A few weeks ago Rick Ross spent $1 million at a strip club.
He definitely made it rain.
Lately the term has been used a bit loosely, but originally it was used to describe the activity at strip clubs where, to show their clout, patrons shower the naked women with dollar bills as though the singles were raindrops. It's a metaphor.
The song that first shed light on this practice was Fat Joe's "Make it Rain" (2006). The track takes one metaphor — dollar bills as rain — and runs with it, stretching it into a four-minute song featuring Lil Wayne. It's good work, but it can't match the use of metaphors in your favorite song and mine, R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" (2002).
Or that song's precognition.
R. Kelly is famous for a number of things: having a great voice, being involved in a really creepy sex scandal, the "Trapped in the Closet" hip-hop era saga (2005-7) and two songs — "I Believe I Can Fly" from the soundtrack to "Space Jam" (1996) and "Ignition (Remix)."
What he isn't so well-known for is being a modern day Nostradamus.
"Ignition (Remix)" isn't just guaranteed to get any party super bumping; it also predicted, in detail, the United States' automotive industry's 2008-10 crises. While most listeners understand R. Kelly's crooning to be a lame metaphor for sexual intercourse, dragged out and tenuously harped on for three minutes (which, in itself, would be better than Fat Joe's song), a closer investigation reveals it to outline what happened to the U.S. auto industry more than half a decade before the crises took place.
In the song R. Kelly sings about carefree partying in a hotel, in a club and in a car. It is extravagant, wild, orgiastic — in short, a party that Bacchus himself would be proud of. There is no thought to the result of the party — the rough morning after that Kelly and company will no doubt have to deal with.
This mirrors the auto industry's lack of foresight. They were making plenty of money producing gas-guzzling super SUVs, ridiculously exorbitant sports cars and horrible sedans, and never thought about sustainability. Then the fuel crisis happened. In the song, these issues are touched on both implicitly and explicitly.
After the party moves from the club to a car — one of the industry's biggest losers, a Lincoln Navigator — it settles into a hotel lobby and then to a hotel room so that the party doesn't end when the lobby is cleared. In the room, Kelly suggests that he will "freak somebody." This is similar to the way that the government took the auto industry to its metaphorical hotel room and (metaphorically) freaked it, bailing out the Big Three and restructuring them to try to save them — to try to salvage their party from totally ending.
And then the chorus kicks in, proclaiming that "It's the freakin' weekend/ I'm about to have me some fun." R. Kelly has nothing at all to worry about, so he decides to totally let go of control. Things are good, so all there is to do is party, and if it doesn't work out, well, at least he had a good time.
Sound familiar?
R. Kelly didn't just predict the crash, though; he also managed to predict the rise of alternative fuels, using a sexy woman as a metaphor for foreign car companies who focus on these fuels: "Momma rolling that body got every guy in here wishin'/ [He was] sippin' on coke and rum."
The successful companies who were still having a "good time," to extend the metaphor, were — and still are — the ones who looked elsewhere, such as to ethanol-based fuel, for which Coca-Cola (a corn-based beverage) and rum (ethanol) is the perfect metaphor.
People are often skeptical of seers, but if Nostradamus had been able to get the club as jumping as R. Kelly does, no one would doubt his prophecies. As it is, however, R. Kelly's dulcet tones might be too smooth, as no one has noticed this completely undeniable prophecy until now.
At this point only time, and serious study, will tell what other horrible events Kelly's sexy R&B has foreseen.
--
Mitchell Geller is a senior majoring in psychology and English. He can be reached at Mitchell.Geller@tufts.edu.
