Stars urge Alicia Keys to drop Israel gig

Roger Waters and Alice Walker pen open letters asking Keys to join cultural boycott of 'unjust and unbelievably evil' Israel

Dear Alicia Keys … Roger Waters and Alice Walker entreat the singer to make a stand against the Israeli government. Photograph: Jeff Barclay/Music Pics/Rex Features

Roger Waters and Alice Walker have penned open letters asking Alicia Keys to call off a forthcoming concert in Tel Aviv. Walker, the author of The Color Purple, invited Keys to join a cultural boycott of Israel, visiting "the children in Gaza" instead of supporting "a system that is cruel, unjust and unbelievably evil".

"Dear Alicia Keys," Walker wrote on the website for the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel. "I have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other's path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists."

In his own letter, Waters admitted that Keys may not know who he is. "I used to be in a band called Pink Floyd and, believe it or not, I still work," he wrote. The English musician implored Keys to "join the rising tide of resistance" and refuse "to give legitimacy to the Israeli government policies of illegal, apartheid, occupation of the homelands of the indigenous people of Palestine."

Keys is due to appear at Tel Aviv's Nokia Arena on 4 July, as part of her ongoing Girl On Fire tour. It will be her first appearance in Israel. As the concert approaches, activists have begun ramping up their Facebook and Twitter campaign, asking the long-time HIV/Aids activist to consider dropping the gig in solidarity with the Palestinian rights movement.

"I have kept you in my awareness as someone of conscience and caring, especially about the children of the world," Walker went on. "A cultural boycott of Israel and Israeli institutions (not individuals) is the only option left to artists who cannot bear the unconscionable harm Israel inflicts every day on the people of Palestine, whose major 'crime' is that they exist in their own land, land that Israel wants to control as its own."

Elvis Costello, Santana, the Pixies and Gil Scott-Heron are among the other artists to have boycotted Israel in recent years, while acts including Madonna and Paul McCartney have dismissed calls to cancel shows. Earlier this month, physicist Stephen Hawking announced he was joining the movement, adding his name to a list of supporters that includes dozens of Nobel laureates.

Keys has yet to respond to activists' requests.

Read More

David Byrne and Alicia Keys join forces for charity concert

The two musicians - and mutual fans - will collaborate at Black Ball fundraiser for Keep a Child Alive in New York

David Byrne and Alicia Keys: pop power couple Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

David Byrne and Alicia Keys are to collaborate at an upcoming charity concert in New York. The Talking Heads frontman and the bestselling R&B singer will perform together at Keys’ annual Black Ball fundraiser for Keep a Child Alive.

Byrne “immediately said yes”, he told Billboard, when organisers asked if he would be involved. “I’m flattered and excited,” he said.

Keys claims to have long been a fan of Byrne’s, calling the team-up “an honour”. “I’ve always been inspired by David Byrne and his ability to combine music and art,” she said. “[We] have been talking about his new music and what we’re going to perform and just the thought of it is amazing!”

As co-founder of Keep A Child Alive, Keys has participated in each of the 10 prior Black Balls, including three galas in London. Past events have hosted performances by Bono, Jay Z, Baaba Maal and Sade, while Keys has performed on stage with artists such as David Bowie, Adele and Pharrell Williams. Over the past decade, Keys’ charity has raised more than $18 million for children and families affected by Africa’s HIV/Aids epidemic.

While Byrne released six solo albums between 1989 and 2004, recent years have seen him become more active as a collaborator. Besides records with Brian Eno and St Vincent, the 62-year-old wrote a stage musical with Fatboy Slim’s Norman Cook and contributed to two songs on a recent EP by Anna Calvi.

As a member of the Talking Heads, Byrne was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Read More

Chris Rock, Alicia Keys and Lenny Kravitz set for Empire's second season

 

Age of Empire... Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys and Chris Rock will all guest star. Photograph: Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Kevin Mazur/WireImage, Mike McGregor for the Guardian

Following huge ratings in the US and a successful jump to E4 in the UK, the music industry drama Empire has announced unblocked school a raft of starry cameos for its second season.

Chris Rock, whose indie comedy film Top Five is currently in UK cinemas, will appear alongside R&B singer Alicia Keys and evergreen rock star Lenny Kravitz. The show has also been extended from 12 episodes to 18.

The show, created by The Butler and Precious director Lee Daniels, has become hugely popular for its blend of soapy plotlines, strong music and unblocked games online, especially in the case of Taraji P Henson’s Cookie, endlessly quotable characters. It focuses on the machinations of a family-run hip-hop record label, built from the ground up by a former gangsta rapper played by Terrence Howard – after he is diagnosed with a terminal illness, his sons and ex-wife vie to take control of the company.

Gladys Knight, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg and Rita Ora are among the real-life music stars who have appeared in the show so far. It built up a huge audience in the US, eventually netting over 23m viewers for the final episode of the first season.

• 
  

Read More

Alicia Keys and BlackBerry? Why celebrities answer the call of tech companies

 

Thorsten Heins, CEO of RIM, introduces Alicia Keys as the global creative director of BlackBerry. Yes. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Most companies would struggle when faced with a rapidly declining market share, but not BlackBerry. It may be losing customers to Apple and Samsung all over the place, but it knows exactly how to reel them all back in – by unveiling Alicia Keys as its new creative director.

It's a genius move. Nobody understands BlackBerries like Alicia Keys does. In retrospect, it's clear that most of her songs were really about smartphones all along, If I Ain't Got You was about the time she lost her BlackBerry and had to temporarily make do with a substandard Nokia, for example, and Girl On Fire was about the time she made the regrettable decision to buy a Kindle tablet instead of a BlackBerry Playbook. Surely Alicia Keys will lead BlackBerry into a brave new future; a future where all the ringtones sound like generic R&B and Alicia Keyshas to be careful not to let anyone photograph her using an iPhone.

 

Will.i.am in his role as Intel's director of creative innovation. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

But BlackBerry isn't the first tech company to draft in a celebrity to beef up its credibility. Three years ago, Lady Gaga was named as the creative director of Polaroid. She even designed a printer for the company. Admittedly it couldn't have looked any more generic if it tried, and people only buy Polaroids ironically now, but it's the thought that counts. Two years ago, Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas was named as the director of creative innovation at Intel; a move that suggested a horrible future where one day he'd mumble disinterestedly over a loop of the company's jingle for three minutes and release it as another godawful single.

 

Jessica Alba introduces another important Windows 8 announcement to a room of spellbound tech journos. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

Similarly, Microsoft drafted Jessica Alba in to launch Windows 8 last year. This was a step down from what the norm – she wasn't made a creative director of anything, not even of the box that Windows 8 phones came in – but on the plus side she gave the photographers something other than banks of worried-looking tech journalists to take pictures of.

Now we just have to wait and see whether Alicia Keys can live up to her creative-directing peers. If she can, who knows, that double concept R&B album about the annoying flashing red light in the corner of her BlackBerry might finally become a reality.

It's obvious that this sort of arrangement has a mutual benefit - the companies know that kids will react more strongly to, say, Lady Gaga than a balding divisional conglomerate head, and the celebrities can flatter themselves to think that they're anything other than a last-ditch attempt to save a firm from bankruptcy. It's a win-win for everybody, especially people who enjoy watching Alicia Keys hold a telephone that she doesn't really seem to care about very much.

Read More

Tweeting about social injustice is not enough for me

 

Alicia Keys plays live in Glasgow. 'A woman becomes a lioness when she sees her unborn child’s future juxtaposed with the horrors of the world.' Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/Getty Images for MTV

This year I spent my son’s sixth birthday protesting outside the Nigerian consulate in New York. Not the most conventional way to spend your child’s special day, I agree, but it was also the six-month anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and it didn’t seem right that this important story had fallen off the news.

I am overwhelmed with sympathy for the parents – I don’t know what I would do or how I would be feeling if I were in their shoes. Eleven parents have since diedand several are in hospital suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of this awful experience.

As for the girls, according to Human Rights Watch, many kidnapped by Boko Haram have been beaten, raped, made to kill and subjected to other unspeakable atrocities. And as if Nigerians have not suffered enough, now comes news of abomb in a school in Yobe in the north-east of the country, detonated during the school’s assembly and killing at least 47 people and injuring scores of others. Boko Haram is again the suspect. As a mother, this cruel bombing leaves me heartbroken about the pain the parents must be feeling. But as someone with a huge platform to reach people it makes me ask, how can I stand by and just watch that happen?

It’s not enough for me to tweet and go on news shows talking about my work. I want to be in the thick of it, to draw attention to things I believe are wrong. I hope my involvement can send a strong message that the global community has not forgotten about the Nigerian girls.

Over the summer, a friend asked me the existential question, why are you here? From the process of asking others the same question I realised that if you can define why you are here, then you have discovered your purpose. I went off and wrote the song We Are Here. It resonates with the way many of us feel at the moment: the world is out of balance and terrible brutality is coming at us all the time in our news feeds. That was followed by the idea of galvanising fans of my music into a social movement which could become part of a 21st-century peace initiative.

My awareness of social injustice became more apparent after I became a mother, and now I am pregnant with my second child. A woman becomes a lioness when she sees her unborn child’s future juxtaposed with the horrors of the world. On the one hand things are surprisingly positive, my generation and the one after mine want to change things. We see no international borders because of the internet, we are more global and more savvy.

On the other hand there appears to be more violence and a refusal to accept we are all equal and deserve the same rights and privileges. Why, for example, is there such an obscene economic gap whereby 85 people have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the global population? Surely it is time to re-evaluate our economic priorities? If we can bail out Wall Street why can’t we bail out the poor? Drop their debts and give them hope.

It is not just people in Nigeria, Sudan or Gaza who have been failed by their governments. For those of us who live in the US, social and racial injustice is glaringly obvious from the incarceration rate of people of colour and the huge amounts of money being pumped into the prison system. This is a country that has a huge legacy of racial inequality and brutality. And the scars run especially deep for those who know very well that at a certain point in their history their family were slaves. Then, there is the issue of gun safety. In the US, 86 people die from guns each day. I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and saw a lot of mental illness, which I think also raised my concern about healthcare.

It is up to us to realise that if we put equality and human rights at the core of our value system, then change is possible. But we need to know what steps to take to really effect the change we believe in. Education, for example, is a vital opportunity for the poor – in Nigeria and elsewhere – and we must fight for it.

I know critics will say that people like me should stick to making records. But musicians are voters too. We are artists and we are human, alive to what is going on around us. We seem to be able to connect to millions of people who have either lost faith in the system or who need to feel a part of a community. Music has an uncanny way of getting to people’s emotions. And when we listen to music it is as if the consciousness changes around us. I intend to keep on speaking out, as do a number of my peers. We feel it is our duty to use our fame for something bigger than empty things.

Read More

Alicia Keys laments 'heartless' justice system in reform pitch to Congress

‘We can no longer afford to be this cruel to our young’ singer-songwriter tells congressional staffers at event with Senator Cory Booker and activist Van Jones

 

Keys said of the US criminal justice system: ‘People are not assumed to be innocent, they’re assumed to be guilty.’ Photograph: Jackie Brown/Splash News/Corbis

On Monday, the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys chose a decidedly low-key way to do this, delivering an impassioned plea to staffers on Capitol Hill, where Congress is weighing landmark legislation to reform the criminal justice system.

Keys spoke not as the recipient of multiple Grammy awards, nor as an international superstar of more than a decade. She addressed the crowd as a mother.

Keys had just arrived from Baltimore, where protests were sparked earlier this year after Freddie Gray, an unarmed 25-year-old black man, died in police custody. Keys had spent hours on Monday meeting the families of those who had been incarcerated, in some cases parents who saw their children tried as adults at ages as young as 15.

“Nowhere in the rest of the western world are juveniles being tried as adults, or even worse, sentenced to life sentences without parole,” she said. “Is this who we are now? Is this who we want to be?

“These are just regular boys and girls, trying to find their way.”

Joining Keys were Senator Cory Booker, one of the leading proponents of criminal justice reform, and civil rights activist Van Jones. Booker, from New Jersey, is a member of a bipartisan Senate group that in September reached a compromise that aims to lower mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders and reform a justice system that disproportionately impacts minorities, particularly African Americans.

In an interview with the Guardian after the event, Keys underscored the urgency of the moment following a year marked by national demonstrations over race relations and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“We need to take that momentum and utilize it,” she said. “We’re losing lives, stopping lives.”

Reflecting on her meetings in Baltimore, she said she had been struck by the different trajectories among the youth she encountered.

One young man had been given the opportunity to go to a high school that propelled and supported him, turned around his grades and helped him become the first member of his family to go to college. One girl had gone to prison when she was 14.

“It’s the opportunity or the lack of that makes all the difference in the world,” she said. “It really has the potential to change everything.”

Last year, Keys launched the We Are Here movement, to push for social justice on a wide range of national and international issues including racial inequity in the US. She has also supported Cut50, an organization co-founded by Jones that seeks to reduce the prison population by 50% over the next 10 years.

On Capitol Hill, Keys urged attendees to sign an online petition that would be delivered to the White House once it reached 1m signatures.

Criminal justice reform was “extremely urgent”, she told the Guardian, pointing to a limited window of time to mount pressure on lawmakers. Asked how escalating tensions between police officers and minorities factored into her message, she said it was no surprise that communities of color lacked trust in law enforcement.

“One of the most important things that I saw [in Baltimore] was people are guilty before they’re even proven innocent,” Keys said. “They’re not assumed to be innocent, they’re assumed to be guilty.

“Who would have trust when you’re attacked, and when you’re not given the opportunity to express yourself? When you’re just automatically judged that you’re there doing something wrong, whether you are or not.”

She expressed a similar message in her formal remarks, emphasizing the need to show more compassion toward minority youth.

Every teenager makes mistakes, Keys pointed out. She certainly did, she said, as had everyone gathered in the room when they were teenagers. Keys recounted stories she had heard of those who grew up in environments in which one mistake could change an entire life.

“Fourteen years old and tried as an adult. Sixteen years old and tried as an adult,” she said. “We can no longer afford to be this cruel to our young ... It’s heartless.”

The criminal justice bill in the Senate, which cleared a committee vote last month, will not resolve every problem. But it would be the most significant federal action in decades. It also has the backing of the White House, where Barack Obama has made criminal justice reform a pillar of his second-term agenda.

Booker said Keys and others like her could play a “very powerful role” in helping to bolster the message, drawing on the involvement of artists like Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Booker told the Guardian the proposed criminal justice reforms would save billions in taxpayer dollars, lower crime and, more importantly, elevate potential in communities most deeply impacted by tough-on-crime laws.

“We are conducting our criminal justice system in a way that is incredibly expensive, it’s not making us more safe, and it’s just destroying human potential,” Booker said.

Booker said he was pleased by the rare consensus across both parties in favor of reforming the system, but cautioned against complacency.

“This will be a long road. It’s going to be an every single day effort,” he said. “And we’ve got to keep the pressure on.”

Read More