"Q Magazine"

Feb 2002

"I have something to say," says Alicia Keys, waving Q to a seat in the kitchen area of her hotel room. "You're aware that I'm not entirely a supporter of this war in Afghanistan?"

You've hinted in the past at some ambivalence....

"Today Access Hollywood TV channel asked me to do a message for our troops. Well, I do feel compassion for them. But I definitely didn't want to lie"

"Go guys, kick Taliban butt!" not your style? "Exactly. So I said, Keep your heads up and search for the truth. I wonder what that meant."

She smiles faintly.

Alicia Keys is 21, a New Yorker, unknown a few months ago. Then she released an album, Songs In A Minor, which - via ingenious promotion and because of her spine-shivering gifts as a singer and writer - debuted at Number 1in America and demanded attention throughout the rest of the soul-speaking world. Meanwhile, she's just landed six nominations at the upcoming 44th annual Grammy Awards including Song Of The Year and Best New Artist.

So now she is called upon, at short notice, cameras rolling, to decide, as a prominent black American, her exact stance on the war against terrorism. She files it among a growing list of "What the hell...? Where am I?" moments.

It's an hour since she won three Billboard magazine awards, including Best Female Artist Of The Year, at an all-star do, 21 floors below in the Las Vegas Grand. Although she wants to watch the TV recording later this evening, the excitement has subsided already.

On the morning of 11 September 2001, Keys, who grew up in Manhattan, was in her new flat across the East River in Queens.

Two days later, when patriotic grief and fervour were at there height, a journalist asked for her reaction. She spoke of the horror, then added, "I look at the flag and I'm not able to completely go there. I see lies in that flag."

Now, in December, she still feels the same. "When you are attacked in your home the first feeling is, Why are they attacking us? I know that, unfortunately, even as a young girl in school you have to fight for respect. if you let somebody come over and punch you in the face they'll continue to do that until you stop them. But looking into it more, it's like, How many people have we attacked over the years? How many times has it happened and we didn't know about it? That's where the ambivalence comes in. Because this is my home, this is where I love and... it's something to uncover. Who knows what you'll uncover."

Q first met Keys three days earlier in Nashville at Mere Bulle's, the restaurant where presidents dine when they visit the country music capital. Keys is here to entertain 100 notably Stetson-free winners of a local radio competition.

She sneaks into the bijou "cabaret room" via the kitchen. Face obscured by a leather cap and wraparound shades, she shakes Q's hand with a wide smile, followed by a word of concern about this on-the-road reportage game - it can get too close for comfort, she says. But, curiously, she's standing rather too close for comfort herself: nothing flirty about it, she eyeballs your correspondent, checking for danger signs.

An audience, though, holds no such uncertainties for her. Aged 4, Keys knew she wanted to be a performer when she sang Somewhere over the Rainbow in Kindergarten.

Stepping onto the low platform, she surveys the congregation - children to septuagenarian, more white than black and women than men, all wearing their best. She gives them a "Hi y'all". She tells them they're too far away and gets them to drag their seats to the edge of the stage: "It's Sunday afternoon, we don't have to rush."

Her set is an illustrated lecture on her musical life and times: a bit of Beethoven (piano lessons from 5 up); Scott Joplin (learnt from her Mother's player-piano rolls); Marvin Gaye (she shows how his Trouble Man feeds into her own song Troubles). She confesses that, while her classical training taught her "discipline", it also led to some accidental melody pilferage. "I've just noticed this," she says, and seamlessly slides from an unidentified classical snippet into her breakthrough hit Fallin'. By now the audience's white contingent - previously restrained - are rocking in the aisles.

The only child of white jobbing actress/paralegal, Terri Augello, and black flight attendant, Craig Cook, who left home when she was two, she grew up on "a freezing cold block" at 43rd and 10th, an area known as Hells Kitchen. " I was very independent" says Keys. "I had a close relationship with my Mother, but was very much alone too. That wasn't her fault she had to work."

On top of that it was a frowsy neighborhood. "I'm seeing 42nd Street," she says. "I walked along there every day to catch the train. I'm seeing lines of theatres where all they showed was women stripping, every sign Sex, Sex. I'm seeing a church, drug needles in front of it, condoms. I'm seeing women on every corner, every day selling their bodies. The pimps said to me, Won't you come dance with me? Won't you come ho' for me? It was dirty, it was desolate, it was nasty.

"But although there were theatres of... darkness, there were theatres of beauty too. Broadway. True theatre. beauty and darkness, day and night, right there. Which is a big part of who I am. That black and white. So to speak [chuckles at the cliché]. Opposites, that's what I mean."

Q has bought a New York street map. Delighted, she prods a finger at Harlem. "42nd Street and Harlem, those two places are my heart," she says. "Harlem was gorgeous, funny - the bomb." Also dangerous. Like her friends, she carried a knife. Once, she was robbed at gunpoint.

But, more importantly, Harlem hooked her on '70's soul. At 11 it introduced her to Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key Of Life, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, Donny Hathaway's Extension Of A Man; music that was "more than just write-a song-to-get-on-the-radio. It was about the hope in your spirit and the death of your spirit, about social and political conditions, about the people trying to come together. Meaty subjects. That struck me soooo deeply."

Consequently, when she left junior school, she chose to attend the Professional Performing Arts High School (not fame's alma mater, but similar). She specialized in piano, dance, voice - and skiving.

Her finger heads south: "When I was 13, 14, I'd go to parties in the Village. Or in the summer we'd hang out in Washington Square, Union Square, cyphering. Cyphers is when a bunch of people get together and start rhymim' and singin' and freestylin' just off the top of their heads. On every corner, cypher after cypher after cypher. We had a ball down there".

Meanwhile, with two friends she formed a girl group, Embishion, and rehearsed at the Harlem Police Athletic League community centre. Their vocal coach, Conrad Robinson - "an angel of a man," says Keys - saw her potential. In 1995, at 14, she had already written several songs including one, Butterflyz, which made it to Songs In A Minor. He introduced Keys to his brother Jeff, who had served his management apprenticeship with Mary J Blige.

After hearing her play some Mozart, then sing a little, Jeff showed no interest in Embishion, but told Keys, "If you come with me, you'll never have a cause to regret. You'll make millions." She recognised in him the champion she needed. Soon Robinson had won her Mother's blessing too.

"Terri may have been anxious at first," Robinson tells Q. "But she trusted my brother already and I guess she assumed I was cut from the same cloth."

As for her partners in Embishion, Keys is still in contact with both of them. While one, Natalia, dropped out of music, the other, Tenisha Smith, co-wrote Rock Wit U and The Life from Songs In A Minor.

Keys graduated two years early from high school as valedictorian, which means all-round top of the form - no doubt pissing off more diligent classmates. Having taken the full range of academic subjects, as well a music, she won a scholarship to study at Columbia University.

But despite Robinson starting to hustle demo tapes and showcase gigs, it was in her mid-teens that literature started to become a profound influence on her. In particular, Ralph Ellison's 1947 novel the Invisible Man: the story of a misfit who becomes an urban hermit after being involved in a corrupt, failed, black militant insurrection in New York. "I am invisible," he says, "simply because people refuse to see me."

Alicia Keys, cover girl of the moment, from Rolling Stone to Braids & Beauty, knows the feeling. Sort of.

"I think, uh..." A long pause. "I have felt invisible in the sense of people not seeing me clearly. But do you see yourself clearly? And what is 'clearly'?" She laughs. "My literature teacher taught me to question everything..."

Was your "invisibility" a race issue or something more personal to you?

"More a personal thing. Definitely there are instances of being judged by race. But you can also be judged just by youth. When I read The Invisible Man that was definitely on my mind. Even with the kids at school, I felt different, I felt old. A lot of them, their whole conversation was, Who's Lisa fuckin'? - gossiping for hours. Phoney, fake, superficial. I felt invisible to them because I was in the real world of the things I saw every day on 42nd Street."

Keys and company touch down in Las Vegas and go straight to a rehearsal studio to prepare for the Billboard show. The challenge tonight is for her band to make the transition from her second single, A Woman's Worth, into a version of Angie Stone's Brotha - a duet with Ruff Ryders rapper Eve - which appeared on Stone's Mahogany Soul album. They've never done it live before and in 24 hours there will be millions watching, so Keys wants to sort out her end before her co-starts arrive.

For an hour she sweats her four backing singers through the unfamiliar harmonies and a choreography of point, punch, shake and sway far more challenging than the usual fart-and-chew-gum test. Bouncing up and down on her four inch stilettos, Keys looks about to explode with frustration. Instead, she gives the vocally superb but rather flustered quartet a mirthful smile and laughs, "I like it when you're not together. It's cute."

Her first record deal came easily enough, half a dozen labels pounding on Jeff Robinson's door. Columbia won the bidding war with an offer of (allegedly) $400,000 upfront and the persuasive bonus of a very nice piano.

But that was the last good thing that happened to her for some while. the label, she says, started throwing producers at her. Producers who knew exactly what she aught to sound like and had no interest in her views. Producers who couldn't help her negotiate the writer's block she'd encountered.

"Apart from Butterflyz, I didn't have any songs," she recalls plaintively.

But the impression is you've been writing hits none stop since you were 14.

"Oh, I write all the time. Describe what I feel. Get it off my chest so that I can sleep. But back then they weren't songs, they were joints [fragments]. I was trying to learn, though, and I ran into all these...psychopaths. Those producers. It was hard as hell. I was pissed and I was sad and I barely wanted to get out of bed to go to school and when I got home I went right back to bed and didn't do any homework, I was a mess."

For the first time she found herself floundering academically.

"I'm reading The Iliad and The Odyssey and I'm on page five and the rest of the class is on chapter 20. I'm like, What's goin' on? I'm fallin' apart..."

Jockeyed through her depression by Robinson, she decided everything must change. She dropped out of university and got her own apartment in Harlem. Both moves upset her relationship with her mother for a while. Then she upset her relationship with her record label by advising them that she would produce herself from now on.

Was there a particular incident that made you pull out of working with Columbia?

"Yes, there was. We were in a certain place - I won't say where it was - and we were trying to work on my album with this wonderful producer. It started out fantastic, the vibe was great. Then we came back and we had to do over a song and suddenly the vibe was a little strange. We would have these crazy arguments. We would start work and then he would leave suddenly, and then one day when we came out of the house to take a break, this guy started tripping out about why we parked our car too close to the back of his car. We're like, What the fuck is wrong with you? We'll move the car. but he was bugged out. he got in his car and sped out the yard and we never saw him again. At that moment, we all looked at each other and decided, look we gotta do this. We can't depend on anyone else."

Keys set up a studio in her basement. Liberated, she hit on the clarity she needed to develop her "joints" into full-bloom songs. Troubles came first. Fallin' soon followed, stirred by the intense "love you/hate you" relationship she was experiencing.

By early 1998, the album was ready. And Columbia didn't like it at all. They wanted samples, loops - what Robinson ironically describes as "a more traditional album".

"I'm like, Hell no!" growls Keys.

"When they told her that, she looked at me, like What now, Batman?" says Robinson. "I said, We've got to get out of this deal."

He started tunneling. through Arista A&R man Peter Edge he reached label boss Clive Davis, the ultimate talent-spotter-cum-mogul whose key signings run from Janis Joplin, through Patti Smith and Whitney Houston to Santana's comeback and Dido.

"Well, to meet her is to know she's the real deal," Davis tells Q. "She's a stunning musical talent, a great voice, a beauty, someone who could be an all timer like Aretha Franklin."

Although he took no part in Keys's negotiations with Columbia, the logjam shifted. Columbia threatened to keep all her songs. Smart lawyers stopped them. Eventually, says Robinson, in mid-'98 Arista came up with the money to buy Columbia out of Keys's past, present and future.

"You have to appreciate that Alicia and I have been involved in bidding wars since she was 14," says Robinson. "With advances from labels and publishers, she always had seven figures in the bank. Take away 'I need money' and you can think straight. You can maintain your integrity. She didn't have to do anything she didn't want to do."

She received a further advance from Arista then, the following year, another when she followed Davis to his new label J (with the blessing of BMG, the conglomerate that owns both labels). In contrast to Davis's Whitney Houston strategy, which included choosing every song she recorded, he delivered on his horses-for-courses promise to give the artist all the freedom she craved.

With Songs In A Minor completed, Davis conducted a ferocious marketing campaign. "This was not a slam dunk," he insists. "Fallin' fell between the chairs at radio - urban [ie black] radio wanted a faster tempo song, pop felt it was too urban - but Fallin' was her signature song. So we had to get around radio."

From January last year, Davis confected an astonishing showcase tour of "tastemaking" DJs, VJs, critics and media talent scouts staged in venues ranging from the Bottom Line in New York to a pre-Grammy's party in Los Angeles and the Congress building in Washington.

This worked a treat. With its 26 June release date approaching, Songs In A Minor was set to debut in the top 10. But then Davis administered his coup de grace. "I contacted Oprah Winfrey," he says. Knowing that she had a music special coming up, he politely suggested that her previous programmes had been too conservative, that it was time she gave a hearing to such newcomers as Jill Scott, India Arie and, uh,"my artist Alicia Keys".

"She called the next day to say, I'm in," he reports. For Keys, it was a wonderous ordeal: "Forty million people watch that. I'm never nervous and that night I was a nervous wreck. Me!"

"Oprah was our most tangible gambit," Davis allows. "Before that we were shipping 240,000 albums for the week of release, and the day after Oprah, the order doubled to 490,000."

The LP debuted at Number 1 and stayed there for two more weeks. It set Keys on course for high ratings in Album Of the Year polls and even a Newsweek nomination as "one of the ten most influential people of the year for the arts".

After the full-cast Billboard rehearsal, Keys adjourns to a press conference on behalf of her first major charity venture. Artists against AIDS In Africa (co-beneficiary, with an 11 September relief fund, of the celebrity remake of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On). After the campaign workers have laid out the facts, she, Angie Stone and Gwen Stefani speak competently and pose for photographers.

Job done, the workers, American, English and Kenyan, wander off through a vista of one-arm bandits and blackjack tables. Keys returns to the backstage area where a blonde woman steers her through some curtains. Keys peers about, baffled. She is surrounded by discreetly lit stalls displaying haute couture, saucy leather gear, sunglasses, roller blades and, for the older luminary, tins of biscuits. The blonde woman says Keys can take her pick..... and she does. She refuses the sponsors' request that she be photographed doing it, though, not for shame but because she doesn't want to become anyone's "advertisement possibility".

Alicia Keys is feeling her way. She'll accept freebies, but not tout for them. She currently turns down all product endorsements. So if L'Oreal are thinking A Woman's Worth would make a great soundtrack for the ads which actually triggered the lyrics she promises them disappointment: "That's just not my speed."

Even so, she won't deny she has made "small compromises". For instance, the album title was Soul Stories In A Minor until the label said it might limit radio play to black stations.

There have been outright mistakes too. Q puts a Dazed & Confused cover from June last year on the table: Keys, jacket open, no bra, right hand grasping left breast, left hand dragging her jeans down to reveal a swatch of pubic hair.

She rolls her eyes ceilingwards. "For the record, I hate that cover. I feel I was taken advantage of by it."

But you still did it?

"Oh yeah. It is me and I am going through lessons. I'm trying to figure out what I'll stand for and what I won't, what my morals are and what they aren't. People can be very persuasive and sometimes you don't like the outcome."

Probably the most important choices she will make over the next year concern her follow-up album, pencilled in for an early 2003 release. The long, successful careers of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey hardly offer artistic blueprints she wishes to follow. The chart disappointments of second albums by artists such as Erykah Badu, Macy Gray and Kelis imply the commercial hazards of a more independent course.

"Black women-black artists period - are forced to do a specific type of music most of the time," she says. "Experiment is discouraged. Everything is so physically and visually driven that they are pressured to be the... everlasting symbol of beauty and youth. Which is impossible."

Naturally, she plans to defy market orthodoxy with a concept album and a more political texture than before, the inspiration of her '70s heroes coming on strong: "I definitely don't want it to look like the finger's wagging [she wags it]. But I know it's going to be digging deeper inside of myself. I enjoyed doing that press conference last night where we were talking about something of importance. So many things in this world are so stupid and this makes me feel...like I'm worth something."

She hasn't forgotten Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man. Lately, she's been reading about the Black Panthers, the '60s radical movement: "In those times people knew how to unite, how to raise funds, how to campaign, they knew how to get their point across. Taking part in something like Artists Against AIDS, I'm discovering for myself how people begin those organisations. I can soak up knowledge and use it when I want to do things of my own. That I can head up..."

So far her attitude attracts only avowals of support from the businessmen in her life. A more outspoken album? Jeff Robinson enthuses, "She can make records like a female Bob Marley," and Clive Davis insists that artists like her "must play what comes from their hearts. I'm not saying the politically correct thing here, I mean this".

Just as well. She seems determined. "I can't wait to just be nowhere. I mean absolutely focused on making that music. Bring it all up. get it all out."

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