The-Dream - Kelly’s 12 Play
Final track from “Love vs. Money” (2009)
We’ve all been there, maybe; the moment when you’re “getting down” with a paramour and decide that this string of songs, and these string of songs only, can score the next 15-180 minutes. And it’s only fitting that after an entire record in which Terius Nash sings about fucking whilst sounding just a teensy bit like R. Kelly that he’d close out Love vs. Money with a song that’s literally about fucking to R. Kelly’s debut album, 12 Play. He’s fumbling through his CD collection, trying to remember when’s the last time he saw it. Behind Usher’s Confessions? Where’s the white cover, the red letters? Where the fuck is the Bose? But he finds, and then it’s off to the races: “Clean the CD, check for scratches / Get up on my mattress / Now we doing it to Kelly’s 12 Play.”
Pause for comedic effect.
Nash and Kells are spiritual and sonic cousins, completely committed to the goofiness of sex. There’s no falsetto too unwarranted, no thought too base to tell a lover not out of sexual hubris but deep-rooted honesty. I mean: Nash and his girl are propped up against a dresser, skipping the track back to “Summer Bunnies” over and over when she looks up and says (or breathes, moans, whatever) “Thank you Dream” to which Nash says “No, thank you Kells.” That’s commitment to an ideal. It circles back to the post-climax moment, when Nash’s girl pops out the CD to put another one in, then gets back under the covers. “Now,” Nash coos, “We doin’ it to Dream’s Love Hate.” Oh Terius, forever the biggest bossest hog.
(Jeremy wrote the first-ever OWOB entry, about The Replacements)
Yeah, being ridiculous about sex is the sort of typical R&B trope that everyone does, but I think Dream and Kelly are in a class of their own for reasons too enhh to go into in a fun, flippant post. The pleading tone on “She like ‘Thank you, Dream’ / And I’m like, ‘No, thank you Kells’” is just seriously the best.
