Alicia called into On Air with Ryan Seacrest this morning to clarify the statements she made in the new issue of Blender magazine. She says she feels that she was misinterpreted. She basically said...
- That she's a very positive person.
- Her only aim is to uplift people and spread love.
- She's not a conspiracy theorist.
- The government didn't create gangsta rap, just the term. And, she thinks they could have done more at the time to do something about the problems the rappers were talking about.
- She doesnt know who killed Biggie and 2pac, but she thinks the media sensationalized their deaths and their rivalry.
Alicia Keys: Unlocked
In order to find herself, she had to leave the music industry, take a trip down the Nile and learn how to tear down the walls she’d spent most of her life building.
Jonah Weiner
Blender March 19 2008
It's early Friday evening in Copenhagen and Alicia Keys is about to emit some deeply bizarre sounds. These trills and jabbers will loosen her vocal cords, exercise her diaphragm and guard against any accidentally bizarre sounds when she takes the stage at the Falconer Salen, an ultramodern concert hall carved into a boxy luxury hotel. Her valet, a skinny guy named Francis, enters her dressing room, adjusts the height of an electric Yamaha keyboard, then disappears to get his boss some potato-spinach soup. The decor suggests a mail-order catalogue called Diva Comfort Depot: Floral-printed scarves enshroud floor lamps; scented candles glow atop ottomans draped with light-purple fabric; dainty white ramekins cradle dried fruits; and in the corner, a humidifier puffs out little steam clouds of calm. The tableau is a portable monument to mood. On tour, every night, this is where Keys goes “to get my head right.”
Which is why she’s kicking Blender out. “You,” she says bluntly, “need to leave now.”
She’s not unkind about it; if we’re in the room, she explains, she “won’t be able to vibe” with her vocal coach, and to be fair, if we were about to perform some warm-ups that split the difference between do-re-mi and the call of a marmoset, we’d probably want to cut down on witnesses, too. Still, the evacuation order is abrupt. A few minutes ago, Keys was bounding onto the Falconer stage, tugging us along, giddily describing her show: the video screens, the dance routines, the spinning grand piano. “Isn’t that cool?” she asked, poking at a vintage Moog synthesizer stage right. Earlier, when she’d known us only a half-hour, she pulled some photo-shoot-freebie Gucci sunglasses from her handbag and offered them up: “I could see you in these. Are they too girlie for you?” They were, but her warmth was surprising. Keys is a bona fide superstar in a business running low on the species—her latest album, As I Am, has sold well over 3 million copies in just over three months. At 27, she’s won 11 Grammys. She’s buddies with Bono and Prince. But there she was, gushing about spinning pianos and offering designer swag to a stranger with a notebook. Now, though, as suddenly as we were invited in, we’ve been expelled from the sanctum. Back to making chitchat with the security dude in the hallway, Keys’s ululations muffled by a locked beige door.
She’s the first to admit it: Alicia Keys has some serious boundary issues. She began writing music at 14, and at 20, when her debut, Songs in A Minor, came out, she was instantly anointed a Legend in the Making. A classically trained pianist and ’60s-soul throwback with a hip-hop pulse, Keys inherited the throne Lauryn Hill abdicated when she became the R&B Howard Hughes. But Keys has done it while hiding behind an impenetrably pleasant facade, revealing nothing. “I’m the best wall builder that ever lived,” she declares. She’s smiling, but she isn’t proud: It’s this trait that recently pushed her to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
She built her first wall as an 11-year-old, to deal with the pimps and strip-club shills who’d catcall at her in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, as she shuttled between music lessons, ballet classes, school and the apartment she shared with her single mom. Keys took to camouflaging herself in cornrows, baggy jeans and Timberlands. “One hundred times a day, it was ‘come dance for me,’ ‘come work with me,’” Keys recalls.“ At 11! So my mentality was Protect yourself. And that took me right into the music game.” She kept the wall up (and the cornrows on) when, signed to a contract with Columbia Records at 16, she had to fend off the advances of music producers more interested in sex than music. “I was meeting all these people who just wanted to use me,” she says. “Or be with me.”
“I always felt I had to be this machine,” she continues. “Like I couldn’t show any weakness.” Those feelings were only confirmed when rumors started circulating, almost the day Songs in A Minor dropped, that Keys was a closeted lesbian. “It doesn’t bother me, because I’m straight,” she says. “Every great, strong woman has been called gay.”
Problem was, a little more than a year ago, she discovered that she couldn’t take the wall down anymore. Not for her manager, not for her mom, not for her closest friends. “It was like talking to a robot sometimes,” says Erika Rose, a childhood buddy who spent several years working as Keys’s day-to-day manager (and self-described “bulldog”). “She was always, ‘I’m fine! I’m great!’ I’d put my hands around her neck, like, ‘Tell me you’re not fine!’”
Keys was hustling across the country from task to task—*touring, shooting roles in two movies, starting work on a new album—when she realized the robot had taken over. Part of her wanted to scream, part of her wanted to drop off the planet, but instead she kept flashing the same dead smile of acquiescence. “These people were coming at me, asking these things, and they didn’t really care about me, but I had to give them everything. What did I have left for myself?” she says. “I felt I had to turn on this thing to make it through.”
Soon, it even warped her music. The songs she wrote, her manager Jeff Robinson says, “came out dark, weird, just not her.” As Keys puts it: “I was hanging off the edge of a cliff. Something had to give, or I was gonna lose my mind.” That’s when she pulled the battery out of her BlackBerry and flew 6,500 miles across the globe, by herself. All to get her head right. And, while she was at it, sing her lungs out at the top of a pyramid.
We first meet Keys at noon, in a hotel room, the day of the concert. Yesterday she played Frankfurt; tomorrow, Stockholm. She’s in Europe promoting* As I Am, her third album, and also her rawest: On the stomping power ballad “No One” and the Prince-indebted lullaby “Like You’ll Never See Me Again,” her voice is *striated, aching—there’s a thrillingly bare quality that hasn’t been there before. “It’s the best album of my career,” she says. “So far.”
Keys sits beside a wood-framed window cut into a quaintly sloped ceiling. The roofs of Copenhagen stretch out over her shoulders: little brick chimneys; clay tiles; squat, toylike houses. Her look is hip-hop-Hollywood. From the neck up, she’s a brown-haired, caramel-skinned Veronica Lake: features elegantly sculpted, hair parted on the right and falling down her neckline in gentle waves. A lone fleck of glitter sparkles on her nose. From the shoulders down, she’s an upscale round-the-way girl: crisp Adidas track jacket, designer jeans tucked into suede boots. She sits with one hand pocketed, one holding a cup of tea, each boot planted toughly on the floor. “You’re lucky,” she says, looking us over. “I can tell who someone is just walking into a room. You seem OK.” Her voice is a honeyed purr spiked with an oh-hellll-no edge.
She works a similar combination in her music. One of her favorite roles is the soul meter maid, smacking down tickets: telling us how a real man should act, explaining what a real woman needs. On her latest single, the jubilant “Teenage Love Affair,” she wrings an unlikely romantic thrill from sexual restraint, sending a boyfriend packing before he can round third base.
Keys has become one of pop’s most reliable Grammy magnets: her vibe sufficiently “genuine” and just “urban” enough for the Academy’s voters to feel they’ve acknowledged hip-hop without dirtying their hands on an actual rapper. Unlike other retro-soulsters, she’s unafraid to write a fat, grandstanding chorus. “When Alicia puts out a song,” says Tom Corson, a marketing executive at her label, J Records, “it gets play on urban formats, on Top 40, on adult contemporary. That’s how she still sells tonnage when so many people are struggling.” Her appeal is stunningly wide. What other artist can say they’ve been name-checked in songs by quiet-storm smoothie Luther Vandross, coke-rappers Clipse and His Boomer Excellency Himself, Bob Dylan?
On As I Am, during the fem-powerment jam “Superwoman,” Keys belts out the caucus-ready refrain, “Yes I can,” and, indeed, there’s something Obama-esque about her. She’s of biracial parentage, raised by her mom, Terri Augello (Italian-American, actress), after her dad, Craig Cook (African-American, university chef), left the scene. She has tapped her mixed heritage to bridge multiple constituencies: She can duet comfortably with Ludacris, John Mayer or a holographic Frank Sinatra (as she did at this year’s Grammys). “I’ve always been good at maneuvering between worlds,” Keys says. Like Obama, she won a crucial Oprah endorsement early on when Winfrey built a whole episode around Songs in A Minor. And she preaches a uniting, post-racial vision of humanity. (Remember those “I Am African” ads with Gwyneth Paltrow and David Bowie wearing face paint? They were for the AIDS charity to which Keys is an ambassador.) In her music, themes of optimism, fidelity and self-actualization are so broadly, rousingly articulated that nearly anyone can feel their own stories are being belted back at them.
Keys’s first mature musical love, after she’d taken down her New Kids on the Block posters, was Marvin Gaye. “He talked about everyday things: life, the street, the struggle—I was like, Wow, you can just write about what’s happening,” she says. Nevertheless, Keys scrubs her lyrics of contemporary references and slang so they’ll sound more like the ’60s and ’70s sounds she reveres. Her insistence on authenticity verges on the reactionary (“there was so much more good music 40, 50 years ago”), but from the way she sidesteps the TMZ vortex and still manages to sell “tonnage,” there’s something refreshingly uncynical about her, too.
There’s a knock on the hotel-room door, and a minder enters with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich: lunch. We’ve been talking about Keys’s early jones for the Notorious B.I.G. “My favorite Biggie song is ‘Me & My Bitch,’” she says, licking a stray globule of jam off her finger. “That title doesn’t make you think he’s speaking about the love of his life, but he is. She throws his **** out the window, she flushes his drugs down the toilet—she’s crazy! But if you grew up like that, then you understood, that was love in that world.”
We ask what other gangsta rappers she liked. And that’s when Keys drives a steamroller through the wall.
“‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other,” she says, putting down the sandwich. “‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”
Come again? A ploy by whom?
She looks at us like it’s the dumbest question in the world. “The government.”
Add another line to her résumé. Alicia Keys: piano stroker, budding actress… and conspiracy theorist? This is the side of her that doesn’t square with the media-trained pro—the side your mom probably doesn’t know about when she hums “No One” on the way to Walgreens. This Alicia pores over Black Panther autobiographies (“I’ve read Huey Newton’s, Assata Shakur’s, David Hilliard’s …”). This Alicia says Tupac and Biggie were essentially assassinated, their beefs stoked “by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing.” This Alicia wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck, “to symbolize strength, power and killing ’em dead.” (“She wears what?” her mom asks Blender. “That doesn’t sound like Alicia.”)
No matter how many records she sells or Super Bowls she opens, Keys still doesn’t feel she quite belongs in the mainstream. She likes to think talent transcends prejudice, but she knows that if her skin were darker, she’d have a much harder time crossing over. “I’ll always be an outsider,” she says.
This might surprise the Grammy committee: Last year, the New York Police Department declassified documents revealing that they’d put Keys under surveillance prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention. The department released a statement explaining that they’d targeted “those openly talking of anarchist actions.” Keys, who had spoken publicly against President Bush and donated $500 to the Democratic National Committee that year, was suddenly labeled an enemy of the state. “Hell,” she says. “Someone’s gotta be an anarchist.”
Comments like these, even said in jest, reveal the sawed-off passions and intelligence roiling beneath Keys’s genteel surface. But, while she idolizes Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, proclaiming that “some of the greatest artists did their best work when they got political,” she has recorded no “What’s Going On” or “Respect.” Now, she says, she’d like to find a way to balance the two Alicias. “If Malcolm or Huey had the outlets our musicians have today, it’d be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself,” she says.
She takes a step in this direction on As I Am. She’s said that “Go Ahead” is a Dubya body slam: “What have you given me but lies, lies, lies?” she snarls. But unapprised listeners will hear it as a shimmying rebuke to a dirtbag boyfriend. “Honestly,” she says, “it’s easier for me to write about relationships.” And it’s difficult to imagine her releasing a more explicit song about politics, never mind an anarchist one, given the resistance she provoked when she tried a different kind of explicitness. Recently, she recorded her “most sexual song yet”—until now, she’s alluded to sex only obliquely in her music and frequently championed chastity. “I’m discovering my sexual side. I recorded this song—it’s supersimple: just piano, Rhodes keyboard and a kick drum. It’s so sensual. It moves you,” she says, referring to movement south of the heart. But when she played the song for Jeff Robinson, her manager, he reacted like a squirmy dad: “He popped out of his seat halfway through. He said, ‘We do not record songs like this!’”
A black Mercedes sedan glides through Copenhagen’s narrow, rain-flecked streets, taking us to the Falconer. This is when Keys tells us the singing-on-a-pyramid story. In late 2006, she was exhausted. A deadline had been set for her new album, and she was pinballing between tour dates and movie sets—playing Scarlett Johansson’s homegirl in The Nanny Diaries and a lesbian hitwoman in Smokin’ Aces. “Alicia never liked to say no,” Jeff Robinson explains. “She wanted to please everyone.” When your manager thinks you’re working too hard, you know you’ve got a problem.
“I felt empty,” Keys says. “But the last thing you wanna come off as is a damn crybaby. What the **** you crying about? I thought you wanted this!”
“I used to say, if you’re not gonna be a bitch, I’m gonna be a bitch for you,” Erika Rose says. “She needed to get back her inner bitch.” But instead, Keys held in her feelings—loneliness, frustration, anger.
Rose remembers the moment Keys finally broke: “We were at a photo shoot, and she got this look in her eyes I’d never seen before. It was not good. She asked everyone to step out of the room, and I stayed with her. There was this lone tear coming down her face. It was five years of accumulation just starting to crack the surface. That’s when everything started to unravel.”
“As her mom, I’d like to say I knew everything that was going on with her,” Terri Augello says. “But there came a time where she couldn’t tell the difference between talking to reporters and talking to her mother. It hurt me to see.’”
Finally, in a maneuver reminiscent of Dave Chappelle, Keys booked a flight to Egypt. She didn’t tell her label she was going AWOL, just bought a ticket, and 48 hours later she was in a first-class cabin, headed to Cairo by herself. She floated down the Nile in a boat, toured ancient temples, swam in the Red Sea and, yep, climbed to the top of a pyramid and started singing. “The strength of a place like that,” Keys says, “the stone, what it took to build, the time—it’s infectious.”
“When she came back, I could see a change in her,” Robinson says. “She was at ease. Now when I do something that pisses her off, she doesn’t hold it in. She smacks me in the face.”
At the Falconer, Keys heads for a second-floor makeup room. We’re asked to wait downstairs. Shortly, walkie-talkies crackle to life: Alicia would like some grilled salmon for dinner. Francis is dispatched. Also: Alicia is ready for us now.
When we enter, she’s wearing a white terry-cloth robe with the hood pulled low, like a boxer prepping for a bout. In an hour, she’ll take the stage, belting her way through a hard-swinging set and shouting, “I’m feeling y’all, Copenhagen!” We tell her it looks like she’s getting ready to pound someone tonight.
“I like that,” she says slyly. “Sometimes I think everyone’s too damn nice.”
Source:
Blender