To overcome his stage fright, he wore sunglasses and pretended to be blind. In the ninth grade, he recalls, “my shyness had me acting strange.” A music teacher persuaded him to perform Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky” in a school talent show. When Kelly wanted to hear a vocal run more clearly, he would slow the record by weighing it down with a nickel. (To this day, he has trouble reading.) In happier moments, though, he and his mother listened to records: Al Green, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, and Sam Cooke, all of whom could deliver a song about seduction as if it were a gospel hymn. Severely dyslexic, he was often disoriented in class. He never knew his father, and he was a victim of repeated sexual abuse by family friends. Robert Kelly grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Various scenes find him writing hooks for Jay-Z and Michael Jackson, palling around with Muhammad Ali, visiting Celine Dion in Canada, privately serenading Biggie Smalls and Nelson Mandela. As sublimely campy trash talk, “Soulacoaster” succeeds, if only by reminding the reader of the depth of Kelly’s résumé. A boxing fan, Kelly knows that what a fighter does outside the ring-trash talking, maintaining a stylish fur collection, appearing only tenuously sane-can destabilize the competition. Kelly, the king of R&B, makes music of epic proportions”) can be interpreted as a self-aware joke or a cocksure statement of purpose. “Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me,” Kelly’s breezy, competently ghostwritten memoir, raises as many questions as it answers. In the 2009 song “Echo,” after describing what sounds like a punishing regimen of carnal contortions, he sings, “When you need a break, I’ll let you up, I’ll let you breathe / Wash your face, get something to eat / Then come back to the bedroom.”
Yet Kelly’s lyrics sometimes overshoot farce to reveal a hint of menace. Some of his songs are sincerely sexy others would cause any amorous embrace to dissolve into giggles. Kelly knows he’s funny, no less than Gene Simmons knew he was wearing makeup. In one sense, the answer is a straightforward “yes.” No one rhymes “Bridget” with “midget” by accident. All of which inspires the inevitable question: he’s kidding, right?
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