Just a few short weeks after walking out on a Huffington Post Live interview for asking prickly questions about lingering allegations of sexual liaisons with minors, today R&B star R. Kelly and GQ released a lengthy, ostensibly no-holds-barred interview during which "R. Kelly agreed to speak about his whole life without restrictions." His interviewer Chris Heath nobly asks all of the hard questions, and Heath's subject is more forthcoming than he has been in recent years, although there is still much he will never cop to. Even amid the lawyerly ju jitsu, it is a wild interview.R. Kelly will not speak about the longstanding claim that he married Aaliyah as a teenager, "out of respect for her mother who's sick and her father who's passed." He admits to being in love with her when pressed but couches it curtly: "Well, there's a lot of ways to be in love with a person. I was in love with my grandfather, you know."Kells' take on the child pornography case that nearly ended his career in the middle aughts seems to be that fans didn't believe it was him in the widely circulated sex tape and that being found not guilty has allowed them and him to move on. "I just think those people didn't believe that nonsense. That's what I think. And they said, ‘The hell with what other people are saying—we love R. Kelly, we believe R. Kelly, he was found innocent, he's moving on with his life, he's not letting that tear him down.’ I believe that's what it was.”
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On the subject of settling out of court with underaged girls he's alleged to have had sex with, women the self-professed "Pied Piper of R&B" capriciously describes as a mix of money-grubbing strangers and women he in fact met when they were of age: "Look, if I break up with a girl, and she don't wanna break up, and I'm R. Kelly, she's gonna be pissed. So pissed that she's gonna go out there, she's gonna say this, she's gonna say that, she's gonna say the other. And if she's really pissed, whoever she said it to is gonna spread the rumor, and if the wrong people get ahold of that rumor, that's gonna come out. If that come out, I gotta get a lawyer, and once I get that lawyer, that lawyer gonna tell me to shut up."Kelly opens up about childhood abuse at the hands of a family member he's since forgiven but stopped speaking to and of breaking the cycle of abuse in his own life but quixotically describes himself as a Bill Cosby figure around the house, quickly adding that he meant to describe "how we saw Bill Cosby when we were coming up." But then he trips into a puzzling, troubling riff about Cosby's rape accusers that suggests he might somewhere feel a kinship with the beleaguered comedian and sitcom star: "When I look on TV and I see the 70-, 80-, 90-year-old ladies talking about what happened when they were 17, 18, or 19, there's something strange about it. That's my opinion. It's just strange." What would it take for himi to believe them? "If God showed me that they were telling the truth, I would say that's wrong. I don't care if it was a zillion years ago. But God would have to do that, because God is the only one can show me that."Other highlights of the exceedingly bizarre interview include Kelly taking Heath up to the top deck of Chicago's Willis Tower, where the first portion of the interview took place, to sing two whole choruses of "I Believe I Can Fly," admittance that he sleeps alone on a pallet of blankets in a locked walk-in closet instead of a bed, and the following tidbit about one of his greatest hits, "Ignition (Remix)": Kells wrote the line "It's the remix to 'Ignition,' hot and fresh out the kitchen" five years before he ever wrote the "original" version of the song, which technically makes the song's "remix" the original version and the "original" a remix of a declared remix of itself. Heath is taken aback. "But how could you have the melody and words for something that was a version of a song you hadn't written yet?" His answer? "You tell me."It's bizarre, it's troubling, it's illuminating, it's evasive, it's necessary reading. Make haste.