By Johnny Ray Huston

The man speaks the truth: Kelly's latest sonic soap opera sudses up a long laundry list of serious issues, including homosexuality in the church, police abuse of power, and that old Kelly favorite, the consequences of two-timing, sexaholic behavior. The five chapters of Kelly's epic "Trapped in the Closet" (found in audio and video form on his new CD, TP.3 Reloaded) pack more cliffhanger shenanigans into a quarter of an hour than One Life to Live manages to cram into a week of hour-long broadcasts. Wives cheating on husbands, husbands creeping on wives with men, interception schemes exacted by cops – as Kelly protests more than once during the saga, this is some "crazy-ass" shit by mainstream standards, marking the official moment that E. Lynn Harris's potboiler sensibility has spilled over from the printed page onto the airwaves.

On the rough chance that BET, VH1, and KMEL haven't been mainlining "Trapped in the Closet" into your dome, here's a rough synopsis. Chapter one finds our protagonist and narrator (Kelly) waking up in an unfamiliar bed; before he has time to collect himself and vamoose, last night's hookup, a girl named Mary, shoves him into an upright clothes compartment to hide as her husband heads for the bedroom door. The second chapter begins with Kelly coming out of the closet, his Baretta aimed and loaded, only to discover that Mary's husband, a pastor named Rufus, has been having a little affair of his own – the lucky someone soon arrives on the scene, and his name is Chuck, not Charlene. During chapter three, all four parties struggle to make sense of the mess; Mary's real name is revealed to be Cathy, and Kelly's protagonist finally scrams after he calls his own home and a man picks up the phone.

There are two more chapters after that, but it might be better to simply imagine that the mysterious male voice on the other end of the line is Kelly's own man on the side. The plotline becomes a bit wearisome, and the repetitiveness of the music – which remains essentially the same throughout – doesn't help matters. But there are still some awe-inducingly absurd, megalomaniacal moments to come. When (in chapter four) a cop car pulls over his character, Kelly uses his own voice to provide the sound of the siren. Not that much of a surprise, really, considering all of the actors in the video version of "Trapped in the Closet," male and female, are made to lip-synch their lines – lines that Kelly sings. (The likable sensitivity that Kelly brings to the character of Chuck is particularly interesting.)

Another ludicrous trait that inspires sheer wonder is Kelly's unwavering dedication to literalism. From "#!*@ You Tonight" to "Feelin' on Yo Booty," he's never been one to dabble in artful simile when he can state what's going on in plainly clumsy terms; among R&B lovers I know who loathe him, this is usually the first offense mentioned. Obvious title metaphor aside – a metaphor that, of course, becomes literal – "Trapped in the Closet" takes this tendency to new extremes, from the video's blow-by-blow re-creation of the lyrics, to the lyrics' blow-by-blow description of what each character says and does. The tactic yields some real whoppers, such as chapter four's final twist. Each segment ends with the last shocking word echoed, and when Kelly's character discovers another man's jimmy hood in his bed, listeners are treated to the exclamation "Oh my god, a rubber! (rubber! rubber! rubber! ...)."

As pop operettas go, we're worlds away from Freddie Mercury's tortured confessions to his mother and tangos with Beelzebub. Or are we? "Trapped in the Closet" 's one-man show could easily be interpreted as Kelly's marathon race through many facets of a single, mightily conflicted psyche, a trek that touches on and flinches away from masculine, feminine, and sexually ambiguous compromising positions, forever landing in modern-day duplicity. The man who would answer – truthfully or not – Ed Gordon's questions about everything but Aaliyah's death (his response: a pained face) has always been adept at role-playing; the classically blues back-and-forth disses of his weirdly prophetic 1998 duet with potential future queenpin enemy Sparkle, "Be Careful," were part of a larger album that could be interpreted as his own drag tribute to a certain former child bride.

Certainly, this isn't Kelly's first venture into soap-operatic realms. Back in the late '90s, I wrote about his initial dabbling, which took place within the remix of Kelly Price's "Friend of Mine" single. There, Price's tear-the-roof-off original became a soft sob story in which she called her daddy (Ronald Isley) to put her wayward husband (Kelly) in check. On the Isley Brothers' 2002 "Contagious," Kelly and Isley were at it – or at odds – yet again, with Isley's grandfatherly Mr. Biggs ready to use his gold-tipped cane as a weapon upon finding his young wife (Chanté Moore) in bed with Kelly's player.

A wild extension of those efforts, "Trapped in the Closet" is one of those strange creations that's simultaneously terrific (containing his best singing to date) and terrible. Its juggernaut status in the face of Kelly's recent public disgrace is worth comparing to the relatively timid reception Michael Jackson received upon releasing a track called "In the Closet" (back when it wasn't so clear his closet contained Nancy Grace's favorite on-air reading material, The Boy: A Photographic Essay). Whereas Jackson implored that it was best to keep things hidden, Kelly, already branded by shameful self-exposure, has no such qualms. Still, his opus would've been better if he'd brought different music to each chapter, rather than playing out a variety of scenarios over the same minimalist track. As a composer, he's not exactly Verdi, even if each section begins with the type of foreboding drumroll that suggests a diva is about to be snuffed.

"R. Kelly is delusional like a fox," my friend Ryan e-mailed me the other day, and I'm inclined to agree. This low-brow opera ain't over until the crazy man is done singing, and he's showing no signs of stopping.

To purchase TP.3 Reloaded, visit iTunes: