Can You Hear That? That's The Sound Of Spotify Siding With #MuteRkelly

By Mieka Strawhorn | | May 10, 2018 |

By Mieka Strawhorn | | May 10, 2018 |

The call to #muteRkelly got amplified again today when Spotify announced it would no longer be promoting any of his music. I know, exciting right?! According to Buzzfeed:

R. Kelly has been removed from all Spotify playlists and his music will no longer be promoted on the platform, the streaming service announced on Thursday.

Listeners can still find R. Kelly’s music of their own accord, but Spotify will no longer recommend his music on its discover page or any other algorithmic playlists.

It’s a start, but it’s not enough. Listeners can still search and listen to his music, but it won’t be because they saw it on Spotify’s “Top 20 Songs To Piss To” playlist. I use R. Kelly “pee-pee tape” jokes because I use humor to cope with the horrifying truth. But the truth needs to be spoken. Here’s the terrible truth about the tape at the center of R.Kelly’s 2002 indictment on 21 counts of felony child pornography (via Buzzfeed):

In the video, a man resembling Kelly tells a young girl to call him “daddy”; they have sex; he directs her to strike various poses and assume different positions, and he urinates in her mouth. Before reporting the existence of the tape or the police investigation, the girl is identified for the Sun-Times by her aunt, who said that based on her appearance, her niece would have been about 14 at the time the tape was made. The man in the tape also can be heard referring to the girl by her name, which the newspaper never reports, believing she is a victim of rape.

Ultimately, Kelly’s trial was delayed until 2008 while he continued to record, tour and make millions of dollars (all while allegedly continuing to prey on underage women). According to The New York Times, Kelly was acquitted because his “high-powered defense team convinced the jury of nine men and three women that the identity of the girl was not conclusive”. And so, the gargoyle walks among us, free as a bird.

Last summer Buzzfeed published an excruciating interview with Jerhonda Pace, one of Kelly’s alleged victims. In it, she relates her alleged experiences of sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of Kelly, whom she met at 15, that mirror decades of other similar accounts. WBEZ has a detailed timeline of the life and alleged crimes of Robert Sylvester Kelly, if you need a refresher. It’s a real punch in the tit.

So yeah, let’s keep this momentum going. #MUTERKELLY

Apple Music, I can’t hear you!