A New York jury has found R&B superstar R. Kelly guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking. He faces a sentence of ten years to life in prison. For years, Kelly was a powerhouse in the music industry, creating the hit song “I Believe I Can Fly,” which dominated the airways in the 1990s. Sadly, Kelly’s musical success hid his disturbing personal life. Rumors and allegations about Kelly’s criminal behavior have been circulating since the 1990s. While this blog will not address the details of his crimes, a broad application of sociology to Kelly’s life offers us an opportunity to review concepts associated with social interaction, interpersonal relationships between two or more persons.
Erving Goffman’s work on dramaturgy is a fitting place to start our analysis. Specifically, dramaturgy is the theory that we are all actors on the stage of life, and as such, we divide our world based on what we let others see and don’t see of us. The three parts of dramaturgy include front stage, back stage, and impression management. The front stage is a person’s public life that they reveal to the world. On the other hand, the back stage is a person’s private world that they choose not to reveal. In the case of R. Kelly, his victims’ testimonies about the extreme difference between his front and back stage personas bring up images of the characters in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The coercion and threats used by Kelly to manipulate his victims were all part of his approach to impression management, an effort to control the impression others have of us.
Kelly’s achieved status, earned social status based upon merit, in the music industry was the Teflon that kept accusations about him at bay for years. At his peak, he had an estimated net worth of nearly $100 million dollars and was known for conspicuous consumption, the public display of lavish and wasteful spending to enhance one’s social status. Historically, being a world-renowned singer was part of Kelly’s master status, the social position central to your identity. Today his master status is that of inmate.
The social context or the environment of the interaction associated with prison life is very different from Kelly’s Atlanta mansion, where he reportedly had a sex cult and held women against their will. This dramatic change is bound to affect Kelly’s social construction of reality; an individual’s perception of one’s social world is determined or influenced by social interaction. We can only hope that Kelly’s conviction and prison sentence will also alter the reality of his victims’ lives but for the better.
