"Ebony Magazine"

Feb 2002

Alicia Keys could see success coming, but didn?t know when is would arrive. The hit album, the world wide acclaim of her musical talents and the appreciation of her style, she thought, were all within her reach.
As for the awards, that may be the one area where Keys might have been caught off guard. Keys won two American Music Awards after receiving five nominations, and was nominated for six Grammys and seven NAACP Image Awards.
In one magical year, this 21-year old, R&B legend-in-the-works has reached an apex some artists can only dream about.
?I can?t quite explain properly how thrilling this year has been,? Keys said in an interview. ?It has superseded any expectation I had or didn?t have!?
The tide turned in 2001 with release of ?Fallin?,? her first single, which took radio stations by storm, crossing form urban to top 40 and even smooth jazz stations. Since then, her album, Songs In A Minor, debuted at No. 1 on the billboard charts and has now sold over 3 million copies. The music video of Fallin?, the story of a strange-but-deep relationship, also bolted to the top of the charts. Even Keys? style?her clothes, cornrow braids with beads and hats?made waves in 2001. Success had finally arrived.
People who talk about her overnight success know nothing about overnight successes or Alicia Keys.
The daughter of a Black father, Craig, and a White mother, Terri, she was raised in a one-bed-room apartment in the Hell?s Kitchen section of Manhattan. She knows that she is of mixed race but feels in her heart she has said, that she is Black and that Harlem raised her ?in a lot of ways.? She told Ebony that she was ?not even a little bit? confused on the issue of race. ?I accepted and loved both sides,? she said.
Money was a big problem in the early years, but her mother, an actress and paralegal, managed somehow to get enough money to pay for piano lessons for the gifted child who fell in love with music when she was 4 and who wrote her first major song when she was 14. The star, who was influenced by European classical music as well as soul and jazz, told a reporter that ?music came before everything, everything, everything. It just meant more than anything ever meant. I would risk everything for it. I?d mess around and get kicked out of school for it or get kicked out of my mama?s house for it.
Keys attended the Professional Performances Arts High School but majored in in Superstardom 101 as a perennial in the girl groups of the time. She won a scholarship to Colombia University but dropped out to pursue her musical interests.
Then, as now, she was a free spirit who was determined to live her life her own way and to sing her songs her own way. When she was 17, she stormed out of her house and got her own apartment. When she was 16, she signed a recording contract at Colombia Records, reportedly for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but balked are the suggestions of producers and directors. They wanted, she said, to make another Mariah Carey of another Whitney Houston; she wanted to be the first Alicia Keys. Clive Davis, who helped create Whitney Houston but knows an original when he hears one, bought her contract and stage-managed the introduction of ?Fallin?? in 2001.
By almost all accounts, Keys is an extraordinary blend of Biggie and Beethoven who can talk though street talk with the best of them and who walks with the in-your-face bop of a Sister who intends to be seen and heard.
Eschewing the limousine life her recording numbers entitle her to, she lives in unobtrusively in New York with her boyfriend.
Alicia Augello Cook Keys isn?t fallin?, as her most famous song says?she?s risin?

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