There’s 22 chapters, now?
How frigging long is the whole deal, now?
You only watched five minutes? Please tell me you at least started with Chapter 1. Because it would make no sense at all to jump into it on some random chapter, not knowing the characters or backstories. 
I agree: the commentary track is one of the greatest works in the history of mankind, and your description of RK’s attitude–Shakespeare set to Mozart–is spot on: he thinks he’s a genius who invented storytelling. He even seems to think he invented rhyming.
But Disc 2, which came out recently, includes no commentary–I nearly cried myself to sleep when I found out–and is too self-consciously funny. He seems to have figured out that people all over the world were laughing at him. Laughing hard. There are people who’ve rented it from me over and over again who’ve got the entire commentary track memorized (“See, the cliffhanger is that there is no cliffhanger”) and come in quoting lines from it.
Truly a work of pure-camp genius.
hehe
“Here I am, quickly trying to put on my cloouuuoothes.”
I also liked:
“His phone get’s off, and then things get a little more interesting”
They didn’t really, though. But this line kept me watching hopefully for 2 more minutes.
You’re right, this is hilarious!
My favorite so far: “Nobody would have ever known that was a man. People would have bet their breath that it wasn’t gonna be a man, you know, but that’s what makes trapped in a closet trapped in a closet, you never know what’s gonna happen.”
He seemingly forgot that the man said he was in the closet just before.
The first twelve chapters of Trapped in the Closet were bizarre genius: unusual cliffhangers, wacky characters, and lyrics that have never before been heard in song (and hopefully never will be again.) The second set of ten, however, did not live up to the expectation, in my opinion: although some funny new characters were introduced (a stuttering pimp, a spaghetti-eating mobsters) and there is some glimmer of the wackiness of the original (three R. Kellys singing “Oh, shit” in harmony during a recap Chapter 12.5, “you’re crazier than a fish with titties”), the later parts of the saga resort to unusual measures: one late chapter ends with the old “it was all a dream” copout, and the final super-cliffhanger turns the thing into freakin’ Rent: Since the gay priest’s boyfriend has AIDS, and everybody slept with everybody else, rumor has it that everybody’s got “the p-p-package!”
I was also disappointed that Bridget and Big Man, two of the funniest and strangest characters, were only given cameo appearances. I guess once you introduce a midget stripper who shits his pants in fear during a fight, there’s no way you can top it. If R. Kelly ever gets on trial and ends up not being arrested for having child pornography, one wonders if he will go back to the closet, and look into the closet, and take things out of the closet, and construct from the closet, and make more Trapped in the Closet…the Closet…the Closet…
In describing his magnum opus, didn’t R. Kelly claim to coin the term “hip-hopera?”
Yeah, I never liked R. Kelly’s music, so maybe I’m biased, but I thought it was pretty ridiculous when I first heard about it. I’m surprised more dopers aren’t familiar with this abortion of taste.
The reason it’s such a big deal is that R. Kelly has, up to this point, been a Serious Grammy-Winning R&B Singer with an ego to boot; Kelly’s always fancied himself a sort of modern Marvin Gaye. But he became a walking punchline after the whole child sex video scandal and the accompanying “piss on you” Chappelle skit, and he seems to have embraced it with first “Trapped in the Closet” and more recently “The zoo”, with lyrics like
I recall the term being used a few years ago, when MTV produced an modern-day adaptation of the opera Carmen, with Beyonce Knowles and Mos Def. It was billed as Carmen: A Hip-Hopera long before “Trapped in the Closet.”
Well, to be fair . . .
You can hypothesize about his sexual preference on your own time. It’s Marvin Gaye.
Yes. Great episode, too.
Are you serious? “Trapped in the Closet”, as in one song that is not either rap or hip-hop, has proved to you that both these genres have no thematic depth?