greatest Rock Critic
Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90s
Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma s Fabulous Flaming Lips

Copyright 2019 Jim DeRogatis
Cover 2019 Abrams
Translation from Der Rattenf nger courtesy of Laura Johanna Waltje
Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930879
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4007-7 eISBN: 978-1-68335-762-9
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
FOR THE GIRLS
Sometimes this versatile musician
Snatches up a pretty gal.
No town has offered him admission
Where he found no girls to beguile.
And even if the girls are dim
And all the women are too prim
They all together lovesick long
Enchanted by his strings and song.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from Der Rattenf nger ( The Pied Piper )
CONTENTS
Prologue: Robert s Problem Is Young Girls
PART I
Chapter 1: He Gonna Grow Up Being a Shooter
Chapter 2: I Promise You
Chapter 3: There Are Lots of People Who Know About This
Chapter 4: School Ain t Gonna Make You a Millionaire
Chapter 5: Numerous
Chapter 6: Trophies
PART II
Chapter 7: Go to Your Mailbox
Chapter 8: Victory by Delay
Chapter 9: Recent Unpleasantness
Chapter 10: The State of Illinois v. Robert Sylvester Kelly
Chapter 11: The Defense and the Verdict
PART III
Chapter 12: How Old Are We Talking?
Chapter 13: It s Just Music
Chapter 14: The Cult
Chapter 15: Reckoning
Afterword
Coda
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
ROBERT S PROBLEM IS YOUNG GIRLS
I intended to make it a quick trip. Since it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2000, I knew most people would have stayed home when I made my dreaded weekly visit to the office to show my face to editors, file my expenses, and sort through the postal bins full of promo CDs piled up since my last appearance. The traffic had been dead, so I zoomed down Lake Shore Drive. As I hustled across Wabash Avenue from the parking ramp into the gray, barge-like Chicago Sun-Times building overlooking the river, the wind bit ferociously. The temperature hovered in the low twenties, but as Chicagoans say, it s always cooler by the lake. I had only started to thaw out when an editorial assistant grudgingly handed me a fax sent to the main number in the newsroom instead of to the constantly humming machine a few feet from my desk in the features department. A lot of that curly, heat-sensitive fax paper got wasted in the days before everyone used email.
Dear Mr. DeRogatis, the fax, a one-page, single-spaced letter, began. I m sending this to you because I don t know where else to go.
My review of the latest album by singer, songwriter, and producer R. Kelly had run as the lead story in the entertainment section on November 7, the day TP-2.com arrived in stores. Like celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, whom I proudly called a colleague, I disliked reductive ratings, stars or thumbs, but our editors demanded them. I thought a line in my critique nailed the dilemma better than the equivocal two out of four stars I d given the disc. Prince, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green all showed that, under the right circumstances, sex and prayer can be the same thing, I wrote, but Kelly s lyrical shifts from church to boudoir were so jarring, they could give you whiplash.
You wrote about R. Kelly a couple of weeks ago and compared him to Marvin Gaye, the letter writer continued. Well, I guess Marvin Gaye had problems, too, but I don t think they were like Robert s. Robert s problem-and it s a thing that goes back many years-is young girls.
My stint as the paper s pop-music critic began in 1992, not long after Kelly rose from busking for change on the city s L platforms. I left in 1995, making a brief foray to Rolling Stone in New York. When I returned to the Sun-Times in 1997, Kelly was firmly ensconced as the dominant voice in R B for a generation, well on his way to selling more than a hundred million records, his own as well as those he crafted for other artists. Both his music and his story inspired many in his hometown, which embraces local heroes with a singular devotion.
Boosterism reigns in Chicago. Residents brag that their skyscrapers, their sports franchises, their entertainers, their crooked politicians, even their pizzas are bigger and better than those in New York, Los Angeles, or any other global metropolis you d care to name. At the same time, Chicago is perpetually the Second City. Its denizens suffer from a deep-seated inferiority complex common to the Midwest, but running especially deep in the City by the Lake, where so many future stars begin their careers, then decamp to the coasts to become real celebrities. This mix of pride and insecurity is amplified on the South and West Sides, where the black community fights segregation and pervasive racism. These make black Chicagoans particularly reluctant to turn on heroes from their streets, especially if they stay once they ve made it. Kelly had made it, and he d stayed.
I got a lot of angry letters via fax and snail mail in response to my record and concert reviews. They were especially numerous when I harshly critiqued aging baby boom favorites like the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, or Eric Clapton-I called them geezers -and whenever I praised hip-hop. That s not music, it s noise! readers commonly complained. Although the faxed letter was signed A Friend, I initially dismissed whoever wrote it as just one more reactionary jerk trying to disparage a black superstar.
R. Kelly likes them young had long been a rumor on the music scene, almost always whispered in those exact words, by publicists and recording engineers, radio programmers and concert promoters, fellow critics and fans. Gossips said he d married his fifteen-year-old prot g Aaliyah in 1994. That story seemed strange and unlikely, and both of them had denied it. There had been little public discussion about what those words actually meant, and I ll confess, I didn t think about them much at first, either.
Although this book and two decades of reporting on the pain R. Kelly has caused dozens of young girls began with that fax, I initially tossed it on the pile of press releases, artists biographies, and angry letters from aggrieved readers stacked in a wire bin filled to overflowing on the corner of my desk, eventually destined for the trash.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
HE GONNA GROW UP BEING A SHOOTER
In the video for I Wish, R. Kelly stands atop a Chicago high-rise overlooking the dramatic skyline of the city he calls the center of my universe. He gazes up at the crisp blue sky. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? asks a disembodied woman s voice. I want out, the singer replies, removing his shades. But it s hard. I need answers, Momma. He turns his back. I need answers.
Almost all of Kelly s albums mix lascivious bedroom jams with soulful prayers or pleas, and I Wish is one of the latter, a nostalgic tribute to his late mother and the South Side neighborhoods where he grew up, as well as a bittersweet contemplation of the burdens of fame: Now you hear my songs the radio is bangin / Oh, I can t believe my ears / And what everybody s sayin / Boy, I ll tell you, folks don t know the half.
The 2000 video also portrays Kelly surrounded by friends and family on the wooden porch of a small stucco house near West 107th Street and South Parnell Avenue, one of two homes that loom largest in his childhood memories. A twenty-year-old female extra lovingly braids his hair. Eight years later, she would testify that during a break in filming, she had a threesome with Kelly and an underage girl in his luxurious trailer. Folks don t know the half.
Rock n roll comes down to myth, my other great critic role model, Lester Bangs, wrote. There are no facts. From the beginning, Kelly excelled at building the myth. I have talked to only one of his three half siblings, and aside from scattered quotes another has given to journalists, the primary source about his formative years is Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me , Kelly s idiosyncratic 2012 autobiography written with David Ritz, the author of more than three dozen as-told-to celebrity tomes, the best of them about Marvin Gaye. Woefully short on real or full names and specific dates and addresses, the book gets some of those it does mention wrong, citing the corners of streets that don t intersect, referring to buildings that never existed, even misspelling the name of Kelly s younger half brother throughout. Ritz views his role as conveying what his subjects want readers to know.
I remove all issues of control of the book by giving complete control to them, Ritz said when we appeared on a panel together in 2003, but even Kelly disowns some of his chosen collaborator s work. He didn t get everything on point, Kelly told Chris Heath of GQ , just like no one ever does. When you say things, you know they ll get them misconstrued. I ve read a couple of things in the book that wasn t exactly how I said it.
In addition to Soulacoaster , which is not always reliable, and public records, where information often is scarce, my portrait of Kelly s early years draws on sources close to his family, and some