The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: “`Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. `Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”
Keys, 27, said she’s read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck “to symbolize strength, power and killing ‘em dead,” according to an interview in the magazine’s May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.
Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled “by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing.”
Keys’ AK-47 jewelry came as a surprise to her mother, who is quoted as telling Blender: “She wears what? That doesn’t sound like Alicia.” Keys’ publicist, Theola Borden, said Keys was on vacation and unavailable for comment.
Alicia Keys has got in touch with her sexual side in her new material.
The singer revealed her manager “popped out of his seat” when he first heard her explicit new record.
She said: “I’m discovering my sexual side. I have recorded my most sexual song yet. I recorded this track – it’s so sensual, it moves you.
“My manager told me, ‘We do not record songs like this!’ ”
The 27-year-old star – who shot to fame with debut single ‘Fallin” and album ‘Songs in A Minor’ – admits she suffered from depression after success came too quickly.
She added to Blender magazine: “I was hanging off the edge of a cliff.
Something had to give, or I was going to lose my mind.”
Though she’s known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton “had the outlets our musicians have today, it’d be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself,” she said.
The multiplatinum songstress behind the hits “Fallin’” and “No One” most recently had success with her latest CD, “As I Am,” which sold millions. – Blender
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April 15 Update
Blender’s Gangsta Rap Articles Was A Misinterpretation
Alicia Keys has taken to the airwaves to “clarify statements” she made about gangsta rap in men’s magazine Blender.
In the new article, the R&B star sensationally claims gangsta rap was “a ploy to convince black people to kill each other… by the government.”
But, after reading the piece in the new issue of Blender, Keys insists her comments were “misinterpreted” and she’s “disappointed” with the “madness” surrounding the article.
Speaking on Los Angeles DJ Ryan Seacrest’s radio show on Tuesday morning, Keys explained, “I feel that I wasn’t a hundred per cent clear on what I was saying and so, because of that, it got slightly misinterpreted, and somehow it got misinterpreted that I was saying that the government was creating gangsta rap – and that’s not what I was saying.
“What I was saying was that the term gangsta rap was so over sloganised during that time… That’s what I was trying to talk about.
“In so many ways, everyday people, as well as the government, could have really done so much more to sorta (sic) obliterate and eradicate the things that were going on in the communities at that time that forced the artists to discuss and talk about, so strongly, what they saw, what they lived with.
“I wasn’t saying that I’m a conspiracy theorist, and I wasn’t saying that I’m anti-anyone because anybody who knows my character knows that I’m a very positive person… My only aim is to uplift people and spread love.
“You’re in an interview for half and hour, 45 minutes… and you’re talking about these different thoughts and ideas and I think… there’s a way that I didn’t exactly clarify what I meant to the point where he (the journalist) could misinterpret it.
“I don’t regret doing this interview; overall it was a great article. It was merely a line or two that has provoked all of this madness. I regret that a negative spin has been put (on it).” – WENN
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