Alicia Keys: Recipient of horndog male rock writer attention, or genuine pop prodigy?

Also if we're throwing cliches around heh isn't it that she's getting fluttery-hearted twentysomething female purchaser attention for her soulful ditties. The American Dido hurrah!

BUT! -- they are not the ones writing over and over and over again about how she has the "sass" and "womanly soul" (actual quotes from new issue of Entertainment Weekly) and girl power and all that! I mean I don't think I've even seen anything slightly negative written about her, ever! (First one who finds something gets this AOL cd that came wrapped with my copy of Entertainment Weekly.) And how can she have sass when she's just playing "Fur Elise" over and over again?

Well, I suppose it is necessary to distinguish her from the manly soul of D'Angelo and Maxwell. Perhaps some readers need to be reminded or informed that Alicia is a woman.

Oh wait. Did someone say "sassy"?

Never seen anything negative written about her = why not to read music writing anymore. She sounds to me like the kind of person who gets resounding 2's all through the focus group and then Dan Perry gives an 8 to. (Sorry Dan!)

Oh, as an aside I have to add that the EW article Maura is talking about (which also features Nelly Furtado and India Arie) is one of the most tiresome and treacly articles I have ever read.

It almost made me long for Fred Durst...

The thing that hurts the most is that IT'S SO TRUE.

I *do* have a fwend who likes her for all the fluttery "womanly soul" thangs.

And finally, I liked falling at least the first two hundred times I heard it, as I've written about plenty of places. Her next single, "Woman's Worth" is one of the most dreadful things I've ever heard, and inspires intense loathing in me for how sincere it is in its gold-digging (as opposed to, say, Destiny's Child's "Eight Days of Christmas" where there's a feeling of getting away with something at least, not to mention which they still rilly want Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y T-I-M-E). Also, as you know, she's important because, uh, she writes her own songs and stuff.

I am hesitant to say "yes" here because a) the "chops" she has demonstrated aren't really all that impressive, like maybe level 4 or 5 in NYSSMA-level complexity (I hope someone else gets that reference) and b) I've rarely seen women who play more 'masculine' instruments, like, say, guitar or bass, as celebrated for their chops as Ms. Keys.

B) Maura insists that ability on the piano matters = Maura is a rockist!

wait, what? i am feeling set up, here ... i am merely pointing out that the supposed standards of chops held up are v v low.

Wanna please wanna keep wanna treat your woman right
Not just dough but to show that you know she is worth your time
You will lose if you chose to refuse to put her first
She will if she can find a man who knows her worth

I mean... yr. argt. is "she's not any good on the piano, and she's not singing about anything important, so therefore all the boys must just be hot for her crotch."

So sure, she covers the gold-digging with discussion of how this is all about showing her you know she's worth it... so great, she's a big spender *and* emotionally needy. And before you try to pull a feminist reading of this song, let me just remind you of another line "a real woman knows a real man always comes first". Really!? But then won't he just roll over and go to sleep?

Keys came up in my aesthetics class last semester and a number of people (including plenty of people whose taste I respected) seemed to be really impressed by her. (All twentysomethings or older, yo.)

But those boys who are "hot for her crotch" (ew) are PROCLAIMING that she's a genius, visionary, etc. Is it rockist to point out that this just might not be the case, that this crotch heat might just be emitting fumes of distraction?

Also, can we have a corollary to Godwin's law on this board about the use of the terms "rockist" and "rockism", because it's really starting to get more than tiresome?

(What's with all he CAPITAL LETTERS Maura?)

No, cos Godwin's Law is on the top-ten worst things about the Internet. But I get your drift!

Actually what we should have a moratorium on is criticism which relies on interpretation of why other people subconsciously like an artist. A lot of what Maura's pointing up doesn't look subconscious at all - "womanly power" is a bit of a giveaway phrase in breathlessness terms - but saying that ppl like pop for the looks is always a video-age simplification and also isn't too far away from somebody saying that fans of, say, Erase Errata like them just because they're obscure.

And it's not a simplification I'm 100% making, but you can't argue that people, both men and women, are softer in their judgments, more heralding in their praise, when there's aesthetic pleasure being stroked.

Puppets on strings, kiddies.

Quite right. What's the next 'revelation,' that Milli Vanilli used lip sync techniques?

I'd think Ms. Keys is not so much Fiona Apple redux as Vonda Shepherd redux, and I hate Vonda Shepherd. But I can't for the life of me remember what I rated her song as.

& Gage, she can't be a puppet, coz she writes her own songs!

& Maura, you say writers are softer if their aesthetic sense is stroked -- but isn't art all about stroking the aesthetic sense anyway? Wouldn't Gravel Pit have been a v. different video if the cavewomen looked like ugly instead of hot chiXoR?

We refer to this as masturbation, kiddies.

Kapish?

keys i suspect is being bigged up by ppl who actually quite like pop but are scared off defending it by gage-o's type of argt (which as all know i think a total non-argt, and am NOT scared off by heh: tho i am bored of FITES about it, at least fites involving me)

tho also my friend p who is a BRILLIANT and GIFTED TRAINED SINGER, jazz AND classical — and yet whose favourite evah popstar = Lulu, go figure — was all abt how grate ak is: acytually i cannot parse p's taste at all

What else does she like? Maybe I can parse it for you.

I think you'll find a lot of musicians (in all genres) have a certain admiration for people like Alicia Keys. It's the Jools Holland syndrome - respect for technique (provided it's harnessed to some sort of 'pop sensibility' as it used to be called).

(A quick check of my hard drive reveals that I have used cognates of "sassy" w/r/t black women, twice. After this trend was pointed out to me, I immediately used it once more--applying it to David Foster Wallace--and thereafter purged it from my critical vocabulary.)

Also all that piano noodling does nothing for me. If I want to see women wanking with instruments I'm sure I can find a suitable porno.

If this isn't commodity fetishism (confusing person & product) then I don't know what is. So try this on Gage -- they WANT you to treat her as a product and not a person, they WANT to sap away everything outside of the mechanics of existance, and they WANT you to be so confused you can't tell the difference between a person and a product, because then you live in FEAR of their power. But if they were REALLY that powerful, if they saw and knew your heart like they WANT to, then why would they need to market Keys at all -- wouldn't she already meet your deepest hidden desires and subconscious preferences? Wouldn't she market herself? Isn't the REALLY rebellious act not in letting them turn people into products, but in RECLAIMING art as something that happens between PEOPLE?

Can I just take a moment here to complain loudly about the word "sassy" being applied to Alicia Keys?

Hear, hear. That's why I prefer "godawful" in the present case.

It's been bled to death. Completely redundant.

Not true. The c&w press applies this word nonstop to Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks. In fact, each of the three Chicks has the word "sassy" tattoed on her ankle, and there's a $30 (or perhaps it's $40) dollar fine for any critic who omits the word "sassy" when reviewing the Chicks. SheDaisy, by the way, tried to top this by having the word "feisty" tattoed on their ankles, but didn't have the Dixies' success in influencing the discourse.

By the way, I gave "Fallin'" a 7.5, and I like it for much the same reason I like Missy Elliott's "The Rain" and Madonna's "Justify My Love" (to name two singers often honored for their chops), for the way it's mesmerizing and enticing, though of course "Rain" and "Justify" do their slow-motion quicksand much better.

An interesting but unexamined assumption in this thread: that Clive Davis is not a human being.