hough Sam Cooke always gets votes in the discussion, no one rocked the sacred/profane conundrum like Marvin Gaye. His heir in that regard was clearly Prince, but Prince’s work doesn’t really feel as downright dirty as Gaye songs such as “Sanctified Pussy.” Yes, of course there’s “Darling Nikki” and “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and, natch, “Scarlet Pussy” in the purple catalog—but it generally feels like there’s a wink and a grin (if not an out-and-out smirk) with the delivery. A line like “I sincerely wanna fuck the taste outta your mouth” doesn’t sound sexy, nor does it sound dirty; it sounds funny. (Prince is quite the comedian, actually.) That’s not to say that Prince isn’t (or at least wasn’t, before he became a Jehovah’s Witness) a fan of sex, but that he still respects the women in his life, and that he feels sex should be glorified, celebrated, and lest we forget, fun. Conversely, Marvin Gaye never sounded like the ideal lover, not if you were really paying attention; for all the romantic sentiment there may have been in the likes of “Let’s Get It On,” there was “You Sure Love to Ball”—and he meant it. Gaye was nasty.

There’s a suitable inheritor to that legacy now, in that he embodies both the (seemingly, at least) God-loving and “bitches ain’t shit” sides of his personality, and that’s R. Kelly. In fact, I’d argue he’s more adept at it than Gaye was, including both a duet with Kirk Franklin and the infamous “You Remind Me of Something” on his R. Kelly album, not to mention vaulting from the all-God-all-the-time U Saved Me half of his last album to tracks like “Sex Weed” and “(Sex) Love Is What We Makin’” on the new TP.3 Reloaded.

Whatever R. wants to do on his own time (barring teenaged porn, that is) is fine. As a friend in her 50s recently pointed out to me, “In the ‘70s, Marvin was the man. We didn’t know anything about him, and that was fine. Now we’re learning that he was kind of a freak back then, but at the time he was just our Marvin.” But R.’s not happy just to have a freaky life—he’s gotta make sure we know about it. Thanks to TP.3 Reloaded, we now know that R. likes to have sex all night (“Hit It ‘Til the Morning”), have sex on the first date (“Girls Go Crazy”), have sex for days on end (“(Sex) Love Is What We Makin’”), have sex with other men’s girlfriends (“Girls Go Crazy,” again), perform cunnilingus (myriad tracks on the album), and have sex (and sing) with women who sound far too much like his late ex-wife Aaliyah (that would be Nivea, who’s got Aaliyah’s early-career coo [cf. “At Your Best (You Are Love)”] down and sings of her “juices flow[ing],” et cetera, in the fairly appalling “Touchin’”).

The biggest shame of this is that it detracts so badly from R.’s talents—and he’s still loaded with ‘em. “Happy Summertime,” featuring Snoop Dogg, is a fine example. Riding a ‘70s groove akin to Snoop’s own “Ain’t No Fun,” this is another of in a long line of R.’s classic summer jams, all about kickin’ back and just enjoying and loving the good life. R.’s voice is creamy-cool and Snoop does his really-should-be-trademarked laconic thing, and it adds up to a superb track, one that screams to be a single. It’s certainly superior to the album’s current single, “Playa’s [sic] Only,” which features the Game talking about “throw[ing] that pussy like Elway” (what?!) and is nearly a sequel to 2002’s equally pathetic “Fiesta” (one of the lowlights of featured artist Jay-Z’s career), with R. talk-rapping his way through an autopilot club banger. He’s coasting, and whether he’ll admit it or not, he knows it.

“Remote Control,” while as sex-obsessed as most of the album, at least partially succeeds thanks to something new: R. takes a page from the Prince playbook and sings nearly the entire song in a fragile falsetto, which kinda gets the lyrics over. “Put My T-Shirt On” is another sex song but is set atop a track so excruciatingly slow-jam-sexy it’s nearly irresistible, “after we just got through hittin’ it” lyrics be damned.

Perhaps most shocking are the tracks which make it sound as if R.’s behind the musical curve, such as the Elephant Man-featuring “Reggae Bump Bump,” a feeble attempt at dancehall-R&B fusion which fails on both levels. Wisin and Yandell, reggaeton’s hot new jacks, appear on “Burn It Up”—but the whole notion of R. Kelly making a reggaeton record is absurd and clearly commercially pandering; “Maybe I’ll get more airplay / Sales if I do this!” is clearly beneath a man of R.’s talents.

And then there’s the pink elephant of TP.3 Reloaded, the now-infamous “Trapped In the Closet” saga. This is simply out-and-out bizarre, a five-part serial encompassing multiple cheating spouses, gay ministers, female orgasms, R. waving his Beretta around like it’s a water pistol, and a myriad of truly awful lyrics so ridiculous I won’t even go into them. The video—for all 5 chapters (available on a bonus DVD included in the album’s first pressing), ups the absurdity ante, as what Rolling Stone waggishly (and cleverly) called “The R. Kelly Players” act out the song’s lyrics in the most literal, cable-access-drama-troupe fashion possible. Musically, as well, “Closet” is nothing special, and in fact rather limp by R.’s standards; I understand he wanted the emphasis to be on his words, but c’mon. On the same hand, however, I can totally envision Marvin Gaye, were he a contemporary of R. Kelly’s, doing something similar.

I totally bought both the “everybody step!” and the “thank you God” halves of R. Kelly’s last album, Happy People/U Saved Me; one thing I tend not to doubt with him is his sincerity. I believe that he believes in everything he says on TP.3 Reloaded as well. He loves God, and he loves sex, and he loves to be a freak about it, the same way that his predecessor Marvin Gaye sang “God is love” and recorded the song “Sanctified Pussy” (later released as “Sanctified Lady”). Both Marvin and R. hit amazing peaks, both commercially and artistically—but both hit some lows, too, as TP.3 Reloaded definitely shows: uneven by and large, and below what we all know R.’s capable of, this one’s mostly shoots blanks.