Alicia Keys On Cover Of Blender Magazine

Think you know Alicia Keys?

That subtly sexy siren who sings family-friendly fare is also an out-and-out conspiracy theorist who wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck and believes Tupac and Biggie Smalls were assassinated, their rivalries stoked by “the government and the media to stop another great black leader from existing."

We are so not making this up.

In this issue’s Blender magazine, Keys proves herself to be more Rev. Wright than Aretha, saying things like gangsta rap was a ploy by the government to “convince black people to kill each other.”

As opposed to her music, which we guess is a plot by Clive Davis to lull us all into listening to her? [x]

I'm not feeling the cover. She looks constipated. What I am feeling though, is the interview. As weird and left-field as her comments are, it's interesting to hear Alicia Keys' views on certain topics, even if we don't all agree with her.





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.

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 shit 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 fuck 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.”