Singer Breaks Bizarre Ground

Indictment on child pornography charges. Redefining the term “golden shower.” An alleged predilection for young girls. Mace in the face. A $75 million lawsuit brought by Jay-Z for breach of contract.

This year has not been kind to R. Kelly.

Neither was the last.

But the man is back with a new album, “TP.3 Reloaded,” featuring the full-length video for his strange and oddly compelling epic of adultery gone wrong, “Trapped in the Closet.”

It is an interesting legal strategy: persuade the prosecutors of your predilection for dirty sex with women of age. That’s all well and good as cockeyed legal strategy, but I want more than mediocre sex-with-me-is-like-great-chronic metaphors. (I’m serious. This is entirety of track 12: “Sex Weed.”)

I want beats. I want flow. I want to feel.

“Playa’s Only,” featuring The Game, has the most oomph of any non-“Closet” based track (at least for three weeks—after which you will never want to hear it again). It is certainly no “Ignition (Remix)” and feels a bit too much like an out-take from the ill-fated Jay-Z/Kelly “Best of Both Worlds” series. The Game has strong flow to his rhymes, but it only works in his verses. And Kelly’s work doesn’t particularly mesh with The Game’s vocals or his underlying beats.

There is a strong single to be made matching The Game with a sultry R&B voice. But this isn’t it.

“Happy Summertime” includes the Doggy-less Snoop Dogg, but he fails to liven up this limp Summer-jam. The track reminded me of Will Smith’s time-tested “Summertime,” but not as fresh. And warmed over Will Smith is like drinking flat diet Fresca.

I mean, there is always a slow-dance pleasure from blatantly sexual slow-jamz like “In the Kitchen.” There is something remotely Shakespearean in the stanza: “Girl-I’m-Ready-To-Toss-Your-Salad/While I’m makin’ love, I’ll be feastin’/Girl you in the kitchen/Sweatin’ up a storm.” Even the chorus is sure to inspire many frenzied thoughts of adult life in boys’ and girls’ minds as they stare at each other across the dance floor: “Sex in the kitchen, over by the stove/Put you on the counter, by the butter rolls/Hands on the table, on your tippy toes/We’ll be makin’ love like the restaurant was closed.”

In fact, the particular lyrics of almost every R. Kelly song can be pared down to a clever metaphor about having good sex. Very good sex.

But the smooth-but-dirty-jamz style gets tiresome. I don’t care that Nivea, the random guest on “Touchin’,” wants it “Deeper…deeper,” even if it is whispered softly.

Kelly finishes off his album by getting “Trapped in the Closet.” All six roles are sung by Kelly, with slight variations for each character. It’s totally unlike anything in contemporary hip-hop or R&B. It isn’t even singing, really.

Chapter one deals with Kelly’s character waking up in a mysterious woman’s home and getting put in the closet when her husband arrives. Unfortunately, the narrator’s phone rings and alerts the husband to his presence. Soon, the action heats up, and the final word of each line is repeated in a whisper, echoed to create a chilling effect: “He looks at the closet (closet)/I pull out my berretta (berretta)/He walks up to the closet (closet)/He’s close up to the closet (closet)/Now he’s at the closet (closet)/Now he’s opening the closet (closet, closet, closet).”

Chapter two begins tensely as new information is revealed: “He steps a little closer I point my gun and say ‘I’m not the one you after’/He says ‘something I bet you didn’t know my man…Did she tell you that I was a pastor?’/ I said ‘well good that’s better right? Why can’t we handle this Christian-like?’”

Everyone has some sexual confusion, it is quickly revealed, when this pastor says that he is also coming out of the closet. A mysterious fourth party arrives while Kelly is waving his gun. “Then a knock on the door/The gun’s in my hand/He opens the door/ I can’t believe…it’s a man.”

I’m sort of convinced that the entire scheme was concocted as an immense joke, but it also works as a cliffhanger, keeping the listener mesmerized with the tale as it unfolds. I won’t reveal any more details, but I can tell you that, by the end, Chuck seems to be the only character free of blame.

At the end of the accompanying video to the track comes a tease bigger than any of the lyrics: “to be continued.” Apparently there is going to be “Trapped in the Closet,” chapters six through 10.

Whether or not Kelly’s future is sunny or filled with golden showers, I’ll still be waiting with baited breath for his return to the “Closet.”

Meanwhile, the mothers of adolescent girls will be shutting off their daughters’ radios and MTV in blind fear. Never has “I want my MTV” seemed so frightening, coming from TRL’s screaming, blooming, pubescent hordes.

­—Staff writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.