Everything's Gonna Be All Right

Ready for another one of my creepy celebrity obsessions? Hold onto your potatoes, Constant Lurkers... here come the one about Alicia Keys...

Jenny and Helene tried to warn me this past weekend, but it didn't hit me till my radio alarm went off Wednesday morn and this song was playing... both familiar and new. The synthesizer recalled some elegiac pop reverie from the 80s... but with a beat and a soul that rendered it transcendent.

Through the miracle of the internet, I downloaded the album ("As I Am"), loaded it onto my iPod, and listened to the whole thing on the long walk to work...
It's sort of appalling that someone can be so unconscionably hot AND make music like this. It's fucking breathtaking. It physically pains me, it's so moving.


Confession: I really had a thing for her second album, "The Diary of Alicia Keys". In this one song, she sings as a waitress who's trying to work up the courage to talk to this guy. Midway through the track, she calls him on her cell phone and we hear her side of the conversation:

"Hello? Can I speak to... to Michael?"

Suffice it to say, on lonely nights (a.k.a., "nights") I like to imagine... I like to imagine that she's talking to me...

Truth is, I discovered "The Diary of Alicia Keys" with my ex, which is the main reason I distanced myself from her sounds for a while. And didn't think to give her new material a spin.

Her new album might be even better, though. Continuing to fuse the past with the future. Making music that feels like you might have heard it on the radio a lifetime ago. When the world wasn't quite so corrupt. When the world held more promise...

Have I mentioned that Alicia Keys is mercilessly, godlessly hot? It's obscene, really. As if hot girls didn't have enough going for them...

Of course, she doesn't sing hot girl songs. Her tracklists have heartache and unrequited love and soulful female empowerment woven into them. She sells it all with her sleepy cool.

What does an impossibly hot girl have to be insecure about? Beats me. Doesn't matter if it's a cold, calculated act, though:

She has me.

I would commit war atrocities for her. I would sell my family. I would do unspeakable things that would haunt me for as long as I lived—all to bask in a fleeting moment of her attention!

And as the pigs drag me away from the horrific, unimaginable aftermath, I would howl:

For YOU, Alicia! I did it all for YOU!

You and me together...
Through the days and nights...

I don't worry 'cause
Everything's gonna be all right...

People keep talking—they can say what they like!
But all I know is everything's gonna be all right...

No one, no one, no one!
Can get in the way of what I feel for you...