Kelly and Public Announcement released their debut album, Born into the 90's, at the beginning of 1992. As his crossover success broadened, Kelly also developed a flair for pop balladry that helped cement his status as one of the biggest-selling male artists of the '90s and 2000s. He was able to make songs like "Sex Me," "Bump n' Grind," "Your Body's Callin'," and "Feelin' on Yo Booty" into hits because his production was seductive enough to sell such blatant come-ons.
While he created a smooth, professional mixture of hip-hop beats, soulman crooning, and funk, the most distinctive element of Kelly's music is its explicit carnality. Kelly and his supporting band Public Announcement began recording in 1992 at the end of the new jack swing era, yet he was able to keep much of its sound alive while remaining commercially successful.
But the subtext for this one makes it sound like musical spin control, a public-relations manifesto as much as an R&B album.R&B producer/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist/songwriter R. It's public relations of the sort that one-time notorious bad boys like Eminem and Ice Cube have mastered, fashioning a monstrous persona and then softening it to maximize sales and build empathy. Whether he's guilty has yet to be determined, and on parts of Chocolate Factory Kelly sounds like he's preparing his defense as he scolds his accusers, musters apologies and enlists high-profile pals such as Ronald Isley, Fat Joe and Ja Rule as character witnesses. Now, however, Kelly's dark side is fodder for talk shows and tabloids and has been documented by his accusers in police files and court documents. In the past, these jumbled passions suggested a dark side to Kelly's life just beneath the surface of his enormous public successes. Of course, Kelly has always trafficked in such outrageousness, mixing soft-porn innuendoes with crying jags about his late mother, God and his own fallibility.
There are a few moments when the disconnect between Kelly's lyrics and his sordid legal troubles becomes disturbing, no more so than when he refers to himself as the "pied piper of R&B " in "Step in the Name of Love," a reference to the fairy-tale figure who enticed a village full of children away from their parents. But celebrity watchers scanning Chocolate Factory for howlers won't be disappointed. It ushers in an album that, by Kelly's standards, is PG-rated overall for lyrical content. Though "Ignition" resorts to a lame laundry list of automobile cliches - Prince's "Little Red Corvette" with a few cylinders missing - the remix leaves tread marks on the imagination with its nursery-rhyme interjections and Jamaican inflections. But he has a big fan base that still wants to hear good music from him, and undeniably this is a good record." "Considering what he's being accused of, the content of the song is questionable, and I had doubts how it would be received. Kelly has or hasn't done is, all radio hears is a hit record," said Dontay Thompson, R&B editor at industry trade publication Radio & Records. 2 on the R&B chart, a major hit in urban markets nationwide. The song's opening line - "Let me stick my key in your ignition, babe" - is indicative of its subject matter, a salacious account of love-making in the back seat of a car. It's been issued in a couple of formats: a slow grind ballad of the sort Kelly specializes in and an uptempo remix. Yet a few weeks ago, Kelly resurfaced with "Ignition," the first single from Chocolate Factory, and radio embraced it. Kelly and R., with its inspirational anthem "I Believe I Can Fly," established him as the biggest R&B singer of the '90s, Kelly found his career in danger of bottoming out. After multimillion-sellers such as 12 Play, R. The Best of Both Worlds, a joint album with Jay-Z, flopped, and in autumn, Jive scrapped a finished Kelly solo album, Loveland. His songs were pulled from radio playlists, and hip-hop peers such as Jay-Z and Nas publicly distanced themselves from him. Kelly was indicted last year in Chicago on 21 counts of child pornography, and faces 12 more counts on similar charges after a recent arrest in Florida.