While I’m generally a pretty big fan of Interview, their overuse of celebrity-on-celebrity interviews is regularly nauseating. More often than not those interviews — I’m looking at you Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman — are nothing but ego massage and fluff. No more. In the magazine’s latest issue, Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy/Palace/Mordecai Applebaum and his Amazing Accordion interviews R.Kelly about being R. motherfucking Kelly and it is great and the pictures, as always, are wonderful. Excerpts follow.
On inspiration:
OLDHAM: Just out of curiosity, what time of day do you like to record? At night?
KELLY: Fifty o’ clock.
On upcoming releases:
OLDHAM: So what happened to the Zodiac album?
KELLY: I’ve changed the name to The Return of 12 Play: Night of the Living Dead. I think it’ll be an R&B-like thriller album, if you will.
On being a street performer before he was famous:
OLDHAM: Did you have other street performers try to say, “This is my turf!”?
KELLY: Yeah, but I would just give them $100 and they would go running like, “Whoo-hoo!” [laughs] I started creating gimmicks and stuff. For instance, when a lady would come down up under the L, she would have a McDonald’s bag in her hand and everything like that, so I said, “I should write a McDonald’s song, because everybody always comes down from the L with McDonalds.” So I wrote a song that was like [sings], “McDonald’s is the place for you / When the day is through / You can go to McDonald’s and get yourself a Big Mac / Big Mac / Order a fries, icy coke and a apple pie / No one does it like McDonald’s / Dooh-ooh, McDonald’s and you . . . ” [Oldham laughs] Sometimes I would do Stevie Wonder—I would sing “Part-Time Lover” to the instrumental. But mostly I would just sing my own songs. I was hustling.
Basically, this interview is hilarious and, at times, pretty touching (I really had to hold off making an R. Kelly/underaged girls joke here). Check it out!
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