She connected with listeners, apotheosizing her achievements to date. I tend to underestimate how huge “No One” became: five weeks at #1, ten on the R&B chart, three million in American sales, and #6 on Billboard Hot 100 decade-end chart. Up through 2007’s As I Am, she was guaranteed a triple platinum platform. As sales collapsed for everyone else in the late 2000s, Keys’ fan base proved resilient. Exceptions: the new tune recorded for her 2005 Unplugged segment called “Unbreakable,” part of the tradition of aspirational middle class R&B that takes in Cliff and Clair Huxtable, Luther Vandross, and Angela Winbush and 2003’s “You Don’t Know My Name,” which benefited from Kanye West’s warm interpolation of The Main Ingredient’s “Let Me Prove My Love to You.” In each case a sample added girth to rickety structures. But for the rest of the 2000s the hits kept coming for Keys, without showing evidence of melodic invention.
This is soul as exertion soul as will to power unmoored from a reason for being. When her mouth drops open, fraudulence emerges. No artists suffered more with comparisons to her forebears. Even at the time this skeletal, uninhabited plaint was nothing special: basic keyboard pattern, drum machine, and a compensatory vocal that like early Houston confused prowess for feeling, but unlike Houston sounded to these ears abrasive and alienating, a drama kid’s idea of passion. The ballad spent seven weeks at #1 in the summer of 2001 Billboard and Rolling Stone averred that a new Whitney Houston had arrived, albeit one who wrote, and produced her hit. A pupil of Clive Davis’ star-making machinery, Keys was welcomed by the industry within a few suspicious seconds of “Fallin'” dropping onto the pop and R&B charts.
NO ONE ALICIA KEYS FULL
Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.įew contemporary singer-songwriters have done as much with so little as Alicia Keys. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.
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