To the extent that “I Admit” details Kelly’s history of wrongdoing, it also obfuscates specific crimes. He stops short of admitting to having been the person in the tape that landed him in court over child-pornography charges, noting that his “lawyer said “don’t say noth.’” (Kelly was acquitted of the charges after a heated 2008 trial in which his defense compared one witness to Satan.) But perhaps one of the more jarring strains of the track is the way Kelly simultaneously frames pedophilia as a simple matter of opinion—and takes aim at #MuteRKelly, the campaign to organize boycotts of the singer’s music and performances:

I admit I fuck with all the ladies

That’s both older and young ladies

But tell me how they call that pedophile

Because of that, shit that’s crazy

You may have your opinions

Entitled to your opinions

But really am I supposed to go to jail

Or lose my career because your opinion?

Yeah, go ’head and stone me

Point your finger at me

Turn the world against me

But only God can mute me

Again, Kelly does not address the women—the real humans with complex lives—whom he has affected, except to frame their objections as trivial matters of disagreement. But the (primarily black) women who have campaigned against Kelly’s prominence in the music industry have not done so because they are enemies seeking to destroy him or complicate his winding narrative. The stakes here are neither literary nor imaginary. R. Kelly, for all his admissions on this new song, fails to acknowledge the human impact of his actions. He rifles through his own traumas roughly, noting that they still cause him deep pain and drive him to drink, but he never extends that same understanding to the girls and women he has reportedly targeted. There is certainly a worthwhile conversation to be had about a number of the issues that shaped a young Kelly—incest, child sexual abuse, ableism—but “I Admit” is not the introspective PSA that the singer frames it as. Rather, it is a potent, dangerous tool of sly, public manipulation. By listing his own traumas and struggles ad nauseam, Kelly attempts not to make amends with any of his alleged victims, but to distract from their stories.

Subsuming the pain of injured parties is, of course, just one particularly pernicious tool of the serial predator. The predator who gains acclaim for his art can wrest sympathy on a much bigger stage. “I Admit” is similar in form to Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” series, a strange and gripping stream-of-consciousness operatic experiment. The earworm sticks, and so Kelly haunts. The specter of harmful actions is softened by the harmonies of the lullaby. “I Admit” is not a prepackaged, publicist-approved message shared via the Notes app. It is a return to R. Kelly’s most treasured form. In releasing a song rather than a public statement, Kelly has kept the narrative of his misconduct confined within the format in which he is most adept. Even if “I Admit” never garners Kelly any streaming revenue, the renewed support he’s gotten from a legion of fans—who’ve shared their appreciation of Kelly’s openness on platforms from Facebook to SoundCloud to Instagram—is itself a kind of currency. Kelly’s fans continue to rally around him, to stream his songs into oblivion even as Spotify removes him from (and then restores him to) its promoted playlists. Music executives continue to ignore his alleged abuses.