Read The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic for Free Online

well, OK.” Then one day I get this call that says: “Go to your mailbox. There’s this manila envelope with a videotape in it.”
    We had gotten one videotape already after the first story, and we gave it to the police. When I say “we,” I mean a roomful of editors sitting around asking, “What is the right thing to do here? This would seem to be evidence of a felony, we should give it to police.” There was one tape, but the police could not determine the girl’s age. The forensic experts they had looking at it said judging by the soles of her feet, they could tell she was 13 or 14 at the time this tape was made, but we can’t identify who the woman is. Videotape No. 1.
    There were tapes on the street. And I had heard of another video tape with a girl who was part of an ongoing relationship. This is the girl who was in the tape that was in the lawsuit.
    And some 40 people testified that it was her?
    Yeah. Coaches, best friend’s parents, pastor, half the family, grandmother, aunt—but the mother and father never testified, the girl never testified. When we wrote our story about the tape, the girl and mother and father took a six-month vacation to the south of France. We’d been to the house several times. We’d rung the doorbell. This was an aluminum-siding, lower-middle-class house on the South Side, with a station wagon which is 13 years old—you know what I mean? And now they’re in the south of France. And one time the dad got a credit as a bass player on an R. Kelly album. He didn’t play bass.
    The situations are incredibly complicated, and sometimes there is an element of, “We’re gonna exploit this situation for our favor.” That doesn’t mean that it’s legal or it’s right or that girl wasn’t harmed. It tore that family apart.
    How many people do you think you’ve interviewed? How many people came forward?
    I think in the end there were two dozen women with various level of details. Obviously the women who were part of the hundreds of pages of lawsuits—hell of a lot of details. There were girls who just told one simple story, and there were a lot of girls who told stories that lasted hours which still make me sick to my stomach. It never was one girl on one tape. Or one girl and Aaliyah.
    The other thing, the thing that people seem to not know: She was fresh out of eighth grade in this tape.
    Fourteen or 15. That puts a perspective on it. She’s not sophisticated enough to know what her kinks are.
    Let’s talk about what it is, aside from not just having reportorial chops, that might hold somebody back. I feel that a lot of younger journalists came up through blogs, not journalism school. They are fearful to write about it because they don’t know what they can say, what language they can use, if they can be sued for even acknowledging charges.
    You may not know how to report, but you should know how to read. The Sun-Times was never sued for the hundreds of thousands of words that it wrote about R. Kelly. You cannot be sued for repeating anything that is in a lawsuit. You cannot be sued for repeating anything that was said during the six- or seven-week trial. It’s in his record, and then there’s Kelly’s own words. Then read [Kelly’s biography] Soulacoaster . It was not a pleasant experience for me to read Soulacoaster ! But read it, and read what he says in his own book! Do your goddamn homework!
    What are the other factors?
    Here’s the most sinister. This deeply troubles me: There’s a very—I don’t know what the percentage is—some percentage of fans are liking Kelly’s music because they know. And that’s really troublesome to me. There is some sort of—and this is tied up to complicated questions of racism and sexism—there is some sort of vicarious thrill to seeing this guy play this character in these songs and knowing that it’s not just a character.
    Songs like “Sexasaurus” make it novel. The ironic, jokey Trapped in the Closet series airs on the