Jonah Weiner
: Jody, I don’t think I ever told you about my ill-fated winter fling with Alicia Keys. The place was Copenhagen, the time was early 2008, and the occasion was a
magazine profile
. She was enchanting and sweet (she even offered me a pair of designer women’s sunglasses she’d been sent as swag—unfortunately, not quite my style), and she gave me a candid interview. I repaid her kindness by printing her hastily phrased but ultimately reasonable quotes about the politicized (mis)uses of the phrase “gangsta rap,” and, pairing these quotes with others about Keys’ (also reasonable) fondness for Black Panther writings, I occasioned a
P.R. shitstorm
that almost cost her some fat endorsements and necessitated some official statement of clarification on her part. I don’t think she ever claimed I’d taken her out of context—that old line!—but said simply that she’d misspoken, or that I’d misinterpreted, or both. It’s one of my regrets that I helped open her up to ridiculous charges of ”
reverse racism
,” though I’m not sure what I really could have done differently.
Which is all to say that, whenever I hear a bittersweet Alicia Keys song, there’s a little bit of poignant, unprocessed personal biography inflecting my response to it. And almost all her big songs are bittersweet. Since her 2001 debut, she’s located her best music at the spot where a crush totters between
schoolgirl-giddy
and destructively
all-consuming
. Her last album included two weepy greats: the choked, deceptively dinky ”
No One
,” the Princely ”
Like You’ll Never See Me Again
.” She’s in a similar mode on the more muscular ”
Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart
,” the second single from her newest record. It was produced with the help of Jeff Bhasker—who co-produced on Kanye West’s
808s and Heartbreak—
and it pairs plush, cosmic-synth bedding with fat drums that tap a rock energy reminiscent of Rihanna’s ”
Umbrella
” and Leona Lewis’s ”
Bleeding Love
.” Alicia, if you’re reading Brow Beat today, I’m sorry about how it turned out, and I really like this one!
Jody Rosen
: Wow, no, you never had told me that story before. What endorsements did Alicia lose, thanks to you? How much money do you owe her exactly? A couple mill?
My affection for Keys has grown as her career has progressed. Her debut album, for all of its obvious craft, was a pretty generic neosoul record, and Keys
exuded that neosoul smugness
:
I am real musician who plays a real instrument
,
I have many Marvin Gaye albums in my collection
, etc. She hasn’t exactly loosened up over the years—she’s a meticulous classicist and still one of the worst oversingers in pop. But her songs can be pretty undeniable. I adore “No One,” a perfect junior-high prom ballad. “Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart” isn’t quite as catchy, but I like the sweet turn the melody takes in the chorus, and the song conjures a kind of teenybopper melodrama that I’m a sucker for: “Have you ever tried sleeping with a broken heart?/ Well you could try sleeping in my bed.”
The main pleasure here is sonic. I’m a big fan of the rock-inflected R & B sound that you rightly trace to “Umbrella” and “Bleeding Love.” Ne-Yo and the Norwegian songwriting-production duo
Stargate
, the team behind Beyoncé’s great ”
Irreplaceable
,” are also key figures in this movement—a shift from stark, rhythmic-centric hip-hop R & B to more Europeanized, harmonically-richer songs, full of drums and synths that clatter and boom. It’s a big sound; for whatever reason, bombast is in. For me, the ne plus ultra example is Jordin Sparks’ “Battlefield”—despite and because of a
video
in which Sparks sings while asphyxiating on cannon smoke.
Speaking of videos, what is up with the
“Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart” clip
? Did my eyes deceive me, or does Alicia Keys revive a dead puppy dog with a Christ-like laying-on-of-hands? Also: Keys’ purple spandex onesie? Discuss.
J.W.
: Oof, the video’s pretty hokey! If I read all of its references correctly, she’s a crack veterinarian via Jesus Christ via Neo from
The Matrix
, with a little Rogue from
X-Men
tossed in. Rogue is the mutant who can’t touch people without sucking out their life force, and in a less charitable moment, I’d say this video sucks some of the life force out of the song. Or maybe it just runs, goofily, hand-in-hand with the melodrama. I do like the fact that Keys, a child of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in the ‘80s, almost always situates her videos in the same sorts of places that rappers like Nas and Mobb Deep used to—outer-borough housing projects and similar locales figure often into her videography, and not in a bogus ”
Jenny from the Block
“-type way. That said, Mobb Deep never had BMW motorcycles that shot lasers from their exhaust pipes. That’s what that American Express plug at the top of the video helped pay for, presumably. Clearly I didn’t cost her
that
many millions!
J.R.
: You’re right about Keys’ downmarket tendencies—they’re part of her charm. She can’t quite decide what kind of a star she wants to be. Is she a bohemian neosoul chick, with incense burning on the windowsill and a
bell hooks
book on the nightstand? Or is she a competitor in the diva stakes, ready to jump into her Maybach mix it up with Beyoncé and Rihanna? By disposition she’s the former; her success has made her the latter. So in the “Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart” video she sort of splits the difference: It starts with Keys in homegirl mode, ambling past brownstones, and ends with her drop-kicking kryptonite off of a rooftop in a superhero costume. (Or something like that.) The schizophrenia is endearing. In any case, nice song.
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