The Next Queen of Soul - Alicia Keys Dress

It's two days after September 11th. Five thousand are reported missing and feared dead. Alicia Keys is on the street in Lower Manhattan, having her picture taken, just a mile and a half from Ground Zero. Many on the street wear thin face masks, a few have bulky gas masks. A block away from the shoot, workers ride up the empty West Side Highway while people stand on the side of the road and applaud them. A young man walks by in silence, holding a small flag high above his head, saying everything by saying nothing. When the shoot ends, Keys walks off singing the Earth, Wind and Fire classic "Keep Your Head to the Sky."

Today's photo shoot was originally scheduled for September 11th. In the wake of that day, Keys felt the shoot had to be something relevant. "To see Chambers Street and the Brooklyn Bridge lookin' like some old spot you might see in Kuwait on TV just puts things in perspective for me," she says. "Some people live with war every day, and we just these small-ass little children who always been protected for one reason or another. The things that people hold in high esteem is fuckin' stupid. That's the reason why I wanted this shoot to mean something. I couldn't go in there and just put on some clothes. I couldn't possibly do a fuckin' photo shoot after what just happened. I would feel like the person I despise. The physical is such an important part of today's society, and that's sickening, sickening, sickening, and it makes it more sickening when something like this goes on.

"The last couple days I been thinkin', 'What's happenin' to this world? What's really goin' on?' " she says. Her voice is kinda deep for a chick, with a distinctly street lilt to it. She spent a lot of time in Harlem, she says, and it's turned her into a ladyish street-smart tomboy, who wears heels and lip gloss, chews gum, slaps five hard like a guy and has a bop to her strut. "Couple weeks ago we was dealin' with that plane shit with Aaliyah," she says, "and now it's a whole nother thing. It's strange. For me, I can't take myself out of that equation. I feel like everyone who died in that building was part of me. The thing that keeps goin' through my head is the phoenix that rises out of the ashes. Although there's despair and confusion, that's definitely not the end of the world, and it's not gonna stop us. It's gonna make us stronger."

And yet, like most African-Americans, her relationship with America is complex. The country that once enslaved her, that constitutionally considered her three-fifths of a human, that just forty years ago barred her from white schools and drinking fountains and kept her from the voting booths, now demands patriotism. That can be a hard shift. "All day I been seein' everyone rockin' flags in they hats and on the street, and I'm torn," she says. "I look at that flag, and I'm not able to completely go there for some reason. I see lies in that flag. I can't suddenly be all patriotic. But this is about human life beyond any country or flag. That's why it makes me feel so strange. Because I'm so torn, and there's so many layers involved."

Immediately after the shoot, a car takes Keys and her crew to a police checkpoint at Fourteenth Street. Another car drives her uptown and then to Washington, D.C., where a tour bus is waiting to take her and her band to Atlanta for a show Friday night at Chastain Park Amphitheatre. She's opening for Maxwell, even though after three months in the marketplace the twenty-year-old's debut, Songs in A Minor, has never left the Top Ten and will soon sell for the 3 millionth time, driven by the gospel-flavored piano ballad "Fallin'".

A Minor unleashes neosoul's newest princess, a black woman impacted equally by hip-hop, soul, Prince and classical. A singer-songwriter with the Nubian beauty, sex appeal and diva presence of Aaliyah and Janet and Toni Braxton, with a street edge.

"When everybody moved up to Dolce & Gabbana," says Jeff Robinson, Keys' longtime manager, "and drivin' Bentleys and 'I'm fabulous' and the $5,000 shit, they forgot about all the kids on the street that can't afford that. Left them without any kind of role model. I knew if we did it right, Alicia Keys could fill that gap. She was around the way, but she was beautiful, but she was not fabulous. She wasn't tryin' to be iced out but ghetto hot."

It's an eighteen-hour ride from New York to Atlanta. Cruising through the country, surrounded by friends, it's easy to switch from CNN to Shaft and lose yourself -- "Is it Sunday?" she asks on Friday morning -- and, for a moment, forget that the country is at war, while telling a long story. Even though she's young, the story of Alicia Keys' triumph is far from an overnight success, and is the result of the patience -- a word rarely heard in the record business -- to allow an obviously talented girl to develop into an artist who could musically speak for herself. The journey took shape when she was fifteen, five years ago, but began long before with a little girl who loved music above all else.

"I've had a deep love for music since I was four," she says, lying on the bed in the back of the bus as it barrels through North Carolina. It's well past 3 a.m., and she's sporting a purple scarf and matching purple oversize sunglasses by Gucci so decadent Prince might rock 'em, and corn braids punctuated by Stevie Wonderish beads of blue and black that clink when she moves her head, and maroon Nike running pants, the left leg rolled up street-style, and size six-and-a-half white-on-white Adidas shell-toes, barely laced, the tongues kicking up the way Run-DMC used to do. "Music came before everything, everything, everything," she says. "It just meant more than anything ever meant. I would risk everything for it. I'd mess around and get kicked out of school for it or kicked out my mama's house for it. There was nothin' that was more important to me." Her friends became musical groups, her piano was a constant companion, her feelings were expressed through songs even before she knew how to write them. "My grandfather died when I was fourteen, and I was so upset because they had to call 911 over and over before the ambulance ever came. He was dyin', and no one was there to help him. That made me write one of my earlier fragmented songs, 'I'm All Alone.'"

"I remember that song," says Keys' mother, Terri, an actress. "He was her everything. He would do anything for his Alicia. I think that was the hardest thing she's ever had to deal with."

Keys was born Alicia Augello Cook in 1981 to a white mother and a black father, Craig. She grew up with her mother after her parents split up, when she was two. "I do know who my father is," she says. "He didn't live with me, he didn't raise me, I don't call him Dad. But I'm funny about talking about it, because people like to interpret it like the lost, black-man father, and I hate to support that stereotype. I almost would prefer not to tell the truth about the matter than to give people that stereotype." Right now, the most her father can do for her is let her hang out with her half brother, Cole. He's eleven. "That's the relationship that I want to cultivate. That's my heart."

If you ask, Keys will tell you she's of mixed race, but in her heart she feels she's black. "It's a little bit strange, but not really. It may sound like an oxymoron. But my mother is not a hundred percent white. I mean, inside. She was always around a lot of different types of people, so I was around a lot of different types of people. Her closest friends were never white. They were African-American, Hispanic, Dominican. So I never felt I had to choose. From the beginning I felt enough of both to be comfortable with both. I never felt that identity crisis. I felt I could be a part of any group. If the bus happen to stop in an all Asian neighborhood, I'll be aiight."

Back in the day, Terri and Alicia lived on Forty-third Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, a neighborhood then called Hell's Kitchen. "All the people that didn't fit in went to Forty-second Street," Keys says. "Runaways, loonies, ho's, pimps -- everyone who was an outcast was right there." But Keys found herself constantly running up to Harlem, attracted by the style, the energy, the flavor. "Harlem raised me in a lot of ways," she says. "Harlem taught me how to think fast, how to play the game, how to not get stuck-up in a Chinese store; taught me leadership, how to get out of bad situations when you need to, how to hold my own." Harlem is why she carries herself in a way that demands you take her seriously. Walking through the projects one day recently, a brother called out, "Yo, shorty," and another quickly corrected him: "That's not a shorty! That's an Excuse-me-Miss!" (While we're up close and personal, the girl's got an innie bellybutton so deep it's like there's a hole in the middle of her stomach, as well as a kittenish nose; she prays at least three or four times a day; keeps a journal; looks good without makeup; loves to sleep ["Sleepin', I think, is a form of meditation," she says]; loves to swim; loves to read about the Black Panthers -- she's currently reading Assata, the autobiography of Panther Assata Shakur; was high school valedictorian and earned a partial scholarship to Columbia University; and if she seems thin on TV, it's a miracle, because she's thick. I'm talkin' seriously scrumptious thighs and a juicy Nubian onion. And she has a boyfriend. "I'm seein' a man," she says, blushing. "A person I've known for a long time." He, like her, is cool, street-wise and high-yellow, with musical ability and a deep love of hip-hop. "We been rockin' for a long time, and it's cool. I know he cares about my heart. Not about anything else. Not about what I'm doin', not about TV, not about how I look. It's all about my heart.")

Harlem introduced Keys to Marvin Gaye and Biggie Smalls. "What's Going On and Ready to Die was that whole realism, talkin' about what was really goin' on right in their face. Biggie and Marvin told me, write what you know; you don't have to make it up, it's right there. Then I wanted to discover every type of music like that -- Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Rakim, Prince -- everyone who had that thing. That true emotion. For real. Not for fun, not for money, for real. That's what I listened to, that's what I lived, that's what I fell in love with." At the same time, she was determined to play the piano well -- "I definitely remember havin' a 'Fallin'' type of relationship with the piano" -- and studied classical from age six to eighteen. "There's classical music that's for the queen. Very light and airy. Never liked that stuff. All classical music is good for fingering and speed and building your skills, but for my heart, hated that shit. I gravitated toward Chopin. His preludes! He has these songs that are so deep and have so much passion you say, 'What was he possibly thinking? What was he feeling?' Chopin is my dawg."

At fifteen she met a manager named Jeff Robinson, a gruff and tubby man who wears expensive sunglasses on a face that makes Biggie look pretty. The product of a rough Bronx project, Robinson is tough and smart with a loyalty to Keys unheard of in the record business -- he worked with her for five years before the real money began coming. "There's no artist development anymore to develop these kids and teach 'em the rights and the wrongs of this business," he says. "We just throw 'em out there and hope they get a hit on the radio, then have 'em run around the country for two years; but when the second album don't work out, you never hear from 'em again. This [working with Keys] has been a building, constant talkin'-to, counseling sessions, bonding, communicating, the real meaning of artist development. She's not gonna break down in a couple years. She's here for the long haul." His loyalty is a profound reason for her success. Keys says, "Jeff held tight to the plan when it woulda been easy to be like, 'We gotta get this paper, this shit's takin' too long, so you need to go ahead and do this song and let's go.' " In retrospect, investing in Keys seems as easy a call as investing in Microsoft, but it wasn't always that way. "It's always been Jeff," Keys says. "It was Jeff in the PAL [Police Athletic League] on 124th Street. It was Jeff when I was puttin' together my demos. It was Jeff when I didn't know how to produce nothin' and I was just tryin' to figure it out and I'd be in the bed, under the covers, tryin' to hide because I was depressed that shit was not goin' right. It was always Jeff. It wasn't nobody else."

Robinson always knew Keys would win. Over and over he says, "She's not a blip on the radar screen! She's not a guest star! She's not an opening act! She's -- " he points at his shoulders with his thumbs for extra emphasis -- "the whole fuckin' show! Oh, it's true. It's damn true."