![]() She’s continued to put up hall-of-fame numbers: in her first two decades, Keys never had an album chart lower than No. Keys’ combination of elegant songcraft and raw attitude would give hits like “Fallin’” (2001) and “No One” (2007) ample crossover appeal among pop, R&B and adult-contemporary audiences, and she carved out a place in the rap canon thanks to her skyscraping chorus on JAY-Z’s ubiquitous 2009 anthem “Empire State of Mind”. The artist born Alicia Augello Cook in 1981 was classically trained but a product of the streets, raised by a single mother in a rough Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood from which piano-playing offered sanctuary. As R&B hurtled toward the future in the early 2000s and pop was achieving new levels of gloss, Alicia Keys stood out not just as a torchbearer for organic, old-school soul, but as a quadruple threat-captivating singer, skilled keyboardist, pop-savvy songwriter and ambitious producer-rarely seen since the heydays of Stevie Wonder and Prince.
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