Mad at R. Kelly, or On Relinquishing Musical Genius

Black Feminist Classics Series #3

I intentionally kept R. Kelly’s trial on the backburner of my mind because I didn’t want to become too invested in the outcome, too devastated if, like so many times before, he was acquitted for coercing, molesting, raping and holding black women and girls hostage in plain sight. His legend has not been as urban as it has been black—seeped in the deep-seated self-hate and disregard of black women’s vulnerability and pain in a community and culture that has often been more invested in shaming than protecting blackgirls while our loyalties have been erroneously tied up in the “respectability” of our men.

We were socialized to hide their indiscretions behind a cloak of conservativism and patriarchy, daring everyone who knew the truth to say anything—barely, if ever, saying anything ourselves, even behind closed doors, and sacrificing the women brave enough to speak up and speak out as race traitors, airing our dirty laundry in public because scapegoating black women to protect black men is nothing new.

October is domestic violence awareness month and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that we are still litigating, in the public sphere, what was settled in the private sphere over two decades ago. No one has suggested that R. Kelly is innocent, only that his guilt should be shared by his victims, that they should take some responsibility because he didn’t do anything that they didn’t secretly want or consent to—this sexist rationale is no different than believing a woman who wears a short skirt invites her sexual assault, or when I was encouraged to “cover my cleavage, arms and legs” in church so as to not entice the wandering eyes of otherwise righteous boys and men. The legacy of women being a man’s downfall is as much a misreading of scripture as a distraction from patriarchy. It is also an excuse to remain in relationship with misogynists.

I don’t have a lot of faith in our severely flawed legal system, and like others I have to reckon with what it means to be invested in the kind of rehabilitation and reimagination that is not available in the prison industrial complex and still want dangerous pedophiles who are likely to reoffend locked up for the rest of their life. I don’t know where or how to draw that line. But the line worth drawing is the one that requires us to wrestle with our investment in men and art that was generated at the expense of black women and girls.

And so I turn to a book I regard as a bible and that the author calls a workbook, Pearl Cleage’s Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth. This book, this bible, includes one of my favorite black feminist essays, In the time before the men came, but perhaps the most famous contribution is the performance piece of which the book is named, Mad at Miles.

In it, Cleage reflects on what it might mean to hold Miles Davis, proprietor of cool and musical genius of jazz responsible for his “self-confessed violent crimes against women,” in particular our beloved Cicely Tyson, to whom he had been married, but also of anonymous black women he was also known to have abused. In Davis’ case, Cleage suggested that we should not compartmentalize the parts of him that we loved versus the parts of him that were sinister. She believed our responsibility, as black women and feminists, was to protect and believe the women who were being beaten and tortured, not the man who committed these crimes with impunity.

In the article Miles Davis beat his wives and made beautiful music, Sonia Saraiya reflects on the magician and the monster that was Miles Davis, saying, “I can’t help loving the music, even as his violence makes me recoil in horror.” I have no such attachments to R. Kelly’s music.

While Cleage references the autobiography in which Miles Davis damn near brags about beating women, intimate partner violence in the late twentieth century wasn’t uncommon. She named other famous black musicians who had the reputation of meanness and violence against women, and whose talent often overshadowed those realities, but what was even more offensive was that Davis had admitted to being a woman beater. It was his smug admission, his unrepentance, his unapologetic understanding that nobody would give a damn about his predilection for slapping the shit out of a dark-skinned black woman that translated disappointment to fury.

Cleage asks, “can we continue to celebrate the genius in the face of the monster?” She ends her performance with a question, can we?, seemingly unconvinced herself that we can entirely unravel ourselves from the messiness of memories already associated with the music, the first slow dance, first kiss, noise in the background of whatever fill in the blank childhood or young adult memory that is tethered to song.

I can’t, for example, change the fact that R. Kelly was a featured singer at the first concert I attended in 1994, headlined by Salt ‘n Pepa. Still a virgin if not virginal, and a feminist-in-training, I didn’t understand the lyrics of R. Kelly’s 12 Play album, but I was easily seduced by the rhythms and the way his voice did not require an instrumental to reach your core. The simulations of sex on stage escaped me but I still used my birthday money that year to purchase his cassette tape which I listened to on my Walkman, safe from my mother’s ears or intervention.  I was not beholden to R. Kelly’s music back then, especially after learning that Aaliyah, whose cassette tape I also owned, was not just his protégé. At this point any allegiance I had to a memory is shrouded in the shame of complicity, knowing but not knowing, and being at an age, at the time, where proximity and vulnerability could have made me a victim.

R. Kelly’s confessions, shrouded in musical genius, are available on his entire catalogue. And while I am admittedly more disgusted at the thought of songs like “It Seems Like You’re Ready” than “I Believe I Can Fly” neither song is on my playlist for the same reason. My allegiance to blackgirls and women will always supersede nostalgia.

Cleage wonders, “. . .what would we do if the violence was against black men instead of black women?” The answer to that question, posed in 1990, still echoes in the background and foreground of our consciousness when protecting and defending black men at the expense of black women and girls is a repetitious reality, not a question. I think of one of Cicely Tyson’s last interviews where she refers to Miles Davis, her former husband and abuser, as “the greatest love of her life.” I think of the one-sidedness of that love and what it cost her, how it limited the kind of love she deserved. I also think of R. Kelly’s victims, women who were so brainwashed and manipulated that they felt themselves unworthy of love.

At the closing of her performance, Cleage returns to Davis’ autobiography and ponders what Cicely may have been thinking as she listened to her abuser shoot the shit with the police while she hid in the basement,

“I wondered if she tried to remember the last time she had known a brother whose genius was not in the way he played a horn, or made a living, or ran a city, but in the way he loved her.

The danger is that we have gone so long without asking the question that we have forgotten the answer.

The danger is that we have gone so long taking what we can get that we have forgotten what we wanted” (p. 19-20).

Indeed, Ms. Cleage, indeed.

May R. Kelly’s guilty verdict yield justice and a recalibration of how we define (and defend) black genius.