R. Kelly – Double Up

Genre r & b Publisher Jive/Zomba External Links Official R Kelly Website Official Jive Records

"'Bout to shoot the world up with this lyrical cocaine"

"Now, the moral of the story's cuff your chick, cuz hey/I'm black, handsome, I sing, plus I'm rich, and I'm a flirt," R. Kelly helpfully advises near the start of "I'm a Flirt," a bombastic, strategically-jerking club banger about how unrepentent a horndog Chicago's self-described "King of R&B" is. Truth? I believe him. But an earlier verse in the same song smacks of fantasy: "Believe me, mang, this is how them players do it in the Chi." It's amusing that Kells pronounces "Chi" so that it sounds a lot like "Shire," which routinely leads me to imagine Mr. Frodo and Samwise the Brave on the mack in some dimly lit Middle Earth mead hall. To digress is divine and fun besides, but this time I have a purpose: Kells is walking a throbbing tightrope between reality and make-believe here. His trial date for alleged watersports with a minor looms like an advancing three-ton elephant over Double Up's nightclub good-time/two-timing, its vinettes, its boudour free-associations gone wild. The consenting-adult fun, the album seems to hint, could end at any given time – so live it up in the club, where the so-fine honeys are wet, the dancefloor endlessly bumping, the liquor keeps flowing, and the bouncers always check IDs.

"Is you tweakin'?"

So it's drunken, X-rated threeways, brutal hangovers, suspicious significant others, and – sometimes – overblown one-on-one boot-knockin' with that special lady or reception of the wonderful news that fatherhood's approaching; better to contemplate any of these things than the slammer, and better to laugh hard and be laughed with. See, Kells is as incredible a songwriter as he is a prolific one, a dynamite, range-unfettered singer who's a vocal surgeon. And he's funny – really, really funny, a comedic hood Shakespeare of sex talk who has no conpunctions about coming out with songs like "Sex Planet" and "The Zoo" and making really obvious jokes glam like spinning rims on an Escalade. Proudly and defiantly unsubtle, Kells plays both to audiences who live the life depicted and ones who never will; minstelry doesn't enter into the equation, as some cranks have noted. It's just entertainment, it's a party, lighten up, let your hair down, dig the weirdness; T.I.'s in the house, so is Kid Rock! Let's have an absolute blast, Kells whispers between the libido zingers and cunnillingus metaphors, while we still can. You'd be wise to surrender.