It's 1998. Keyshia Cole is 16 and on her own. She should be in the 10th grade.
Brandy and Monica are big with "The Boy Is Mine." Janet Jackson has "I Get So Lonely." It's been more than a decade since the start of the crack tsunami, and the Oakland Unified School District has experienced triple-digit increases of assaults, sex offenses, and drug and alcohol offenses. Clinton cops to Lewinsky. The hot new show is HBO's Sex and the City.
Keyshia walks in to a West Oakland recording studio at about two in the morning. Alicia Keys is at work in one of the rooms, as is D'wayne Wiggins of the recently disbanded East Oakland R&B group Tony! Toni! Tone!
There is a hazy, after-hours vibe in the place. Somebody says Keyshia wants to get on the mic. The "young lady sound good," they say. Keyshia sings a song now lost to legend, then she leaves. Wiggins wakes up at dawn and listens to the track. He asks the room, "Who was that chick who was here last night?"
Now it's 2007, and here's what we know about "that chick" Keyshia Cole. She's an American Music Award-nominated singer-songwriter whose second album, the much-anticipated Just Like You (Imani/Geffen), has just been released. Keyshia's a platinum-recording artist - and it's no easy feat in this era of digital downloading to sell more than one-and-a-half million copies of any album, even one as deeply felt as Keyshia's 2005 The Way It Is. Her "Love" song was painful to listen to, but it was also huge - rising to No. 3 on Billboard's R&B/Hip Hop chart. Then, in 2006, with Sean "Diddy" Combs, Keyshia had the biggest pop hit of her career (to that point) with "Last Night" (Bad Boy). She also stars in a highly rated BET reality show (Keyshia Cole" The Way It Is) in which the "reality" is her life. Keyshia has a reputation for being a magically emotive live performer and often plays to sold-out crowds. Keyshia Cole, everyone says, is Mary J. Blige's heir apparent.
So, okay: But who is Keyshia Cole?
Keyshia Cole is an Oakland type of chick. And I'm one who might know a little something about that.
Keyshia came up in East Oakland off of 84th Avenue and East 14th Street. I claim 83rd and East 14th, and so can my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. For the first 27 years of my life, I never left Oakland except for Los Angeles, so I didn't know to say that I "loved" Oakland, or that I'd ever "miss" Oakland, or that I was an Oakland type of chick. All I knew was that Oaktown (called that corruptively and affectionately) was wide-open, dangerous, sometimes pretty, and ferocious with crack and the seemingly cool, vicious, sweet guys who sold it in small and sometimes big ways.
Sixteen years separate Keyshia and me, as well as the circumstances of our upbringings (though, of course, we all have our crosses to bear) but she - with her grimy sweetness, underdog mentality, and what can only be called a reflexive stank attitude - reminds me of the girls I ran around with when I was young and living in Oakland, trying to figure out how to get out of - but still be of - the 'Town.
To read the rest of this cover story, cop VIBE's December 2007 issue, on stands now! Or keep VIBE locked, as we roll it out, piece by piece, paragraph by paragraph, over the next couple weeks.
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