Travesty: The Wasted Career of Alicia Keyes
It is said that the Strativarius violin is an irreplicable instrument. It isn't the craftsmanship that makes it superior, it is the nature of the wood from that era. A unique combination of the age of the trees and the nature of the climate produced a particular sound well suited to the violin that is unlikely to be replicated.
Something similar took place in music in the first half and a little beyond of this century with black women's voices. The lack of video and the invention of the phonograph allowed the voice to take center-stage. The music was jazz and blues, and the combination of new black ambition and mobility combined with the ache of the Depression-era, war-era, and segregation-era childhood stilled weighed heavy in the voices of the greats, Nina Simone, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Odetta. It is a timber of true suffering perfectly matched to the music of the age from a larger framed female that created a musical style that today's singers cannot match.
Certainly Aretha Franklin, and later Whitney Houston have beautiful voices and not without sorrow. But it is not the same sorrow as that of the women above. It is a domesticized sorrow, tamed, and far more so in Whitney, commercialized. The same holds true today for Beonce and any number of talented singers. Lauryn Hill best epitomized what has become of black women and their suffering - it is a spiritual sorrow, not a material one. It is about religion in a secular age, about the loss of that true suffering, the hollowness of comfort. And it's also about a bit on anachronistic racism that doesn't speak to this generation. And hence, she's disappeared, to trying to be real to be commercialized, a deliberate anachronism to an audience quick to move to the next thing.
And then there's Alicia Keyes. Alicia Keyes is not a Strativarius. Alicia Keyes is a new instrument. That's how talented she is. Nobody knows how to play it, let alone include it into the music being put out. When you see her live, say on a music Awards show, you let her do her own thing w/ the other stars and everyone's mouth drops as soon as she opens hers. She puts everyone else to shame. She hits Mariah's notes with ease and flourish.
And yet her albums are fairly lame. She has a few great songs that she wrote for herself, but they are generally very simple melody-wise. Her production values, backbeats, everything is off. Does she get stuck w/ lousy producers because she's so good herself? Everything she does is better in its live version. That is generally pretty telling that the pros aren't doing their jobs.
Can we please fix this? You never know when a person's voice will change, when celebrity or alcohol or health will give way and snatch that talent away.
Can we please stop wasting this woman's career? Is she doing it to herself?
