Jamie and I have been making Songspeak Greatest Hits mixes for years now, and while we’ve tried to make them reasonably listenable, we can never deny a truly awful song’s inclusion if it falls under the category of (what we consider to be) songspeak.

That said, even some of these types of songs are just so damn long for a mix… A lot of Pink Floyd songs, Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie, pretty much anything by Tool, and of course, Trapped In The Closet by R. Kelly.

Trapped In The Closet, R. Kelly’s ridiculous hip-hopera with all the soap opera elements (sex, betrayal, gunplay) was released in installments of one chapter at a time. Its first twelve chapters run over 30 minutes long. I know this because I own the dvd. When he wrote it, in 2005, he always left the storyline open ended. In 2007, he wrote another ten chapters, and apparently we can expect more chapters. By the way, the dvd is great because there’s commentary on it. First of all, the song itself is basically an R. Kelly singing narration of the storyline. The commentary, therefore, is R. Kelly commenting on the narration of the storyline… just in case the story wasn’t clear or whatever.

It’s been parodied a bunch of times, but I think my favorite is South Park’s Trapped In The Closet, the infamous Scientology episode where Tom Cruise thinks Stan is L. Ron Hubbard and gets upset because he doesn’t like his acting. Eventually Tom Cruise and John Travolta are both stuck in the closet and R. Kelly tries to coax them out.

And then of course, there was a great story on VH1’s Best Week Ever once about an old lady who was trapped in the closet.

But here’s the real deal, Chapters 1-5. I’m sure you can find the rest (all 20 chapters so far!) on the interweb yourself.

Tags: 00s music, 00s tv, best week ever, hip-hopera, r. kelly, south park, trapped in the closet