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R. Kelly - Out of the Closet (REMOVED)

Ryan Koo

08.10.05 @ 3:00AM Tags

In August 2005 I had an idea to boost traffic to my site. It was a really bad idea: I thought, since R. Kelly’s Advanced series Trapped in the Closet is essentially a 20-minute song that uses the same beat throughout, could you take his tale of sexual infidelity and re-cut it to tell an entirely different story? With judicious editing one could rearrange all of his words — while sticking to the beat — and come up with a new, even more ridiculous narrative. Naturally, having nothing better to do — and based on a friend’s opinion that I couldn’t pull it off — I decided to try. The result was a five chapter story in which R. Kelly confesses to a number of sexual infidelities, including several episodes with men.

It worked: the parody received something like 75,000 views in a week (I’m on a different stats system now so I can’t go back that far), and a bunch of comments running the gamut from “this is the funniest thing ever” to “you must be the most pathetic human being in the world.” They’re all preserved here for posterity’s sake (they’re split onto pages, so only the latest are displayed unless you click on the previous page numbers at the bottom).

I knew it was a terrible idea, but since I couldn’t think of anyone else having done this before (that is, mocking a song by using the original singer’s own voice, and taking his words completely out of context), I had to see it through. Also, it goes without saying, although I’m saying it anyway, that the same guy who does ridiculous things like naming an album 12 Play–”because it’s three times better than foreplay”–should have the tables turned on him, sexually. Including the kitchen table. (That was a reference to another song of his, In the Kitchen, which does not touch on any culinary topics, although it may include references to cunnilingus). Because R. Kelly never released an a cappella version of the song, the audio editing took longer than I expected and took some fairly advanced maneuvering to pull off. And yes, I wanted to take the story in a different, preferably more original, direction, but I had to work with what I had–and the lyrics to Trapped in the Closet didn’t really lend themselves to anything else.

Anyway, I still think the resulting song is impressive from an audio editing standpoint, but I’ve taken it down — sorry I couldn’t “keep it on the download.”

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