R. Kelly

R. Kelly does whatever the hell he wants, to such a compulsive extent that you wonder if he has ever even considered what anyone else thinks about him. In 2007, with a child-pornography case swinging against him, he released “Sex Planet,” a song that included the couplet Girl, I promise this will be painless/We’ll take a trip to the planet Uranus. Sure, he’d been accused of urinating on a 15-year-old girl, but that in no way discouraged him from penning, elsewhere on that album, the lyric Just as soon as she go to the bathroom, player, I’ma holler at her. But this complete lack of self-awareness is also why Kells will go down as one of the most complicated, fascinating and adventurous pop stars of all time. For the past 20 years, he has defined and grandly re-imagined R&B as a genre ready to accommodate concept albums (Trapped in the Closet) and stand-alone chart statements such as “I Like the Crotch on You.” Hats off.