R. Kelly's double dose of dirty

Towards the end of "Freaky in the Club," one of the more effectively funky paeans to the pleasures of booty on R. Kelly's

Double Up

(Jive **1/2), the most shameless man in showbiz looks at the clock on the wall and makes note to self: "Time to have sex!"

Which raises the question: Isn't it always?

Just about. Oh, sure, there are times when even the world's most unrepentantly priapic R&B love man must be busy doing something other than gettin' busy.

Such as the (brief) segments in the song "Double Up," a collaboration with Snoop Dogg, when the services of two women are required not to perform any explicit sex act, but so that "one will suck my toes while one braids my hair."

That's not to mention "Real Talk," a profanity-filled spoken-sung telephone diatribe that finds the 40-year-old R. - real name Robert Lindsay Kelly - excoriating a girlfriend for having the temerity to question his fidelity.

And there's also Double Up's most audacious moment, "Rise Up," an "I Believe I Can Fly"-style inspirational number in which Kelly appoints himself the nation's musical mourner-in-chief. To appreciate this, remember that Kelly still has not gone on trial for the 14 child pornography counts he faces in Cook County, Ill., in connection with a 2002 videotape that allegedly shows him having sex with (and urinating on) a 14-year-old girl.

The song is a hand-holding pop-gospel number dedicated to the victims of the Virginia Tech mass murder. It's more than a little creepy, coming from a man facing child porn charges who nevertheless recently likened himself, in an interview with XXL's Hip Hop Soul magazine, to four great Ms of black culture: Muhammad Ali, Marvin Gaye, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Bob Marley. What, not Malcolm X? Don't sell yourself short, R.!

But then, Kelly has never come up small in the chutzpah department. Five years ago, observers as prominent as rap producer Dr. Dre predicted that Kelly's legal woes would do in his career. Just the opposite has occurred: Chocolate Factory, his 2003 album, topped the charts, and his baroquely perverse Trapped in the Closet music video series has been a serialized sensation. (Good news for those awaiting the next series of lurid plot twists: Chapters 13-22 come out on DVD on July 24.)

These days, everybody wants to follow the footsteps of the Pied Piper of R&B. Kelly has been as hot as ever on the hip-hop charts, where he's provided creamy hooks on hits by Snoop and Young Jeezy.

That success convinced him to temporarily ditch a ballads-only album to be called Making Babies. Instead, he chose to focus on Double Up, a 77-minute single CD loaded up with rap cameos from the likes of Snoop, T.I., Chamillionaire, Nelly and Ludacris. (The latter appears, along with Kid Rock, on the ludicrous "Rock Star.")

The album provides plenty of examples of the real reason that Kelly's career continues to thrive. No matter how vile the allegations against him, he keeps serving up the hot jams.

True, some are hotter than others: "Same Girl," a duet with Usher in which the players get played, bogs down with too much plot exposition, and "The Champ" opens the album with an obnoxious boast.

But for the most part, the hooks are abundant and the melodies silky and sweet. And the twisted pleasure to be found in an R. Kelly record is seeing how absurdly far his sexual obsessions will take him.

On Double Up's "I'm a Flirt," he admits that he's a cad, though, with apologies to Don Imus, a better word choice might have been "ho." And he slings metaphors animalistic and intergalactic on "The Zoo" and the hilariously lewd "Sex Planet."

In the first, he sings: "It's like Jurassic Park, and I'm your Sexosaurus." And the giggle-inducing latter goes to absurd lengths to demonstrate that Kelly is the most freaky sexaholic in the galaxy, one who brags that his "rocket is so full of fuel" and can't resist turning the seventh planet into a locker-room joke.

That's our R. for you: His talent is out of this world, but his mind is in the gutter.