Alicia Keys: Unlocked

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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.