In his twenty-year exploration of the limits of the R. & B. sex ballad, R. Kelly has often toed the line between satiric and satyric. In his song “Sex Planet,” he made the obvious joke about Uranus; in his song “Sex in the Kitchen,” he made the obvious joke about salad-tossing; in his song “Pregnant,” male backup singers (ominously? chivalrously?) offered to “knock you up.” He has referred to himself as a “sexosaurus” and a “lesbian R. & B. thug.” He has attempted onomatopoetic renderings of cunnilingus and of flesh skidding down a stripper pole. He has yodeled, twice, in the songs “Echo” and “Feelin’ on Yo Booty.” (To perform the latter song in concert, he donned a top hat and cape for an extended operatic remix.) And then there is his unfinished magnum opus “Trapped in the Closet,” a series of twenty-two songs (and counting) featuring a gay pastor, a stuttering pimp, and a woman named Bridget whose lover is a midget.

All of which inspires the inevitable question: he’s kidding, right?

In one sense, the answer is a straightforward “yes.” No one rhymes “Bridget” with “midget” by accident. R. Kelly knows he’s funny, no less than Gene Simmons knew he was wearing makeup. Some of his songs are sincerely sexy; others would cause any amorous embrace to dissolve into giggles. Yet Kelly’s lyrics sometimes overshoot farce to reveal a hint of menace. In the 2009 song “Echo,” after describing what sounds like a punishing regimen of carnal contortions, he sings, “When you need a break, I’ll let you up, I’ll let you breathe / Wash your face, get something to eat / Then come back to the bedroom.”

“Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me,” Kelly’s breezy, competently ghostwritten memoir, raises as many questions as it answers. Even the author’s bio (“R. Kelly, the king of R&B, makes music of epic proportions”) can be interpreted as a self-aware joke or a cocksure statement of purpose. A boxing fan, Kelly knows that what a fighter does outside the ring—trash talking, maintaining a stylish fur collection, appearing only tenuously sane—can destabilize the competition. As sublimely campy trash talk, “Soulacoaster” succeeds, if only by reminding the reader of the depth of Kelly’s résumé. Various scenes find him writing hooks for Jay-Z and Michael Jackson, palling around with Muhammad Ali, visiting Celine Dion in Canada, privately serenading Biggie Smalls and Nelson Mandela.

But for a work of auto-hagiography, the book contains a number of revealing details. Though the phrase “sex addiction” does not appear in “Soulacoaster,” Kelly is surprisingly candid about his Augustinian struggles of the flesh. He admits that his infidelities helped destroy his marriage. He invokes (and denies) the charges that he filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. And in a childhood memory that should inspire Freudian analysts everywhere to book flights to Chicago, he recalls drinking from his mother’s lipstick-stained coffee cup: “Because I loved my mother so much, I always turned the cup to where she had left that red mark.” (If I hadn’t known all this about him, I might have felt less conflicted when I heard him sing “I like her / I like her too / And her friend too / And her cousin too / And her sister / and her mother / and her—and her—and her big grandma.”)

Robert Kelly grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He never knew his father, and he was a victim of repeated sexual abuse by family friends. Severely dyslexic, he was often disoriented in class. (To this day, he has trouble reading.) In happier moments, though, he and his mother listened to records: Al Green, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, and Sam Cooke, all of whom could deliver a song about seduction as if it were a gospel hymn. When Kelly wanted to hear a vocal run more clearly, he would slow the record by weighing it down with a nickel.

In the ninth grade, he recalls, “my shyness had me acting strange.” A music teacher persuaded him to perform Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky” in a school talent show. To overcome his stage fright, he wore sunglasses and pretended to be blind. “I started to wear the sunglasses all the time at school, hiding behind them…. I’d walk down the hallways, practically hugging the wall, dragging my head against it like I was crazy.” He cut class and spent his days in an empty music room, fooling around on the piano. Eventually, he dropped out of high school and began busking underneath the El train. He sang songs by Jeffrey Osborne and Luther Vandross; some days, he says, he earned hundreds of dollars. More importantly, “having heard me sing a little, the girls were showing me serious love.”

In 1990, his group won the TV talent contest “Big Break” (sometimes called the black “Star Search”), which led to a deal with Jive Records. The trendy sound in R. & B. was new jack swing, so R. Kelly wrote a new-jack-swing album: tinny drum machines, honking synthesizers, basso profundo raps about fly guys and their tenderonis. In place of his smooth tremolo, he used the bright, brassy vocal timbre that was in fashion, as if he were singing through his soft palate. Two singles from the album reached No. 1 on the R. & B. charts. In the music video for “Honey Love,” Kelly affixed a flashlight to his head as if it were a miner’s helmet. For the “Slow Dance” video, he selected a strange garment that looked like a hybrid of overalls and a corset. In both videos, he wore dark sunglasses. Like Little Richard, James Brown and Prince before him, Kelly was staking out a compromise between musicianship, exhibitionism, and pure weirdness.

He went on a national tour, opening for the journeyman R. & B. singer Gerald Levert. The audience reception was kind, but not electric. “I needed a gimmick to take my show to the next level,” Kelly writes. The gimmick he settled on was a time-tested one, and he would exploit it often in the subsequent two decades. It was a lewd joke. “I would start talking to the audience,” Kelly recounts. “‘Can I tell you about a dream I had last night? In this dream, it was more than foreplay—it was 12 play.’”