![]() Recorded as part of the television program MTV Unplugged on Jat the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the album includes songs from her first two studio albums Songs in A Minor (2001) and The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003). The end.Unplugged is the first live album by American singer Alicia Keys. It’s great if you like her, not so great if you don’t, and right down the middle for everyone else. I wonder what she’ll be like when she finds out who she really wants to be. I just think her talent will take her a long way without her needing to be the baddest chick in the room, who just happens to be a classically trained pianist who has been relentlessly groomed for fame since she was young. And watching her go all hip-hop on the DVD of this concert is strange, because she’s just trying SO HARD to urge on the crowd that she doesn’t understand that they are already into it.īut you know what? I’m cutting her slack on this, because she’s a young performer. But hearing Keys, whose excellent diction is well-documented, faux-gangsteristically slurring ” ‘Atshright, ‘atshright” to urge on her band, on two different tracks, is just depressing. Gong” Marley comes out and they segue into “Welcome to Jamrock”.īut the posturing! It is obviously important for her to sound down with the streets I can understand this, and accept it to a certain extent - I’ve done the same thing. I even like the corny closing medley of “Love It or Leave It Alone”, which features pretty good contributions from Common and Mos Def… but mostly because Damian “Jr. She has a pretty voice, and she lets it fly on old favorites “A Woman’s Worth” and “You Don’t Know My Name” (which I love) the arrangement of “Streets of New York (City Life)” is fairly ambitious and weird her piano playing is lovely as always. It’s not the only time here when we see Keys come alive. Also, they do a nice little key change at the end of every chorus that turns it from a country-rock song into an R&B song, pretty canny there. You wouldn’t think this would work at all, but it does, pretty handily, because Levine has soul and Keys lets hers show. But I actually love the version of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” that Keys does with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. We all know that she loves to cover Prince’s “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore”, which is done exactly the way you’ve heard it before, except with some audience-fluffing conversation that sounds like she’s reading it off a cue card. She covers a couple of interesting tunes here. Plus, as long as we’re name-dropping, don’t you think you’d NOT want to be praising the parenting strategies of the Jackson family? Or throw around the names of broken-up couples in a song that claims “Our love is unbreakable”? She does a couple of new songs, and they’re okay, although I really kind of hate “Unbreakable” and I don’t know why, other than that it’s a hooky pop piece but a poorly constructed song, condescending in its name-droppage (“We could fight like Ike and Tina / Or give back like Bill and Camille” ), and completely uninspired. ![]() She does those singles, and they sound fine. Suddenly, after “If I Ain’t Got You” and “Karma”, and after the adulation of my nine-year-old daughter, I was on the Keys train. I was much more impressed with The Diary of Alicia Keys, because I thought the singles were better, and because she was much more about the soul than the neo. She was happy and lucky, and came off like someone who felt like she deserved and expected all the accolades she was getting. What I hated was her Grammy acceptance speeches, where she kept saying how “humbled” she was to get all these awards, when it was clear that she was not humbled at all. But I didn’t hate it either, just kind of “eh”. I didn’t like Songs in A Minor very much, past the pretty competent singles she seemed like a nothingburger to me, a construct, a neo-soul kiddie decked out in Lauryn Hill’s clothes (even copped a Grammy, just like Lauryn), stealing some thunder by semi-paraphrasing a Stevie Wonder album title. Like the career of Alicia Keys, this record is right down the middle. But there’s nothing wonderfully magical about it either. The arrangements are nice and tight, the band is great, the guest appearances are good, and not especially plentiful. Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with this CD of Alicia Keys’ appearance on the revival of MTV’s Unplugged series. One comes away knowing nothing more than that. It sounds exactly the way you think it does: pleasant and soulful, but formulaic and calculated. But this is the least insightful live album ever. I think they are usually fascinating and worthwhile, as they provide an insight into an artist even if that artist stinks. Some music writers hate live albums, but not me.
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