Explaining Multiverse Theory with R. Kelly’s Christmas Album

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Earlier this year, a phenomenon occurred that threatens to challenge everything we think we know about the universe: R. Kelly released a Christmas album. It’s called 12 Nights of Christmas.

Here it is: ITunes: R Kelly, ’12 Nights of Christmas’

Everything about this is real. There’s R. Kelly on the cover, looking like James Harden playing Blacula. Every song is a wholly original holiday composition by Robert Kelly, and they’re all completely, utterly insane.

Sure, R. Kelly turning the Christmas canon into a lightning round of how many holiday-related things he can turn into a metaphor for sex is terrible, but there are grander things at work here. Things that challenge our greatest minds and spit in the faces of our gods.

About 14 billion years ago, our universe ballooned into being in the wake of the Big Bang. But who is to say that our universe was the only one created in that moment?

Multiverse theory is a heady blend of science fiction, wild-eyed conjecture and intricate astrophysics. But the most convincing evidence of another universe parallel to our own is a 42-minute R&B Christmas album that somehow crossed the spacetime continuum and ended up in our plane of existence.

R. Kelly has transcended the fabric of reality. There’s simply no other way to explain how this album came to be. So, with that in mind, let’s use this as a teachable moment and explore how such a thing could have happened.

Quantum Mechanics and “Daughter” Universes

One of the more compelling arguments concerning the multiverse is the idea that for every choice ever made, there is a separate universe where the opposite happened. This is perhaps best exemplified by Evil Goateed Spock.

Photo courtesy of memoryalpha.com

Going by this theory, there must have been two major changes made in this alternate universe that would lead to the release of 12 Nights of Christmas:

1. Christmas albums never went out of style
Christmas albums are among the least cool things a musician could do, short of assaulting a fan or being Ted Nugent. In the parallel universe that 12 Nights of Christmas came from, Christmas albums must not carry the same stigma as they do in ours, leading to 12 Nights of Christmas being beloved by fans everywhere and lauded by the likes of Pitchfork, The Guardian, and President Bernie Sanders.

2. R. Kelly never filmed himself urinating on an underaged girl
This one is pretty obvious. No horrible, inexcusable crime = no sensational public trial = no disgraced, irredeemable scumbag R. Kelly = 12 Nights of Christmas.

Eternal Inflation

This is another common theory that attempts to explain how alternate universes could exist. According to cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, while one piece of spacetime – our universe, for example – stops inflating, others begin to expand. This forms a sort of network of separate “bubble” universes all coexisting alongside one another in the fabric of space.

Consider, for a moment, R. Kelly’s 1998 jam, “Get Up On A Room.” When R. Kelly invites his girl to join him for the night with the enticing promise of “bubble bath, you and me chillin’ in a tub babe,” try to think of each bubble in his tub as a separate universe in the grand foam of spacetime.

Mathematical Democracy Principle

The flashy young newcomer on the quantum mechanics scene, this theory revolves around the idea of a Level 4 parallel universe; one whose core laws of science and nature are drastically different from our own. Imagine a universe that operated on completely different physics, mathematics or logic. That is the world in which Robert Sylvester Kelly can record 12 Nights of Christmas.

In the end, these are all just theories. We are no closer to explaining how multiverses work than we are to explaining how 12 Nights of Christmas came to be. In this season of peace on Earth and good will towards men, the only thing we can do is sit by the fire with our loved ones and listen to R. Kelly’s fateful words – “This Christmas, my gift to you will be… me.”