I normally don’t cover anything having to do with R. Kelly because I have such mixed feelings about him – his seeming penchant for underage girls, the criminal accusations of child p0rn (he was found not guilty), and his relationship with a teenage Aaliyah are all part of a man who should not be allowed to interact with women. On the other side, he’s charming, somewhat bonkers, talented and he makes his own kind of crazy, interesting music. So… as I said, mixed feelings. Some people can separate his personal problems from his music and public persona. Can you? Can I? I don’t know.

So, let’s do this. Kelly is promoting his new album, Black Panties, and he’s giving some rare in-depth interviews to support the album. I read a few quotes from R. Kelly’s new Guardian interview yesterday and I was like “Oh, that’s bad but maybe it had another context.” So I read the full interview and you know what? The context makes it WORSE. If you have five minutes, you should totally read the full Guardian interview because it is insane. He’s perfectly willing to talk about anything but his publicist – a woman “with a face like thunder” in the words of The Guardian – starts bitching whenever Kelly is asked about anything not related to music. Here are some highlights.

He was sexually abused as a kid: One alarming passage of Soulacoaster deals with what Kelly calls his “secret box” – a part of his brain where he’d store childhood traumas, rather than talk about them with anyone: the death of a childhood friend; the fact older women were performing regular oral sex on him from the age of eight. Does he think this was healthy? “Well look at me now!” he says. “Absolutely.”

Explaining that “healthy”: “I would say, ‘To each his own.’ You could sit here and take a drink of alcohol right now and be OK. Someone else could become an alcoholic. So when it comes to the analysts, I think those guys are blessed with gifts to know certain things. But nobody knows 100% what affects the human body, mind or spirit.”

Songwriting/music: “I’ve pretty much got a leash on it and I know how to walk it – it’s not a stray dog,” he smiles, before switching comparison. “It’s no different to being Spider-Man. He knows when to spray that web. He ain’t gonna spray it at some old lady, walking down the street with her groceries in her hand! He’s going to spray it at the guy who’s trying to take the purse off her. That’s what I’m like – I know what to do and when to do it.” Kelly’s songwriting gift has many guises. He’ll describe it as a “beautiful disease” or “like taekwondo – you have to master it”. Another time he says he has been “abducted” by music or, best of all: “I’m in love with music and I’m pregnant by it. It’s like having twins. Or triplets. Or eight-lets!”

On Chris Brown: When he watched Chris Brown become the centre of his own scandals – which began with his assault on then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009 – Kelly says he could empathise but that he never felt sorry for him. “I only feel sorry for weak people,” he says. “And mostly what I’ve come to find is that the weak people are the ones that are the haters. The ones that’s talking about Chris Brown, or R Kelly, or anybody that’s successful? I feel sorry for them, not Chris Brown, because he’s obviously one strong individual to be able to do what he’s done. He got knocked down a little bit and he climbed up. You know, that sounds like Ali to me. That sounds like Martin Luther King to me. That sounds like a lot of the greats that have walked this earth. It even sounds a little bit like Jesus to me.” He catches my eyes widening and clarifies: “I’m not saying that Chris Brown is Jesus or R Kelly is Jesus. But Jesus is the No 1 inspirer of someone being knocked down and rising again.”

Macklemore’s “Thrift Show” diss: “I see them as weak too. But I don’t get into what people think of me, I’ve graduated from that.”

Whether he would boycott Florida after Trayvon: “No,” he says. “I’m not into boycotting anything because that, for one, is not going to bring Trayvon back, and that’s the main issue here.”

Working with Lady Gaga: “Yes she is [an alien], and I met my match when I met her. She’s not afraid to just do themselves and not try to do anyone else.”

[From The Guardian]

Not to defend R. Kelly’s Chris Brown comments too much, but it does sound like he was TRYING to say that Chris’s path – falling from grace and attempting redemption – is the path of the righteous. But Kelly just says it in a horrible way where it seems like he’s saying Chris Brown is the new Jesus and MLK and Mohammed Ali.

Also, I love ALL of his comparisons for songwriting. Taekwondo, Spider-man, stray dogs, pregnancy. HE IS PREGNANT WITH MUSIC.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.