ALICIA KEYS ARTICLES

[JumpinJack AJ]

ALICIA KEYS: Playing 'Mommy'

By Karu F. Daniels, AOL Black Voices

Alicia Keys For The Children!!!

The nine-time Grammy Award winning musical wunderkind will guest star in a special episode of Nick, Jr.'s cartoon 'The Backyardigans' premiering Oct. 9 at 10:30 a.m. (ET/PT).

In a special episode, titled "Mission to Mars," Tyrone and Tasha are Mission Control specialists who send their brave astronauts Uniqua, Pablo and Austin on a mission to find life on Mars after hearing a strange sound --"boinga, boinga!"-- coming from outer space.

Keys stars as the animated Mommy Martian along with her real-life niece, Shakyra Lipscomb, who plays baby Martian Boinga. In addition to voicing the bright green extraterrestrial, Keys sings an original song entitled, "Almost Everything is Boinga Here."

"After speaking with kids who said they loved 'The Backyardigans,' I knew this would be a great project for me to get involved in," said the J Records superstar. "Working alongside my niece was so much fun and the people at Nick Jr. helped to make it a great experience. I can't wait to see it all put together to make one great episode."

Also, each half-hour episode of 'The Backyardigans' features a unique music/dance genre with four original songs, along with real choreographed by Beth Bogush, a former director of the Alvin Ailey Dance School’s children’s program.

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The Awakening

A Closer Look at Alicia Keys

Ellen Von Unwerth

In A Nutshell: As an artist driven by social responsibility, Alicia Keys sends out messages in her songs and videos, but now she has taken on a broader challenge: AIDS in Africa. Is Alicia Keys just another celebrity activist jumping on the African bandwagon, or can her dedication really save the children?

By Claude Grunitzky, Trace Magazine

As an artist driven by social responsibility, Alicia Keys sends out messages in her songs and videos, but now she has taken on a broader challenge: AIDS in Africa. Is Alicia Keys just another celebrity activist jumping on the African bandwagon, or can her dedication really save the children?

In November 2002, days before flying to Cape Town as the headliner for an HIV/AIDS awareness concert billed “Staying Alive,” Alicia Keys told Leigh Blake, the British woman who would become her partner in front line activism, that she was going to Africa. Leigh told her she wasn’t really going to Africa. “Cape Town is not Africa,” Leigh said. “You’re going to Los Angeles.” After the concert, which was aired globally on MTV as a 90-minute special on World AIDS Day that year, Alicia and Leigh flew together to Zululand. One night, they were out in the middle of the bush, eating under the stars in a circle, African-style, around a fire and Alicia asked Leigh what it was she really wanted to do with her non-profit organization Keep a Child Alive. “I want to get AIDS treatment to the African people,” was Leigh’s reply. “If you can figure out a way to do that,” said Alicia, “I’m with you all the way.”

They got into a helicopter and flew to Soweto, the township near Johannesburg. Their first stop was the Perinatal HIV Clinic at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, a unit run by a few dedicated South Africans who are known to be at the forefront of AIDS activism. 95% of the clinic are women; they knew Alicia’s song “Fallin’” and as soon as she came in, they spontaneously started singing it for her. When Alicia asked the women what they wanted, they said treatment. That defining moment, in the clinic, when she first confronted the catastrophe behind the African AIDS pandemic and the faces behind the alarming numbers, marked the beginning of Alicia’s active involvement with Keep a Child Alive .

“I met so many people on that first trip to South Africa,” Alicia told me recently. “I met women who were infected. I met kids, some infected, some not. I saw a white South African couple, both infected, because the husband didn’t want to tell his wife that he had the virus. He was afraid of the stigma. When I got to understand, after that night under the African stars, that treatment was possible for less than a dollar a day, I decided to get involved.”

That very day, Alicia began dedicating a large amount of time and personal resources to the cause. The African experience was a rude awakening for a singer, who, admittedly, had never traveled outside of the United States—with the exception of a trip to Puerto Rico—until she began touring and promoting her albums. Still, it created a new sense of purpose, a new sense of empowerment that comes with the ability to change the course of people’s lives. Beyond uplifting people’s spirits through music, she found that she could help to save lives, in countries where death by disease has become an accepted reality after years of neglect by the world’s health authorities. “My plan was to go to this nice vacation after my trip to Africa,” she later told me, “and I did go, to this beautiful hotel, but I felt horrible afterwards, when I looked at my bill. I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’”

The key, so to speak, to understanding Alicia Keys’ appeal as an all-around entertainer and role model for a new generation of music lovers around the world, may be found in the very honest dialogue she began with her fans back when her first single, “Fallin’,” hit the radio and catapulted her, overnight, into the somewhat uncomfortable position of having to live like a celebrity. I remember those early days very clearly. I remember her gradual transformation from aspiring recording artist to global superstar, because five years ago, almost to the day, I interviewed Alicia Keys for the cover of this magazine, and sat in on Ellen von Unwerth’s photo shoot. Everyone on the set could feel that we were witnessing a very special moment, because, clearly, this young New Yorker had something very, well, special to offer the world.

I remember how the photo, hair and makeup teams and I were gathered in a bar called Idlewild on New York’s East Houston Street, a very narrow space that had been designed to resemble a top-of-the-line 747, circa 1967. Ellen kept asking Alicia to look sexy when she sat on the banquettes. Alicia was trying, acting as if it were all natural for her. The distinctive, braided look was clearly working in her favor, with the red lipstick adding that special touch of ’50s movie star glamour that Ellen had long favored. Every time Alicia glanced at the camera from the corner of her eye, and tried to look sexy, Ellen smiled and spoke loudly, as she snapped away with feverish alacrity. Ellen was on, and so was Alicia; the pictures and cover reflected the energy of the photo shoot.

A few weeks later, Alicia sang at our issue launch party, hitting the keys of the baby grand piano she’d had delivered that afternoon, and setting the pace with her accelerated finger strokes for an hazy New York summer evening. She made eye contact with our crowd, and cracked a few jokes when everyone could see that she was wearing the same houndstooth-patterned Dolce & Gabbana hat she’d sported for our cover pictorial, her first of many. On the last Tuesday of June 2001, five days after our party, we found out that Alicia’s debut album, 'Songs in A Minor,' had entered the Billboard charts at number one in its first week of release, and was officially declared the best-selling album in America.

The bar Idlewild closed a while back, but Alicia’s record would go on to sell more than ten million copies worldwide and earn her multiple awards, honors and admiration. Even after she started selling out major concert halls, even after her follow-up album,'The Diary of Alicia Keys,' blew up around Christmas 2003 with the song “You Don’t Know My Name,” for the longest time, Alicia insisted on riding the subway, just like all her Harlem homegirls would, just like she herself had done since she was a young teenager growing up in the city. Eventually, her friends, family and business associates managed to dissuade her from riding the New York City subway, but Alicia’s attachment to those turnstile memories denotes a humble New York City upbringing just as much as it symbolizes the culture shocks that come with the constant travels associated with the job of being one of America’s sweethearts.

“I miss the train,” was one of the first things she told me when we reconnected last March for our first interview—and Trace cover shoot—in five years. “I miss the sound of tens of thousands of people. I miss the grittiness of it all.” This time around, we’d decided to shoot our cover in a nightclub called Happy Valley, in New York’s Flatiron District.

The two-level club, which was recently revamped by the fashion designer Jeremy Scott, revolves around a light box floor and a giant mirrored disco ball suspended above the dance floor. Alicia made her way around the go-go cages, light bars, staircases and multiple leopard prints before posing not too far from an oversize, mesh-gartered set of female legs that are said to open and close on demand. This time around, Ellen didn’t ask her to look “sexy,” but a seasoned Alicia struck a few natural, sexy poses anyway. The mood was playful and I managed to chat with her for a few minutes in her dressing room.

I asked Alicia how success had changed her. She said that she had grown a lot, and that she was feeling like a woman now, even though her essence was still the same. New York, she said, had taught her about struggle and hardships. I asked her if she was starting to feel the pressures of staying on top, now that her Unplugged album and accompanying DVD—her latest releases, from 2005—were confirmed as her latest certified hits. (MTV had stopped the Unplugged series, but they brought it back for Alicia.) She relayed an anecdote, which turned out to be an analogy. “I went bowling last Saturday; I’m usually pretty good. At first it started alright, but I bowled a gutterball, and then another gutterball, and I was thinking so much about the gutterball that I kept bowling gutterballs. My point is that if you focus so much on the failure, you’re going to fail.”

I wanted to get to her definition of success, because I knew from our previous interviews that, for her, success was closely linked to the central idea of happiness. “Success now, is being able to have the opportunity to create happiness for more people than just myself. I feel like I can help others to achieve their dreams as well.”

While I was waiting to interview Alicia at Happy Valley, in between shots where Ellen was click-clicking away and navigating the club with increasing intensity, I couldn’t get my eyes off one of the front page stories in that day’s New York Times. The headline read “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn”. The article explained how “black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.” The piece focused on the life patterns of young black men, and showed that “the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.”

The subject was too heavy to discuss on the shoot, and I was aware of Alicia’s attachment to social issues – the messages are all over her videos - so I saved my questions for the following week, because I knew that she would be better disposed to speak about the cycle of poverty and miseducation behind the plight, particularly the role that certain types of negative hip hop imagery play in the crisis. “It’s very sad,” she said, “and I see it with my own two eyes. It seems that every image that we see reinforces this negative stereotype, and it’s the worst trap that we could go into. I try to show different sides of things, and I try to speak to people with honesty and truth, but sometimes, I feel like there’s only one way when I see these images being perpetuated. We need to sing about it, and show it in videos. I’m not trying to get too preachy, but…”

I mentioned that she’d sang on a reinterpretation of Marvin Gaye’s classic 'What’s Going On,' one of the most political albums ever released, and she immediately started talking about her upcoming album. “I feel that this new album is going to be political. I’m feeling really heavy. I feel like we’re all feeling lost, me included. We get lost in these lies, and we are living in a broken society. Everything I’ve been writing lately reflects that, because I can’t turn anywhere else. I feel like Marvin couldn’t not have written What’s Going On.” In many ways, I mentioned, some of the hip hop videos showing booty-shaking, black-on-black violence, homophobia and misogyny amount to a blatant disrespect of the achievements of the civil rights.

“Hell yeah!” she interrupted me. “It’s blatant disrespect. That’s why I was so honored to be involved in Oprah’s "Legends and Young’uns" event. Oprah had women who had been through it all and come out victorious. Many of these women I never would have expected to meet, women like Maya Angelou, Coretta Scott King, Kathleen Battle, Ruby Dee, Cicely Tyson. From the first days, we were able to spend time together. There were no men, no friends, no family around, just us women, and I remember feeling this very strong sense of responsibility. The reality is, we’re regressing, we’re sliding back down the mountain. I feel like, in a lot of ways, even though we have so much to accomplish now, the video games and BlackBerrys, and everything else that’s out there is distracting us from each other. We don’t even talk to each other anymore; we don’t even ask, ‘how was your day?’ And then you have these crazy advertisers who are having us believe these crazy things. We don’t have a foundation of where we came from, that’s why we don’t know where we are.”

Alicia has refused pretty much every advertising endorsement that’s come her way, including very lucrative, multi-year offers from brands such as L’Oreal. She feels that her integrity is at stake. “These advertisers, they’re smart. They come at me like, ‘we want you to celebrate these strong women, the real people.’ And then the contract comes, and there’s this crazy clause that says that after the event, it resorts to a traditional endorsement. I feel like the right thing hasn’t come along yet. It’s not like you’re going to be seeing me with a bottle in my hand, saying ‘cheese.’” Later on, she said that many of the problems in modern society come from our obsession with “money, fame, success, big houses and big cars.”

Alicia has had plenty of money, fame, success, big houses and big cars for a few years now, but she credits the strong women in her family, namely her mother and grandmother, and her New York education for her ability to stay grounded in the face of all the attention. “Being raised in New York meant that I saw things very early on. With the amount of prostitutes, hookers and hoes that were in my neighborhood, I said to myself, early on, that I wouldn’t do that. I learned to respect myself, my body, my mind, and the different turns in my life meant that I had to choose what I wanted to do. I’m not one who likes to run away from problems. When there’s a problem, I say, ‘Here’s my problem, let’s talk about it.’ I’m very direct, and I don’t like to play games. It’s more like, ‘Here’s what’s going on, let’s come to some happy medium.’ I find that, often, things are made extra complicated, when they’re actually not that complicated at all.

My friend Bethann Hardison, a seasoned model agent from New York, knew Alicia’s mother Terri Augello when Alicia was growing up in ’80s New York. She would see young Alicia running around, and the first thing she noticed was that Alicia was a very mature child. Alicia graduated as valedictorian from the Professional Performing Arts School, a public high school in Manhattan, at the age of 16. She briefly attended Columbia University on a scholarship before devoting herself full-time to her musical career. The word precocious has also been used to describe her, given that she began playing piano at age seven, learning classical music by Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin, and writing her first song, "Butterflyz," when she was 14.

I spoke to Leigh Blake in early May, just a few days after she and Alicia had returned from a trip that took them from Kenya to Uganda to South Africa. A thin, hyperkinetic, fast-talking, middle-aged woman from the working class Elephant and Castle neighborhood of London, Leigh is an unlikely doppelganger for Alicia. They met in 2001, when Leigh approached Alicia because she wanted her to appear on the "What’s Going On" tribute album she’d been working on with Bono. To Leigh’s bewilderment, Alicia asked her who Bono was. She explained that he was the lead singer for U2, and a major activist who was fighting for the African continent. Alicia agreed to appear on the album, and they stayed in touch.

In 2001, Leigh had some money left from "Red Hot + Blue," her first AIDS benefit. Rather than having the funds disbursed through various organizations, she chose a different route. “All the focus was on prevention,” says Leigh. “It was as if the people dying weren’t worth saving. So I initiated a campaign and found the doctors who would help build this clinic in Mombasa, Kenya. Anti-retroviral drugs were costing about $11,000 a year, but we weren’t about to let the enormity of the situation deter us. We felt that giving family care, treating opportunistic infections, and giving nutritional advice would go a long way. I was married to a South African, and I ended up inheriting this incredible family of black South Africans in Durban. I saw people in our family dying. It was as if God had given us a test, but many people were still acting as if these children with AIDS in the developing world weren’t worth the investment.”

One day, a woman called Anne, who had a three year-old child called Brine, came into the clinic that Leigh had helped to build. She said she wouldn’t be leaving until she got the drugs that the Americans had access to for their own children. When Leigh heard that, she felt heartbroken, because she had a four year-old child of her own. She decided to find a way to pay for the drugs that the woman needed. Eventually, she managed to procure the drugs through NYU hospital and bought them at the teaching price of $1,200. The clinic in Mombasa began to treat Brine, and more people stepped up, identifying themselves and offering to help.

In 2003, an Indian company called Cipla began manufacturing generic anti-retroviral drugs, in a complete violation of the international patents that were imposed on AIDS patients and doctors in developing countries. According to Leigh, those drugs made a spectacular difference, because they made the Keep a Child Alive mission of providing HIV/AIDS drugs to children in need all the more realistic. After Leigh and Alicia had returned from the African trip in late 2002, Leigh had spent much time educating Alicia on the inner workings and ramifications of the international drug laws, particularly with respect to the crucial role played by the World Trade Organization. When the two women felt that they were ready to launch Keep a Child Alive to the world, they contacted Evan Harrison at AOL, and AOL Music became the media partner for Keep a Child Alive.

On Word AIDS Day 2003, Alicia sang at a special concert and participated in the creation of a public service announcement, encouraging people to sign up. On that one night, through AOL Music, they signed up 56 donors, who agreed to pay $1 a day each for a minimum of two years. Leigh and Alicia didn’t want to show the usual terrible pictures of African children dying, but the message was clear, in that it supported a business model that was proven to have worked well with the public in the past. Statistics showed that people who sign up as donors end up staying on as donors for an average of eight to 20 years. By June 2004, Leigh and Alicia knew that Keep a Child Alive was going to be really successful.

The cynics—and there are many—will remind us that a lot of celebrities choose to attach themselves to charities because it looks good. In general, it’s a temporary, transient thing, and the photo opportunities (usually with sick children) get leveraged in the mainstream media as a way to build goodwill for the celebrity’s own brand equity. According to Leigh, Alicia is different. “I am on the phone with her almost every day.” Last year, for Keep a Child Alive, Alicia hosted the “Black Ball,” which was sponsored by Time Magazine. Guests paid $15,000 each for a table, and Alicia sang some very special songs she’d never .performed before in public.

“I got involved with Keep a Child Alive because I was really moved by Leigh,” says Alicia. “Sometimes, with these types of organizations, you wonder if it’s honest, if the people can be trusted. When I first got involved, it was pretty much just her. Here was this little woman, really rebellious and willing to do whatever it took to make it happen for the people whop deserve attention. To this day, there’s no red tape involved with Keep a Child Alive, where you wonder if the money is really going to the people. We act as a Fedex; we just send the medication. I wanted to make sure that when I went there [to Africa] and made those promises, people could trust me. The organization is still very grassroots; it’s just Leigh, a woman called Diane, a young woman called Erika Rose and a lot of interns who do it on the strength, out of love.”

In Wentworth, which is located on the outskirts of the port city of Durban, Alicia bought a big building, which had previously been a sports bar, and with the help of a local team began the process of converting the space into a modern clinic. In South Africa, Wentworth is called a “colored” township, meaning that the “colored” people aren’t really considered black, nor are they considered white. For the most part, “colored” South Africans tend to keep to themselves. (Surprisingly, the term endures as yet another legacy of the apartheid years.)

“I remember being very surprised two years ago in South Africa,” remembers Alicia, “because we were out one day and one of the guys I was with asked ‘what kind of clubs do you have in America?’ He said ‘colored’ clubs, or ‘black’ clubs? I was shocked, because I wasn’t aware of the degrees of blackness and the separations that they have over there. It felt like being back in the States in the ’50s. It brought me back, even as far back as the time of slavery.”

In Wentworth, Alicia and Leigh want to do more than just fund a clinic, which is what they would normally do. Instead, they want to do something spectacular. They want to provide AIDS testing, treatment and counseling services. The place will even have short stay beds, and patients will be taken through anti-retroviral treatments. They even want to tackle people’s issues, like alcoholism, drug and family problems. In short, they want to make the Wentworth clinic the best clinic there is.

The South African press reported that Alicia paid half a million dollars for the building, which is currently being run by Irene Stainbank, the coordinator of the Wentworth AIDS Action Group. Alicia gets really excited when she talks about the future clinic. “It’s going to be a rehabilitation center, an incredible clinic that will do wonders. In that area, there’s nothing like it. Because it’s in a ‘colored’ area, some ‘black’ people would not normally go there, but this one is going to be different. It’s kind of interesting that some things were allowed to happen, in our dealings with the health department, because over there they consider me to be ‘colored.’”

When I spoke with Leigh, in early May, right after she and Alicia had returned from Africa, she told me that they were both “exhausted, shell-shocked and wounded” by this latest expedition. “On this Africa trip,” she added, “what I loved about Alicia was her incredible humility with the Africans. She was with the people, she spent time there, she listened to their issues, and she cried. I know that all of the love and compassion that she gives to the African people every day is completely true. She was resolute about going into crowds and signing autographs, even when she was told that it wasn’t safe. It also matters that most of the people who go on these sorts of trips are white, but when Alicia comes with her braids and brown skin, it makes a difference.”

Soon after she returned from Africa, Alicia showed up on a New York movie set for the big-screen adaptation of Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin's best-selling novel 'The Nanny Diaries.' She will be playing the best friend of Scarlett Johansson, who plays a New Jersey-bred nanny for a wealthy Manhattan family. Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney and Chris Evans also star in the relatively big budget production for the Weinstein Company. The character is a far cry from the assassin she plays in the upcoming action flick 'Smokin' Aces,' a Vegas heist movie which also features Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Jeremy Piven and Ray Liotta. Alicia is also currently in pre-production on yet another film, this one co-starring Halle Berry.

This is all in addition to the production company, Big Pita, Lil' Pita, that she formed with longtime manager Jeff Robinson earlier this year as a vehicle for creating original television and movie projects. With her ten year-old production company, Krucial Keys, which she formed with Kerry “Krucial” Brothers currently in overdrive after producing hits for Christina Aguilera, Mario and Usher, it seems that Alicia just can’t allow herself to slow down. As far as this piece is concerned, another final key to understanding the appeal of Alicia Keys as an all-around entertainer and role model may be the zeal with which she has seized the opportunities that life has given her. “After I started traveling the world, I felt fortunate to see so many things that so many people I knew would never see, because they would never leave their block radius, or go anywhere below 125th Street or above 135th Street.”

Alicia Keys is the talented, hard-working, mature, precocious Harlem girl who is taking over the world, and doing it on her terms, one big challenge at a time. Towards the end of our final interview session, I realized that, at 26, she is already thinking of posterity. “I know that I’d like to be remembered as a timeless voice that stood for something.”

To become a donor to the Keep a Child Alive foundation, register at keepachildalive.org

[fresh_from_sofia]

thanks ..dope stuff from Alicia !