New Release - Alicia Keyes & Soul's Survival

[DudeAsInCool]

Alicia Keys Fights for Soul's Survival

By JON PARELES

Published: December 7, 2003

 generation ago, before Alicia Keys was born, soul songwriting began to face nearly fatal challenges. Disco flattened out the syncopations of funk, and hip-hop replaced soul's gospel roots with macho conflict, materialistic striving and vamps instead of song forms.

Like every revolution, hip-hop called for sacrifices, and sometimes it seemed like the adult perspective, the melodic peaks and the dynamics of soul songwriting would be among them. Eventually, the old name of rhythm-and-blues was applied to singsong melodies floated over computerized tracks. The music gained an electronic bite suited for dance floors, car radios and boomboxes, and it has long since found rhythmic subtleties of its own. Meanwhile, the lyrics moved into an immediate present tense of boasts, battles and come-ons.

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The 21st century brought stirrings of a soul revival, with young neo-soul songwriters and belated recognition for 1960's musicians. But looking back is easier than moving ahead. In 2003, longtime soul singers like Aretha Franklin, Al Green and Howard Tate have released albums that apply their magnificent voices to so-so songs. It has taken "The Diary of Alicia Keys" (J), her second album, to testify that soul songwriting can survive.

For most of the album, Ms. Keys, 22, harks back to what vintage soul singers did: plunge into love's hopes and torments with a gutsy voice and richly arranged, clear-cut songs. Her Grammy-winning, five-million-selling 2001 debut album, "Songs in A Minor," also had soul underpinnings; behind her career-making hit "Fallin' " was an old James Brown vamp. With "Fallin' " and "A Woman's Worth," Ms. Keys established the character she still plays on "The Diary of Alicia Keys": a woman who's willing to give everything for love, and who wants just as much in return. But the album's production catered to R & B radio, and its second half sagged.

"The Diary of Alicia Keys" is immersed in romance, focusing on a singer who is yearning, flirting or struggling to stay together with her man. The battles of the sexes and girl-on-girl catfights that fill hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues didn't suit Ms. Keys (despite "Jane Doe" on her debut album). Nor do R & B's typical stand-by-your-thug testimonials and tales of conspicuous consumption.

Ms. Keys doesn't spurn hip-hop. She has collaborated with rappers like Eve and Nas, and her new album ends with the bleak, hard-headed "Streets of New York," which sandwiches Ms. Keys's bluesy perspective on urban troubles with raps by Nas and the rapper's rapper, Rakim.

But Ms. Keys has the vocal talent and ambition to draw on singers like Ms. Franklin, Betty Wright, Ann Peebles and Gladys Knight. She has absorbed their timing, their sweet-to-raspy dynamics and their gospelly interplay with backup singers (who usually are Ms. Keys herself, overdubbed).

On "The Diary of Alicia Keys," she eases into the transition from rhythm-and-blues to soul. After a quasi-classical piano introduction comes the rhythm-and-blues of "Karma," with an old-school drumbeat, turntable scratching, a low, ominous riff and an arpeggiated squiggle of classical violin. "Don't play with me," Ms. Keys sings, tearful and angry, to a guy who treated her badly but now wants to come back.

Next she collaborates with hip-hop's rhythm conjuror, Timbaland, on "Heartburn." Instead of Timbaland's typical skewed electronic grids, they come up with a skeletal facsimile of the wah-wah guitar, chattering cymbals and whooping backup vocals of the Ohio Players in 1975. Like a time machine, the track deposits Ms. Keys where she wants to go.

It's an early-1970's zone of verses, choruses and bridges, and of music that's more plush than percussive. The songs are built on computerized drum tracks rather than human rhythm sections; that's how things are done now. But Ms. Keys and her regular collaborator, Kerry Brothers, favor samples of actual drums.

Ms. Keys remakes a 1970 hit by Ms. Knight, "If I Were Your Woman," and offers two direct homages to the Aretha Franklin of "A Natural Woman." In "If I Ain't Got You," Ms. Keys starts with wordless vocal glides and rises step by step as she chooses love over possessions. And in "Wake Up," she growls, exhorts and pleads as she wonders, "Where did we go wrong?" while the backups go "ah-ooh!"

Ms. Keys recreates silky mid-1970's soul ballads in "You Don't Know My Name." The backup vocals coo, her piano cascades like Liberace and a string section floats in the distance as a waitress finally gets up the courage to date a customer. The guy she calls on her cell phone is no hip-hop roughneck; he wears a suit and uses cufflinks in his shirt.

He's only one of the tantalizing men in the songs. Ms. Keys ends up making more promises than she receives: she'll keep his secrets in "Diary," she misses him desperately in "Dragon Days," and she longs to go back to their courting days, instead of their current squabbles, in "So Simple." In "Samsonite Man," about a roving guy, she finally gets up the nerve to kick him out. But much of the album is pervaded with loneliness and need. After 13 love songs, "Nobody Not Really" concludes, in a musical swirl recalling Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," that "I'm alone in a big empty space" where no one cares enough to understand her.

Such private misgivings are rarely revealed, much less rewarded, in the brawling environment of hip-hop. But in soul, which begins with an alchemy that mixes divine and earthly love, there's room for humility along with pride. "The Diary of Alicia Keys" echoes familiar soul sounds, but Ms. Keys sounds undaunted by her sources, and she's learning fast. Soul lets her look beyond hip-hop's arrogance and the instant gratifications of current rhythm-and-blues. It's what she's been after all along.