R KELLY NUMBER ONE TRIAL
R KELLY NUMBER ONE SERIES

These days, it is a little over six million a week, having hovered in that range continuously over the last four years. 177 - Kelly’s catalog was drawing an average of around five million streams each week. In early 2017, shortly after the release of Kelly’s last studio album - “12 Nights of Christmas,” which peaked at No. Jackson, on the other hand, remains steadily popular on air. Since the Lifetime documentary, airplay of Kelly’s music plunged and has never recovered. Radio, where song playlists are part of a station’s identity, is one barometer of public taste. But for Kelly, “it was the documentary that really resonated so strongly that it just brought people to a place of never playing him.” The television series, he added, “pulled our hands from over our eyes and was like, you have to look at this.” “There’s a lot of people who have a lot of controversy who get played,” Rosenberg said. and morning show host for New York’s Hot 97 (97.1 FM), who called Kelly “completely dead” at the station. “There was a long period where you could have enough plausible deniability, and then in one moment, it just collectively ended,” said Peter Rosenberg, a D.J. Kelly,” with gripping firsthand accounts from his alleged victims, in January 2019, RCA dropped the singer from its roster, and some of his past collaborators apologized, while law-enforcement investigations in multiple states pursued the allegations anew. The singer saw his performances picketed and then canceled, while Spotify announced, then rescinded, a policy banning the promotion of artists, like Kelly, whose personal conduct was deemed “hateful.”Īfter the broadcast of “Surviving R. He collaborated with stars like Jay-Z, Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga and Chance the Rapper, and headlined major festivals into the 2010s.īy then, Kelly’s influence was waning - he had not scored a Top 40 hit in a decade - and the campaign against him coincided with the momentum of #MeToo.

But Kelly thrived before, during and after the controversy, releasing 12 platinum albums in all. In 2002, Kelly was indicted on child pornography charges after a video surfaced that authorities said showed the singer urinating on and having sex with an underage girl. Throughout the 1990s, he settled lawsuits accusing him of having sex with underage girls in 1994, at 27, Kelly married Aaliyah, his then-15-year-old protégée, allegedly using forged documents. “He’s not just muted or turned down, he’s in jail,” Hampton said.Įven before 2000, when The Chicago Sun-Times published the first major investigation into allegations of abuse by Kelly, the singer had been followed by rumors and accusations of misconduct.

R KELLY NUMBER ONE SERIES

Hampton noted that the documentary itself was “not a call to boycott - no survivor said that in the project.” But “social death doesn’t happen without some sort of narrative” that helps consumers make up their minds, she added, tracing that path from the “righteous” activism that sought to cut off Kelly’s financial resources through the Lifetime series and the criminal charges that followed.

R KELLY NUMBER ONE TRIAL

(Kelly has denied the allegations.) Yet even as his federal trial begins in Brooklyn this week - he faces charges of racketeering based on sexual exploitation of children, kidnapping and forced labor - Kelly’s musical legacy remains far from simple. “Everybody on the dance floor stopped and looked at me like, ‘What are you doing?’”įor some, a rejection of Kelly’s music has been long overdue, a belated reckoning for a star dogged by accusations of misconduct. “It was immediately a vibe killer,” Gintowt said. The one time that Gintowt has spun “Ignition” recently - at the request of a bride - the experience only reinforced his stance. Growing up, hits like “Ignition (Remix)” and “Step in the Name of Love” were ubiquitous local favorites by the homegrown R&B star, and when Gintowt started soundtracking wedding parties, “‘Bump n’ Grind’ used to crush it for me,” he recalled.īut in 2019, amid renewed furor over decades of allegations that Kelly had systematically abused young women, the D.J., now living in the Bay Area, stopped playing Kelly’s music altogether. from Chicago, Richard Gintowt has a lot of history with R.

R kelly number one