R. Kelly was the Countrywide Mortgage of pop music. There, I said it. Everyone kind of knew. Nobody stopped it - and then it blew up and everybody claimed to have seen it coming.

R. Kelly is problematic. Partly because I’m of the age where the songs were around. OK not even just around - his songs were everywhere, at school dances and parties and on in stores - but then we all found out what a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad human he was.

This is not an artist forgiveness post, for the record.

I am all for not forgiving R. Kelly. I am also still plenty disturbed by what he did and how it makes too many of those songs feel when I even think of them. The perspective shift is - gross. So, generally speaking, I resist playing all of them.

When I was talking to Tony Greer and Jared Dillian about the Billboard charts in 2007 though, there he was. Multiple times. It was a reminder. I remember weird details about that era because I wasn't listening to as much music then.

Some things are just wallpaper until the house burns down. Which, burns with the house. No matter how pretty it looked when it got put up.

So stuff like R. Kelly, all via the radio I should say, was just wallpaper in life. Which, in many ways is a lot like that little financial problem that was about to go crazy: subprime.

Subprime, for the non-finance folks, was the increasingly dodgy loans that lenders like Countrywide were making to average people. These include the famous NINJA loans (“no income, no job, apply!”) and all the economic reasons The Big Short was a best selling book and then movie.

Subprime showed what happens when you cheat on the American Dream at every level, systematically, like there's a shortcut to utopia. A global financial crisis ensued. With R. Kelly, he's only emblematic of a far larger crisis — perhaps more horrifying because innocence is very much not a dream, but the toxic reality of his existence sitting behind the hit after hit after hit he put out came to a very similar, and catastrophic, end.

When I see R. Kelly’s name on that Billboard list, I get a lot of the same feelings.

Jim DeRogatis (Chicago music reporting and radio legend, Sound Opinions host, author of many of my favorite music books) started covering the R. Kelly accusations all the way back in 2000. He knew there was a problem there. I read it. I listened to him opine something's not right here. But life went on.

Subprime started around ‘95. It was a way to get certain loans done at first. There were new ways to cut up debt and if you haven’t seen The Big Short, that’s got the best explanations of what was happening. It wasn’t until 2004 when it got real crazy, when the leverage rule changed for a few players. 15ish years for an ok idea to go horribly wrong and ruin a perfectly good thing like homeownership, with the primary benefit being some great Michael Lewis books along the way.

Kelly wasn’t that much different. The allegations started around 2000. DeRogatis is the Michael Lewis of that story. He fought that fight and kept trying to warn us all until 2019 when the allegations finally stuck. It was way too long for it to have continued. It was also a complete failure of a system to avoid a predictably awful outcome.

I wish I could revisit that catalogue and not feel gross about it. But the Countrywide of modern music had to go and subprime the whole thing to hell.

Jim DeRogatis was right the whole time. Read Soulless. Support investigative journalism. And if you need the songs, at least go somewhere the royalties don't reach him.