15 Things you don’t know about Alicia Keys

1. Her debut album, Songs in A Minor, sold over 12 million copies worldwide. The same album garnered her five Grammy Awards in 2002
2. Throughout her career she has sold over 35 million albums and 30 million singles worldwide
3. She is listed on VH1’s VH1 top 100 Greatest Artists of All Time list
4. Alicia Keys’ mother is of Italian, Scottish and Irish descent. Her her father is Jamaican.
5. She was raised by a single mother
6. Throughout her childhood, Keys was sent to music and dance classes by her mother.


7. She dropped out of college to pursue her musical career full-time.
8. During an interview with Blender magazine, Keys allegedly said “‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other, ‘gangsta rap’ didn’t exist” and went on to say that it was created by “the government”. The magazine also claimed she said that Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. were “essentially assassinated, their beefs stoked by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing”.
9. During the time of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the couple had their union and their unborn child blessed in a Zulu ceremony, which took place in the Illovo suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa.
10. She is BlackBerry’s Global Creative Director
Keys incorporates piano into a majority of her songs and often writes about love, heartbreak and female empowerment
Her music inspirations are Prince, Nina Simone, Barbra Streisand, Marvin Gaye, Quincy Jones, Donny Hathaway and Stevie Wonder.
She is the co-founder and Global Ambassador of Keep a Child Alive, a non-profit organization that provides medicine to families with HIV and AIDS in Africa.
She recorded a song together with Eve called “Speechless” which is dedicated to her son
Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz had a wedding celebration on the French island of Corsica on July 2010