Kids "R" Us

By Crispin Sartwell

Here's a question for you: should radio stations continue to program Grammy-winning R&B singer R Kelly? Kelly was recently arrested on 21 counts of child pornography, for allegedly filming his own encounters with young girls.

Apparently, some stations in his native Chicago and elsewhere, responding to complaints from listeners, have taken "R" off the air.

By all accounts, R has a taste for very young girls, and has indulged in that taste immoderately. But on the other hand, plenty of pop stars have been criminals of various kinds, and Lord knows that illicit sex and drugs are common enough.

Tupac Shakur is an interesting comparison. He rapped about sex and violence, and lived and died the way he talked, which makes his music - which was extremely good anyway - a fascinating study in pathology. I would never support taking Tupac off the air.

But R is something else again. His music is utterly undistinguished. It has no angle at all, no point of view. His best-known song is "I Believe I Can Fly," and that's typical: a mere muttering of empty though supposedly uplifting cliches: the kind of thing your high school principal chooses as a graduation theme on the ground that it cannot possibly offend - or even interest - anyone.

R is to real R&B what Velveeta™ is to good French Brie.

So first of all, if we lose R, we will have lost nothing. American popular music would be no worse and I guess no better without him.

Maybe you're saying that's not the issue. Maybe the question is only a moral one, not aesthetic. But in fact moral and aesthetic questions are inseparable.

One example would be Leni Riefenstahl, a pioneering film-maker who produced propaganda documentaries for the Nazis. The primary immorality in Leni was embodied in the work itself; it was the work that was wrong, whatever her motivations or beliefs might have been. That's a decent reason to condemn "Triumph of the Will" - Leni's heroic depiction of a Nazi rally in Nuremberg - though I still don't think there's any point in banning it.

Leni developed a visual style that corresponded to Nazi ideology. Her art was aesthetic as well as political fascism, and in that sense had a perverse integrity.

But the point is that losing Riefenstahl from the history of film would be a substantive loss. Losing R Kelly is meaningless.

In fact, there's something particularly offensive about a pederast whose art is as puerile as Kelly's. Eminem, for example, is into the serious exploration of his own pathologies. R just hides his pathologies under a mass of high-sounding cliches. That makes his art even more superficial and dishonest than it would be if his music was sick.

The problem with R's music - the reason you might as well take it off the air - is precisely that it isn't sick enough. It's far, far too wholesome, and now that we have some idea of who R is, the music is enough literally to make you nauseous.

Kid Rock, to take one of many examples, sings continuously about sexual misbehavior. But the work has integrity because it's not false to the life and beliefs of the person who made it. Kid Rock is wrong, but fun, and true.

On the other hand, it makes no difference whether we ever hear R again or not. So, I say, make the band immediate and total.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.