When Keys was 14, a vocal coach at the Harlem Police Athletic League’s community center introduced her to his brother, Jeff Robinson, who saw in her an artist who could comfortably embody Mary J. “Biggie and Marvin told me, write what you know you don’t have to make it up, it’s right there,” she told Rolling Stone in 2001. Hip-hop, soul, and classical music all spoke to her. At age 7, she began practicing the Suzuki Method and took up jazz at 14. She discovered classical music when her kindergarten teacher introduced her to a piano. Keys avoided publicly addressing her father’s absence in her life early on because she didn’t want to play into stereotypes about Black fathers-her mom is white, her dad Black. “Do you know my name?”īefore she legally changed it, she was Alicia Augello Cook, raised in Hell’s Kitchen by her mother, Terri Augello, a part-time actress and paralegal.
On the intro of Songs in A Minor, “Piano & I,” she embraces her position as a star over an instrumental that builds from the operatic hum of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to jolting drums. Keys played up the culture clash, often seeming to materialize on stage in leather Going Out tops, headscarves, and floor-length furs-and suddenly in front of a grand piano. She subverted expectations of what a classical musician should look like in a genre associated with stately white composers in starchy suits. She was a biracial girl from New York who performed in crop tops and blazers and wore beads in her cornrows like Stevie Wonder. Keys’ accolades were much-deserved, but they were also rich with subtext. Keys found herself at the center of a pop landscape where she and India.Arie became the new ambassadors of neo-soul. 2-just before the singer’s death and a month before 9/11. Songs in A Minor spent a third week atop the Billboard charts in the same week that Aaliyah’s self-titled album bowed at No. She sang of profound love and desire, emotional and career stability. Then came Keys with her self-produced, Chopin-inspired compositions about self-worth, survival, and practical pursuits of happiness. Britney Spears and JC Chasez’s boy band were on their third albums, and Usher was gaining momentum for 8701, about to crush pop music off rock-hard abs alone. Songs in A Minor arrived amid the birth of iTunes and the sensual empowerment of Destiny’s Child. 1 album and Rolling Stone had crowned her “The Next Queen of Soul.” By March 2002, she’d gone five-times platinum and won five Grammys, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for her No. Keys left Columbia in early 1999 to sign with Clive Davis at Arista Records and later his new label, J Records, where she could pilot her own vision. The label was, of course, laughably wrong. Columbia execs told her it sounded like one long demo. Keys found the recording process crushing and chose instead to partner with producer Kerry “Krucial” Brothers to create a dexterous blend of classical music and soul that merged young-adult melodrama with Beethoven. The label had already brought in big-name producers to strip away the retro-soul sound that separated artists like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Keys from the stream of sex-driven R&B in the late-’90s. “They wanted me, the tomboy from Hell’s Kitchen, to become the next teen pop idol,” Keys wrote in her memoir.
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