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Kelly was musical from as far back as he can remember, and he began his career on the streets, singing for money in his clear, gorgeous tenor.

At 11, he was shot by thieves trying to steal his bike. When he was 8, he watched helplessly as his first love, Lulu, drowned after bullies pushed her into a creek. Around the same time, boarders in his family’s house repeatedly made him take photos of them having sex. In his memoir, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, he wrote about being sexually abused as a child by a woman from the neighborhood. He grew up poor and functionally ­illiterate - owing to dyslexia - on Chicago’s South Side, raised mostly by his mother. Probably the most talented and sexually explicit, too. His first name is Robert, he’s 48 years old, and he’s inarguably the biggest male R&B singer since Marvin Gaye. Here are some key things to know about R. “So let me ask you something first: What do you call a black man who flies an airplane?” “You gonna be asking me all these things,” he says. As it rises, Kelly, tall and wearing patterned jeans, sunglasses, and a baggy gray hoodie that mostly hides his slight middle-aged paunch, points his cigar at me. We’re here to listen to tracks from next month’s The Buffet , the 13th album of Kelly’s massively successful, extremely controversial career, and the first one since allegations of his past sexual misconduct resurfaced online, causing many to argue that Kelly is both a predator overdue for punishment and a walking moral dilemma. “New York got a lotta pretty girls,” he says.

Kelly grimaces, as if seeing an attractive woman in a passing car and not being able to do anything about it hurts. The SUV pulls even with the woman’s car, and Kelly, on his way to a Chelsea recording studio, goes quiet, staring at the woman as she looks straight ahead.

This man’s job, as best I can tell, is to light his boss’s cigar and carry around a small duffel bag. “Uhm-hmm,” says a bearded assistant in a baseball cap from the backseat. “Damn,” says Kelly, as the smoke from his cigar curls along his giant gold watch and up past his diamond earring. On this sparkling afternoon in early fall, he’s just noticed a young woman driving a red sedan one lane over. “You see that?” asks the R&B star, sitting in the middle row of a black SUV cruising down Manhattan’s West Side. Kelly whirls around, straining to look out his car’s rear window.