It’s the kind of thing that makes you slap your forehead with disbelief that he has the balls to pull it off. It’s a novel idea for a pop song: no chorus except for the repeated mantra of “ real talk,” all speech, sung, no rhymes (Kelly has less regard for rhymes than probably any pop star in history). It takes the form of a phone call Kelly’s girl heard through the grapevine that he’d been at the club with someone else, and Kelly gets angrier and angrier, finally breaking up with her and telling her to go fuck herself and her other friends.

It’s also about how Kelly will steal your girl, and the moral of the story is “ cuff your bitch.” Superficially, it’s probably one of two or three prettiest pop songs of the ‘00s. T-Pain makes good on his intent to make his voice sound like a saxophone, echoing the melody almost jazzily through pounds and pounds of Auto-Tune. There are one-liners aplenty: “ she’ll be calling you Kelly when your name is Tommy,” he brags hilariously. The piano stomp is as gorgeous as any in pop, its nine-chords hitting with ten-ton weights. “I’m A Flirt” is the kind of song Brian Wilson might have written if he were an unbelievable piece of shit. The songs you know from Double Up are “I’m A Flirt,” “Real Talk,” and “Same Girl.” If you never went to a bar mitzvah around 2007, a primer. The definitive document of who he is as a man and as an artist is Double Up, released in 2007 during the most Teflon point in his career.

He’s released 14 albums it’s not much fun to slog through any of them front to back, and if you pick the wrong one up it’s easy to see why you’d be confused that he’s hailed as such a genius, or eccentric, or both. Mostly you have to wrestle with the worldview of a man who is clearly morally bankrupt and monstrously stupid who sees women as lower than dogs whose response to being busted for statutory rape was to deny it was him in the video and then troll his listeners by calling himself the “pied piper of R&B.” Robert Kelly is one of pop’s truest and boldest auteurs. He’s never made a classic album because the spaces between great singles and astoundingly brave caprices are generally filled with failed experiments or garbage crossover attempts. You’ll have to accept that about half the record will be dreck.

Listen to r kelly double up album