The Music Thread For 12/17/13: Where The Hell Have You Been?

You see the videos up above.

The first video was from the Saturday sketch show MadTv (which was funner than Saturday Night Live for many years and never had a problem with hiring a black woman in Debra Wilson) and was made by Aries Spears way back in the year of either 2001 or 2002. It was a parody of R. Kelly's "The World's Greatest" called "The World's Greatest Statuary Racist."

The second video down below is from cartoon The Boondocks' second episode, ever called "The Trial of R.Kelly," which was aired in 2005.

Vibe Magazine reported on R.Kelly having more than a secret fling with an adolescent Aaliyah back in the late 90's.

All of this about Robert Kelly has been well known, well documented, and all over the place for more than a decade.

He should have been locked up a long time ago.

Now with all of this information that everyone could have easily asked their black friends (or people in black music circles who don't do pandering interviews) about or just locate right on a Google search, it makes me sick to my stomach how Jim DeRogatis was not vocal enough about these stores that exploded yesterday in that Village Voice interview and has waited to do this when R.Kelly has become somewhat relevant again.

Jim didn't need Pitchfork endorsing R.Kelly to do this. He didn't need R.Kelly coming on a track with Lady Gaga and have "Beats by Dre" and Best Buy co-sign playing it all over the damn place. He didn't need Saturday Night Live and the AMA's to give him performance time with Lady Gaga to imitate sex on stage. He didn't need R.Kelly to call his latest album "Black Panties" or do an #AskRKelly epic debacle on Twitter to do all of this.

DeRogatis could have kept doing this before and before, and yet, waits to now to do this? After all the important time that could have been used to get these devastated young women the justice they deserve? It took him all of this time to realize that "nobody matters less to our society than young black women, nobody?"

I mean Jim, you work in music and have covered a lot of artists, how the hell did you not know in our American society and global community that black women as a collective whole have long had to bare that burden for like, forever.

And it's not just young black women having to bare that burden, ALL black women bare that burden.

Where was this Jim DeRogatis at when he chose to use his First and Fifth Amendment rights in those two trials and not take the stand? Was he more scared of going to jail or getting sued instead of fighting for these young women's lives? Was his own life or money more important than the young girls' whose stories he knew about?

How he has suddenly had a rejuvenated catharsis now is suddenly so appalling, distasteful, and downright disturbing in my mind, almost to the level of Robert Kelly's teenage girl nightmare addiction that should have long been criminalize. Especially if DeRogatis had testified.

Instead, DeRogatis chose not to testify.

The terrible music journalists' ethos that he talked about in that interview in The Village Voice, well,  he is among those music journalists since he did not answer the call when he most needed to, when it was time to call R.Kelly out on all the immoral, egregious and monstrous behavior (as he said) in the most vital of moments.

(And let me make sure to say that Aaliyah's family does not get a pass on this at all too, because they let their daughter continue her rise to fame without stepping in and stopping all of this from happening. )

Jim DeRogatis has had this information for all of these years, yet coward out when the time called for him to brave. What an awful time to display a pusillanimous mentality.

Where the hell was Jim DeRogatis this whole time, just like his music journalist colleagues?

It's the most important question Jessica Hooper could have asked him yesterday.

(Update: To be clear, with me mentioning Jim taking the first and the fifth amendment, he CLEARLY testified. So that should have been clear when I said "not to testify" on Jim there).