Do we like Alicia Keys?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of speaking up for diversity, women and the planet, with one clumsy 2023 post as the only real stumble.
Alicia Keys grew up in Manhattan, raised by a single mum in Manhattan Plaza, and her story runs through Hell's Kitchen to the Broadway stage. Her 2024 musical Hell's Kitchen is loosely based on that childhood, and the new Tribeca documentary Girl From Hell's Kitchen retraces it, from the neighbourhood to Fallin' and Oprah.
The reviews of that doc were warm but a bit sceptical. TheWrap called it a celebratory companion piece rather than an intimate portrait. So don't expect a tell-all; it's Keys telling her own story, polished.
On the harm test, she's solid. At the 2025 Grammys, collecting the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award, she said “DEI is not a threat, it's a gift.” She didn't name Trump, though coverage read it as a reply to his anti-DEI push. Her critics online disagreed, but that's a position on diversity, not a harmful one.
She's been clear on the planet too. In a 2020 Guardian interview she said “We're literally killing our mother” and suggested climate deniers are largely driven by financial interests. In 2019 she played a surprise gig at the Stonewall Inn, 50 years after the uprising, and called for “Acceptance, tolerance, and equality” for all people. I couldn't find any harmful words about trans people or anyone else.
The one real stumble was October 2023. She posted a photo in a green racing jacket with a paragliding caption, and some social media users read it as a coded nod to Hamas. The group StopAntisemitism questioned it. She deleted the post and said it was “COMPLETELY unrelated” to the loss of innocent lives. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a clumsy caption or something worse; her explanation and the speed of the deletion point to the former.
The legal record is thin and old. Songwriter Earl Shuman sued in 2012, alleging Girl on Fire borrowed from his song Lonely Boy. The parties announced a settlement in April 2013 without saying what it involved. No court found against her.