Despite everything, I can’t help but enjoy “Ignition (remix)”. R. Kelly is a suspicious character and his lyrics can be a bit uncomfortable at times, but that song at least has a great hook and r’n’b rhythm.
That said, I can’t wrap my head around these lyrics:
I mean… Yes. This is R. Kelly, not R. Proust.Still, what is this I’m hearing? It’s like “Murder she wrote” once R. Kelly gets the girl “out of them clothes”? I don’t know about you, but to me ‘Murder she wrote’ is what old ladies watch on sunday afternoons together with scones and tea. Judging from R. Kelly overall, I’d assume that he’s a bit less innocent than that. Rather “Freakazoid” or “American Gladiators”. Perhaps even “Fear Factor”.
So, from what I can gather, the lyrics have something to do with either of the following:
a.) “Murder, she wrote” is stranger than I recall. Maybe Angela Lansbury in particular.
b.) The lyrics are a metaphor for something intricately kinky that I’m too European and too non-R. Kelly to grasp. If so, I apologize in advance.
The three lines that follow explain the line in question. He is saying that once he gets started she is going to be screaming like someone who is being murdered. Not sure if there is anything else I may be missing but that is at least the main idea.
Lil Wayne confused the hell out of me with “3 Peat”. At one point he says
You cannot see me
Like Hitler it’s the New Orleans nightmare.
And I’m like what the hell. Why is New Orleans afraid of Hitler? But as I listed a little closer I realized I was focusing on the wrong thing. “Cannot see me like Hitler” is pronounced “Can Nazi me like Hitler” and the part about New Orleans is the next line. Why he wants to be Nazi’d is anybody’s guess.
Well that would make sense if the words “she wrote” were not there. But for most of us “murder she wrote” refers to a very staid TV show, with very little screaming or overt violence (yes there were murders to be solved, but they mostly took place “offstage”), and where most of the characters were elderly and decidedly unsexy. If he is trying to suggest hot sex he is way off.
Maybe it is just very carelessly written. He meant “it’s like murder” but the scansion demanded a couple of extra syllables and he just slotted in the pre-existing phrase that came to mind without thinking about its connotations. Some musicians care a lot more about the music than about the words. I am not very familiar with R. Kelly’s lyrics. Is he usually a meticulous wordsmith, or not?
I remember having pretty much these exact same thoughts in the early nineties, when Chaka Demus’ dancehall hit Murder, She Wrote charted. (Youtube link.)
R. Kelly’s line makes* slightly *more sense as a namecheck of this tune than a direct reference to Angela Lansbury’s detective show.
I think R is using “Murder, She Wrote”, but he actually means “That’s all she wrote”. As in ‘once I get you out of those close, it’s on, and there is no stopping it’.
I think it’s just supposed to be like, oh cool, he name dropped a TV show. Even though it doesn’t make that much sense. We are talking about the same genre where rhyming “Louis Vuitton don” and “Louis Vuitton mom” is intricate wordplay. And “she got a white friend look like Michael Jackson” is like knock one out of the park poetry.
That actually makes a lot more sense (if he’s that clever). Knowing that they killed people offstage gives a much better explanation of the whole “privacy is on the door, still they can hear you screaming more” part. Hes “killing it” (having amazing sex) offstage behind a “do not disturb” sign.
The murder would be offstage, but at the end of the episode, Jessica would reveal the sequence of events as she had deduced them and as I recall that would be shown, with Jessica narrating:
[recreation is shown] Jessica: “…and after you planted Miss Brown’s glove in the freezer to throw suspicion on her, you sneaked into Mister Green’s bedroom and shot him.”
[cut to drawing-room revelation scene] Murderer: “But how could I? James saw me at the boathouse at the time of the murder.”
[cut back to recreation] Jessica: “James saw what he wanted to see, since he was eager for yet another romantic encounter, but when the figure in the dark coat waved him off, he assumed this wasn’t a good time. But that wasn’t you, it was your accomplice, Miss White.”
I add this for the possible benefit of non-native English speakers. I don’t have any great insight, but I think the word “like” here is used in the slang sense of “like, y’know” rather than just meaning “it is similar to the television show.”
So more of a “And you’ll be all ‘Murder She Wrote’ once I …”
The slang “like” often describes not exactly what someone would say, but what they were thinking/ feeling phrased as a more extreme version of what they actually said.
“The professor said we’d have a pop quiz today, so I was like, ‘just shoot me now.’”
I think “Murder She Wrote” is supposed to make the sentiment sound more playful than plain “murder.” Why R. Kelly would be concerned with anyone’s delicate sensibilities at this point, I do not know, but overall I like the lyric, it’s snappy.
As a long-time rap and R&B fan who has oft been exposed to comical and sometimes nonsensical lyrics, I find it amusing how deeply all of you are trying to analyze this particular line. I think Frosted Glass has it correct, by the way. I suspect that any attempt to analyze it beyond that is putting far more thought into it than R. Kelly ever did.
Still though, I’ve heard more obviously charming things than comparing your love making to a murder scene. It’s one of those things that should make a girl re-concider things.
