By Andrew Flanagan and Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR
“Today is the day you’ve been waiting for,” R. Kelly claims in an Instagram post Monday morning in which he directs his followers to listen to a new, 19-minute song titled “I Admit,” in which the singer obliquely or directly addresses allegations levied against him over the past year.
Accusations of sexual misconduct have trailed the 51-year-old singer for nearly 20 years, perhaps most prominently in a child pornography court case in Chicago. The Grammy-winning singer was acquitted in 2008, but his reputation has remained clouded.
In the new song, uploaded to SoundCloud by A&R man Julius Darrington (who did not respond to questions about the new track) and which isn’t available on Spotify, Kelly continues his practice of denying the many allegations against him except, this time, within a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness-style musical mode that recalls his 33-chapter Trapped In the Closet series.
