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4,454 words · no email, no account
No. 032 · Music · R&B & Soul
The Chicago Compound
a biography of Robert Sylvester Kelly
What the book is
Hyde Park, 1972. A boy who cannot read sits at the back of the classroom and learns to disappear into sound. By fourteen he is singing for change on the Red Line platforms; by twenty-five he is the best-selling R&B artist in America. By fifty-four he is inmate 02616-748.
Devon Marable's biography of Robert Sylvester Kelly follows a single life across five decades of American popular music — from the South Side projects to the Born Into the 90s breakthrough, the secret marriage to a fifteen-year-old Aaliyah, the operatic excess of Trapped in the Closet, the 2002 indictment, the 2008 acquittal, and the long silence that followed. It is also the story of the women and girls whose names were not on the records, and of the lawyers, label executives, radio programmers, tour managers, and reporters who saw what was happening and chose, year after year, what to do with what they saw.
Drawing on court filings, label memoranda, and more than two hundred interviews, Marable reconstructs not only a man but the architecture around him — the contracts, the NDAs, the settlements, the rooms with locks on the outside.
The question is not how one predator was finally stopped. The question is how, for thirty years, he was kept working.
At a glance
- Subject
- Robert Sylvester Kelly
- Shelf
- Music · R&B & Soul
- Written by
- Devon Marable
- Chapters
- 19 across 220 pages
- Narrated by
- Eric Whitfield
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- sexual abuse of minors · trafficking · RICO conviction
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01South Side SonRead free
- 02Joann3,189 words
- 03What Was Done to Him3,330 words
- 04Kenwood and the L Platform3,962 words
- 05Born into the 90's3,593 words
- 0612 Play3,409 words
- 07I Believe I Can Fly3,488 words
- 08The Kingdom of R3,469 words
- 09Aaliyah3,424 words
- 10The Pattern3,349 words
- 11The Tape3,279 words
- 12The Acquittal and Its Aftermath3,124 words
- 13Surviving R. Kelly3,691 words
- 14The Federal Indictments2,642 words
- 15The Trial2,589 words
- 16The Sentence3,008 words
- 17The Survivors2,815 words
- 18The System3,492 words
- 19Butner Appeals2,173 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 220 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 220 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-026-3 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Eric Whitfield
ISBN 979-8-90623-007-2
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Chicago Compound about?
Robert Sylvester Kelly. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Chicago Compound — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,454 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 62,000 words, 19 chapters, 220 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: sexual abuse of minors; trafficking; RICO conviction. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- sexual abuse of minors
- trafficking
- RICO conviction
Listed before you buy, not after.
