Will a criminal conviction do to R. Kelly’s music what years of ugly allegations couldn’t?
NEW YORK — Will a criminal conviction do to R. Kelly’s music what years of ugly allegations couldn’t? It’s unlikely that Monday’s moment of justice — when a federal jury in New York found the 54-year-old R&B superstar guilty of all nine counts in a sex trafficking trial — will mean much for his fans, given all the awful things they had learned already, some observers say. “The lines have already been drawn,” said Jem Aswad, deputy music editor for the trade publication Variety, who has been covering R. Kelly for 20 years. “The people that are going to listen to R. Kelly’s music are still listening to it. I don’t think a guilty verdict is going to change their minds.” Still, advocates hope the criminal conviction brings a moral reckoning. Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, understands how irresistible the music of R. Kelly can be for people who grooved to songs like “Ignition,” but said, “People should just have a second thought about the message that it sends.” “This generation is very clear about who R. Kelly is, right? These young people have come up with the information that this person is a perpetrator, right?” Burke said. “And if we can’t push past our personal likes and desires to dance to a song for the sake of sending a message to these little girls and little boys, at some point I’m just going to draw a line. “I don’t want to support somebody who will cause this kind of harm in my community. I just urge people to think about that,” she continued. “Is it really worth it?” Kelly had long managed to avoid professional consequences amid decades of reports of sexual abuse of young women and children, from his illegal marriage to R&B phenom Aaliyah in 1994, when she was just 15, to a 2002 arrest in which he was accused of recording of himself sexually abusing and urinating on a 14-year-old girl. The #MeToo era and the 2019 docuseries “Surviving R.
