TheFader

For a long time I thought I was going to write fiction. I was okay at it. I had a professor who had been a rich banker before she decided she wanted to write stories about her mother’s cooking and she quit being a banker and started writing stories about her mother’s cooking. She thought I was awesome. I was maybe even a little better than okay. But I wasn’t good. I don’t know. It’s hard to write stories. I would just come up with ridiculous ideas and then fill in the gaps to talk about ridiculous things. My first writing class in college I sat around coming up with ideas and wrote about a kid and his dad with one leg going boating and the dude then throwing his fake leg off the boat and then realizing he couldn’t do that and then going and getting it. I wrote about a really ugly dude hitting on people on an airplane. I wrote about drunk teenagers hunting turkeys after prom and an Olympic long jump hopeful with an imprisoned father. But the stories were crappy because I can’t write about morals and slow movements I just want to come up with dumb ideas. Here are some dumb ideas I will come up with right now: A group of widowed grandmothers go on a vacation tour bus to Montana and learn to ride horses and find a dead turtle on a trail and have to sleep outside because they get lost and then they eat the turtle; a sunglasses magnate dies and asks to be buried wearing nothing but sunglasses (like naked, because he loved sunglasses) and his wife is like “no way” but his family is like “honor his wishes” and they fight; Bo Jackson thinks about a career in golf and tries to get Tiger Woods to help him but Tiger Woods never answers his letters so instead he just pretends like he is good at golf and gets golf endorsements at local sports agencies and feels bad about lying. See, this is fun. Right? Or something.

This song is like that. I know it’s Nick Cannon. Let’s get that out of the way. But this is an R Kelly song; he wrote and produced it. The song has these things: computer flute, computer guitar, bird noises, handclap snare, no hi-hats. Nick Cannon doesn’t have to do anything except stay modest. The last thing I need is lawsuits/ All I did was call you/ Initiated first move, shorty that was all you. That’s as fancy as he gets. Kells on the chorus, echoing the word “hoes.” Makes it sound like the minute when you watch a baseball be a homerun or a foul ball, either way, worth the gasp.

Kelly’s on trial now, weird trial for a weird crime. I remember in a story I wrote once, I don’t remember what the context was, someone justified something by saying “Yeah, but Miles Davis beat his wife” to another character, talent separate from behavior. But it’s not, it’s unavoidably connected and you would be stupid to hope they are not. I don’t plausibly think that R Kelly’s defense believes that someone CGI’d his face onto a video of him peeing on someone. That would be absurd. But Kelly must have pushed for that. There are hard boundaries in my life, un-oversteppable ones. I wouldn’t pee on anyone underage. I wouldn’t beat my wife. I haven’t created a universe that I live in without regard for much of anything or anyone else, but it seems like that is where genius comes from. So what’s the difference between him saying someone digitally implanted his face on an incriminating video and trilling on a song he wrote for Nick Cannon, being “a gigolo, always on the go.” It’s an easy fairytale, sounds like Shel Silverstein. Who I heard was kind of a filthy adult. But I’m still into the Giving Tree.