Our favorite artists become our counsellors, our heroes, and our means of escape, a burden of which many are not deserving. In the face of these testimonies, the question of the fan’s responsibility, our responsibility, remains. Kelly, black girls without star power never stood (and still don’t stand) a chance. & B.’s most beloved icons, couldn’t get anyone to stand up and intervene against R. If Aaliyah, despite her status as one of R. Citing songs like Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There” and the romances of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley with much younger women, they present a framework for how girls are mistreated in pop music, devolving from shameless, barely legal marriages to being viewed as a sort of prize that comes as “part of the life style.” Men’s indiscretions are chalked up as the inevitable result of consensual idol worship.
In the first episode, the writers Ann Powers and Nelson George offer a primer on the long, twisted history of pop music’s idolization of relationships with young girls, on and off wax.
They all seemed to think, What’s another victim compared to another paycheck? Kelly’s label, RCA Records, which refuses to drop him, to his entourage, who, when not turning a blind eye, casually facilitated his abuses. The documentary also indicts the music industry at large-from the very top, starting with R. Kelly” demonstrates that black girls and women are at particular risk for getting drawn into this cycle of negligence and silence. Kelly, creating a culture where there are only the abused, abusers, and those who are complicit, often in alternating and interchanging roles. Over six hours, we hear from Kelly’s siblings and business associates, psychologists, journalists, survivors, and the families of the girls who have all but disappeared into his cultlike orbit-families who are desperate for their daughters to come home.įew viewers will be surprised to see how the justice system falls short (Kelly was acquitted in 2008 of child-pornography charges, and has denied all of the more recent allegations against him), but the documentary’s power is in how it forces all of us to recognize how small choices of selfish indifference enable someone like R. Viewers had been called to bear witness to the stories and pain of black girls and women-an essential and revolutionary act in its own right-and to the failings of the individuals and the systems that allowed these women to suffer. Kelly, the music industry, his fans, ourselves-would emerge unscathed. Within the first minutes of the six-part documentary “Surviving R.
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