DeRogatis vs. R. Kelly's lawyers!

i hope he goes down eventually but they've been after him for about 16 years.

I didn't want to revive a thread just for the Lifetime show, but eeurgh....

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/entertainment/r-kelly-investigation/index.html

how the hell is Michael Avenatti involved in this. we really do live in a simulation

de Rogitas has an article on this in the new yorker online today too

Avenatti is a grandstanding fool but good on him for this.

wow @ that story

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/prosecutors-are-moving-to-indict-r-kelly-after-the-discovery-of-another-videotape

DeRo's book is imminent (or out?). I'm not sure I'm up for reading it, which makes me a huge hypocrite, given how many books about rock and pop debauchery I've read.

https://aux.avclub.com/r-kelly-is-not-the-only-villain-at-the-heart-of-jim-de-1835080372?/setsession

There's an excerpt in this week's New Yorker that's really good, and contains a lot of info that was new to me alongside some fascinating stuff about how he and other newspaper colleagues actually went about reporting the story. (Of course, it does begin with "I met Lester Bangs!" - I suppose we're just lucky he didn't wedge in his story about getting fired from Rolling Stone for giving Hootie and the Blowfish a bad review.)

hey you gotta play the hits

things DeRogatis has done, ranked

1= called his wire tribute band ex-lion tamers
1= ex-lion tamers tour with wire, playing pink flag in order at every show
1= all the stuff in this thread
.
.
.
.
4: the bangs book

5. calls out a bunch of female pop stars for not being good role models for his daughters

348,294,718. This critic’s take: Chief Keef is a thick-tongued, mush-mouthed rapper with little grace and stilted flow who stumbles through generic, unimaginative, frequently plodding and numbingly repetitive backing tracks bragging with little imagination and forced conviction about his bad-ass self and utter disregard for anyone else in the universe. The cynicism is bottomless; in his view, one either exploits his own community or is one of the exploited. “I’m laughing to the bank/Ha, ha, ha/I’m laughing at the slave’s life/Ha, ha, ha,” he raps. His attempts to shock with exaggerated tales of senseless violence were old decades ago, as noted earlier, already transparent by the time N.W.A lost Ice Cube and its political edge and gave us nothing but empty gangsta porn on Niggaz4Life in 1991. Forced to rate it on this blog’s own scale, it ranks at exactly zero stars.

Good New Yorker excerpt.

in short he's a terrible critic, a not-bad journalist and a good wire tribute act

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/soulless-r-kelly-jim-derogatis-interview-838478/

Another New Yorker piece, now that R. Kelly's been convicted.

I'd like to make a memorial of bad takes:

It’s not that R. Kelly was playing Pitchfork because everyone thought it would be funny—far from it. He was playing because his music matters to people, and if Jim DeRogatis wasn’t paying attention to that, that’s his problem, not Pitchfork’s, and it’s certainly not ours.

Drew Millard is an Assistant Editor at Noisey. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard

Yeah, R. Kelly playing Pitchfork was one of the all-time shit moves.

Even Albini knows a good guy (and a bad guy) when he sees it:

I tip my hat to Jim DeRogatis. For years, less serious music journalists looked the other way on terrifying allegations about R Kelly so as to maintain access; DeRogatis was relentless in telling the stories of Kelly's victims. Model ethical journalism. https://t.co/ZOavukwW4b

— steve albini (@electricalWSOP) September 28, 2021

Say what you will about Jim's music criticism, but he was always a top-notch journalist. His reporting in the Sun-Times was always great.

I forgot, Albini actually majored in journalism at Northwestern!

I wonder if he ever tried to pursue that path, but I digress...