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With nails bitten to the nubs and the haunting echo of the last line of chapter five running through my dome, I walked into the Best Buy last week searching desperately for my fix. Though he claims to have at least 20 chapters filmed (and many more in the works), Kelly recently released a DVD of chapters one through 12, seven of which had never been seen before. So, new chapters in hand, I walked into my apartment. I opened the DVD. I put it in the player. I hit the play button! Fine, I'll stop.
Chapters one through five of Trapped In The Closet are still as glorious now as they ever were. Each tumbling cliffhanger is shocking, but believable; each line R. Kelly utters is hilarious (hearing someone emphatically sing "you must be crazy or on crack to have somebody here up in my motherf---in' house!" is still the funniest thing maybe ever), but furthers the plot. But once the new stuff kicks in, Trapped In The Closet goes from mildly outlandish to totally bat-dump crazy, a figurative freak show transformed into a literal one. And that, my friends, is the sound of the water skis flying high above the shark.
Like I said, R. Kelly's no genius. In fact, I think he's crazy; for land's sake, he's got a song called "Sex Weed" that's about exactly what you think it's about. But R. Kelly throws the comparative plausibility of the first five chapters out the window with six through 12 and turns something surprisingly ingenious into something surprisingly awful.
In the latest chapters, we meet an overweight, adulterous, Southern, possibly developmentally challenged woman with some sort of fixation with pears. We're introduced to a character named, cross my heart and hope to die, Rosie the Nosy Neighbor.
And then there's the grand entrance of Big Man, the gentleman who's been getting with the cop's wife.
Insanity aside, some other cracks in Trapped are starting to show; the rhyme schemes are progressively weakening, and each tune has the same backing track, which gets awfully tiresome after a dozen viewings (and will probably drive some to violence if the entire set is ever released).
But that's small change compared to the real problem here: Trapped In The Closet has veered from a fun little soap opera into just another stupid R. Kelly song full of bad innuendo and even worse singing. And this time, that stupid song might just last forever.
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