I didn’t want to report on this story despite how easy a target R.Kelly is, because that might mean I would have to watch some of this lengthy and widely panned R&B soap opera. Up until now my exposure to “Trapped in the Closet” was limited to a brief segment on The Daily Show in which it was all too easy to dismiss the laughable creation of an eccentric pedophile who has inexplicably been able to carry on with his singing career. (I guess Michael Jackson set the precedent.)

Now that Kelly has said that the “Trapped in the Closet” hip-hopera series was dictated to him by aliens that came down from space to show him new music video techniques, I can no longer ignore his extra-terrestrial inspired genius. He is quoted at the premiere of Chapters 11-16 using a kind of metaphor but it comes off like he’s saying aliens visited him and inspired him to create the series.

“Don’t nobody ask me no questions I don’t know how to explain how I wrote it” the singer laughed “I’m tired of people asking me that because I can not explain this. I can explain any other song but I cant explain ‘Trapped In The Closet’.”

Kelly went on to explain “It’s an alien, People ask me why is it an alien and I say it’s come down to show us new genres and new ways to produce movies, magic, song and dialogue which have all been put together, and has never been done as far as I’m concerned. I call that alien. And people ask me when ‘Trapped In The Closet’ is going to end and I say when the aliens decide to leave.”

[From NME.com]

So I read the summary of the first three episodes of “Trapped in the Closet” on Wikipedia and a guy played by Kelly ends up sleeping with a married woman whose husband comes home, so he hides in the closet. The husband and wife then mess around, Kelly’s cell phone rings, and the husband discovers him in the closet. Kelly has a loaded gun, so the husband doesn’t give him a beat down. It turns out the husband is a pastor. Then the husband’s lover comes over unexpectedly and it’s a man and all four people stand there arguing. After that I lost interest in the plot, which keeps getting more convoluted.

“Trapped in the Closet” has been parodied on South Park, Saturday Night Live, MadTv, and in a song released by Weird Al Yankovic called “Trapped in the Drive Through.”

I did watch some of it on YouTube, and it seems to merit all the derision it gets. Kelly sings the same tune in different voices with lyrics explaining the plot twists and it’s hard to believe he’s taking it seriously.

Here’s a link to part one. Chapter 15 is below. All the rest are available on YouTube.

After five years of an odd series of coincidences that delayed his trial for child pornography, R.Kelly will finally face the music at his trial September 17. His excuse for those sex videos that surfaced in 2002 featuring a maybe 13 year-old girl was that it wasn’t really him in the act – just a computer-generated image of him. Maybe the aliens made him make that video too.