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Alicia Keys: More than 'Girlfriend'

by Jon Caramanica

On "Girlfriend," Alicia Keys's debut single, Ol' Dirty Bastard is growling in the background and the beat is a classic hip-hop pattern -- triple bass thump followed by a simple snare hit. Keys strides onto the track with new-jack-swing sass: "You say she's just a girl that is your friend/I think I'm jealous of your girlfriend." She's asking, how dare you be up late at night talking to her on the phone, letting her steal you away from me? It's the scorned counterpart to "You Make Me Wanna," Usher's 1999 doozy about a man drawn to the comforts of his female friend after she counsels him about how to reconcile with his girlfriend.

Here, the girlfriend is all the wiser to her man's chicanery. Keys pleads, "You said that she's the one who helped you see how deep you're in love with me/And intentions were not to get in between but I see possibilities/Can you say that you feel I'm the best thing in your life?" A simple, catchy track, it's produced by Jermaine Dupri, a man who specializes in this sort of easy pop hit. What sets it apart is Keys, her fey voice confident but also revealing subtle textures of self-doubt. At the end, dropping the diva pose, she purrs hungrily into the mike, "It's enough to make a nigga go crazy." Again she evokes a potent moment in urban-music history -- this time it's the tender moment in "I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need" when Method Man embraces his girlfriend as his "nigga." Transcending traditional gender boundaries, Meth showed that a woman could be everything and more, even to a hard-rock thug. Here Keys flips it to her own ends, collapsing the dialectics between girl and woman, priss and thug.

Don't let the gruff taste, or the bad-ass swagger, fool you. "Girlfriend" is a token, an aural illusion. Authentic and convincing, it nonetheless belies Keys's true gifts as a songwriter, arranger, and producer. It's a calculated nod to the urban audience, something that will go down easy on the radio to pave the way for the rest of her J Records debut, Songs in A Minor (which debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart last week). And that's a wise move, because the rest of the disc is the antithesis of mainstream R&B -- moody, ballad-driven, quiet-storm-nostalgic, savvy, polished with a bit of rough edge. Oh yeah, and she's only 19.

In 2001, the youth angle is an easy one to exploit. A spot could certainly be held for Keys on the teen-pop charter, somewhere among Christina Aguilera, Lil Bow Wow, and Samantha Mumba. But Keys is assured enough to know what she likes. And having been burned once before by the industry, thanks to an aborted project with Columbia Records, she now seems unwilling to settle for what some label tells her to do. The result: a collection of downtempo tracks that feels intimate, alluding to everything from late-'80s R&B ("Troubles") to the Supremes and Whitney Houston ("Goodbye") to Prince (whose "How Come You Don't Call Me" is covered here in stunning fashion). Take "Fallin' ": while clubs were spinning "Girlfriend," this shimmering track sneaked onto MTV. It's heavy-handed, and deliberately so, opening with vocals only. Then the piano slides in, followed by the gospel-choir interjection. Finally, the hi-hat and the bass kick in, completing an orchestral ode to romantic confusion that Keys conducts to a stirring climax.

On "Rock wit U," she borrows strings and Rhodes keys from the Isaac Hayes Orchestra, letting them play out for a good two minutes before she steps in for her vocal turn. It's admirable restraint, especially for a girl with something to say: "I stay and walk this life with you, no matter what we make or do/Dead broke, no job, no house, no ride/I'm gonna stay right by your side." Like another ODB-friendly chanteuse, Mariah Carey, Keys isn't scared to flirt with street cred to toughen up her look. She may not have Carey's vocal pipes, but her hip-hop sensibilities are far more believable. More important, whereas Carey didn't start songwriting until late in her career, Keys does it all, from playing the piano to arranging the material to singing her own backing vocals. And while the older Carey struggles to keep up with the Bad Boys, Keys comes on as post-hop, a musician so confident in her abilities that she's willing to lay them out on view practically unadorned. Songs in A Minor feels remarkably understated for such a big girl.