His last full-length, Love Letter, was a plunge into the past, with homages to Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye it was led by the barnstorming “When A Woman Loves,” a dedication to devotion that showed off both the muscular timbre of his voice and its ability to float into butterfly-light falsettos.
The Trapped In The Closet series, a soap opera suite of songs with a plot that could populate The Jerry Springer Show for a month, seemingly anticipated most of its parodists even “Weird Al” Yankovic’s riff on getting fast food that was based on it, “Trapped In The Drive-In,” couldn’t hold a candle to Kelly’s tales of affairs and other forms of deception.ĭespite these forays into ludicrousness-and the increasingly obvious fact that he’s enjoying playing the peanut gallery for ready-to-mock fools even more than they relish their cackling-he’s played it straight for his past two albums. When he performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a boxing match in 2005, inflating the United States’ bombastic anthem with just enough air so that it could sound like an extended remix of his floaty 2003 hit “Step In The Name Of Love,” he outraged some, delighted others, and perplexed even more.
He’s one of those performers who throws himself so fully into whatever he’s doing that it’s unnerving to irony-damaged observers, who tend to react to him with the equivalent of an uneasy laugh. Vocally, he’s one of pop’s premier male talents, able to throw out instantly hummable melodies seemingly on command as a songwriter, he’s as able to craft throwbacky love songs that don’t sound like retro schlock as he is to write deadly serious sex jams. (That the lingerie-tosser was sitting in the arena bowl, and not on the floor, made it even more noteworthy.)Īt the center of it was Kelly, the self-proclaimed Pied Piper Of R&B-with good reason. Kelly at the Prudential Center, and it was one of the most impressive live spectacles I’ve been witness to in my two-plus decades of attending big arena shows there was an onstage bar complete with cocktail-shaking mixologist, an acapella reworking of his 1994 single “Bump N’ Grind” accompanied by video footage of a bunch of mouths-just mouths-singing the lascivious lyrics opera-style, bras being thrown from the crowd.
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