The Princess of Queens

(2 of 2)

On The Diary of Alicia Keys she has made half a great record. The first six songs are models of how to make nostalgic music that is not anti-present. You Don't Know My Name is six minutes of sprawling midtempo lightness that revives that '70s staple, the spoken interlude, without a moment's embarrassment or doubt; Karma uses fraught bursts of strings over a stuttering beat to create great pop tension; while If I Was Your Woman sounds like the product of a one-night stand between Gladys Knight (who made a hit of If I Were Your Woman ) and the Notorious B.I.G. The second half of Diary sags, but it's obvious that there will be a third, fourth and fifth Alicia Keys album and that those albums will be worth hearing.

Meanwhile, Keys is working her songbook. While some performers get tired of playing their hits, Keys continues to look forward to the moment in every show when she gets to dust off Fallin' . "I drag it around like a damn badge of honor. So many people told me that that song in particular would never work. 'It's too urban, it's too black, it'll never cross over.' The fact that it was successful told me one thing: Nobody knows anything," she says. "A lot of those people who doubted are out of jobs now," she adds. Keys will be keeping hers.