So back to that moment R Kelly ‘burrowed the shark ’, where he became truly great, in chapter one of TITC: The unique thing about Trapped in the Closet is that it takes these elements and adds a ridiculously overblown sense of drama, a nonsensical half-baked plot, and then repeats itself TWENTY TWO TIMES. “ Bitch I wish you would burn my mother-fucking clothes, with your trifling ass, Milton, you bogus girl, Milton.”

“ Dis toilet paper be cutting my ass, I need some roles of tissue, Charmin.”

Girl, you look so sexy while you’re doing the damn thang” “ Cutting up tomatoes, fruits and vegetables and potatoes Just look at the rest of R Kelly’s catalogue for perfect exemplars Couple a ludicrous detail or three with a hastily delivered melody and fresh beat, and you are transported into a place of such surreal confusion that wonderful flickers of magic appear. It is one of the things I truly love about R&B, and in particular, R Kelly the audacity. Why would we want to know these things? Why are they telling us? How could anybody say these things in this way? With such crooning, ‘emotion’, and lord knows what else? Ornamentation ?Īside from the usual themes love, sex and money, there is frequently an unusually heavy weighting on gadgetry (particularly phones, pagers, texts, emails), usage of the newest slang terms, and this insistent magnification of detail. Yes, conversational, colloquial, mundane, and the all important descriptor – audacious. Usher: “ she’s telling you might change, but you tell her not to” T Pain: “ she made us drinks, to drink, we drunk ‘em, got drunk” In an inverse jumping of the shark (burrowing the shark?), the delivery of a single phrase transformed this simple, cringe-worthy balladeer into a walking sun of entertainment.īut let’s look at the context first, US R&B has long had an obsession with minutiae trifling matters, and an insatiable thirst for mundane details

In this instance, I’d like to apply it to the point at which R Kelly became insane the defining moment occurs approximately 166 seconds into his ever-expanding Hip-Hopera Trapped in the Closet. To Jump the Shark is a term usually applied to long running TV series that includes an event after which the show is deemed ‘never as good again’.

Trapped in the closet full episode