Alicia Keys is celebrating her song with JAY-Z, “Empire State of Mind,” hitting one billion streams by teasing a new track with Hova.
The “If I Ain’t Got You” singer took to Instagram on Saturday (June 15) and shared a black and white clip of her and JAY-Z standing in front of bright lights before epic orchestral music crescendoes.
Keys captioned her post: “1 Dream. 1 Song. 1 Billion streams [three prayer hand emojis]. Thank you! We love you. What’s next….[eyes emoji, shushing emoji].”
She later took to X (formerly Twitter), where she shared a photo of two performance microphones — one with the initial “J,” the other labeled “AK.”
While she left the photo uncaptioned, she tagged CBS and Roc Nation, indicating that a surprise televised special may be in the works.
Check out both posts below.
— Alicia Keys (@aliciakeys) June 16, 2024
Despite the song’s success, it didn’t change everyone’s life for the better.
Back in March, Lil Mama opened up about her infamous crashing of the duo’s VMAs performance back in 2009. She made it clear that the fallout afterwards left her “hurt.”
That’s the confession she made during an interview on The Jay Hill Network, wherein she also revealed that the subsequent backlash took a serious toll on her mental health.
“Yeah, in the beginning, I was hurt,” she began. “Tyrese called my phone as soon as I got home. He was like, ‘Bro, you didn’t tell me you was performing!’ First of all, my heart is racing. I’m already mad embarrassed.
“I had to deal with Ed Lover on the radio in the morning, Wendy Williams, Angie Martinez, who talked to JAY, and he was just like, ‘Yeah, you know. I didn’t like it.’ He was so angry, and I was just trying my best to do everything I could do. After a while, I was like, ‘Forgive yourself, bro. Move forward.’”
She continued: “Bro, I was hurt. I was depressed. I was like, ‘Yo, what’s going on?’ And then you got everybody telling you, ‘You’re doing bad.’ People pointing at you, like, ‘What did you do?’”
Back in 2009, Alicia Keys teamed up with JAY-Z to perform their hit song “Empire State of Mind” at the MTV VMAs.
Lil Mama was, apparently, so moved by the performance that she hopped onstage to serve as the unofficial hypeman — even as Hov’s wife, Beyoncé, unsuccessfully tried to stop her from becoming a Twitter trending topic by repeatedly yanking her arm.
Despite Lil Mama becoming the punchline of many jokes afterward, Keys told The Morning Hustle in October 2021 that she wasn’t even aware of the rapper’s presence.
“Listen, to this day, I truly never knew she was even on the stage — that’s the craziest part of the whole thing for me,” she said. “I was on that stage, [JAY-Z] was in the middle, she was on the other side of Jay, and I never saw her.”
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mental illness
Good to see Hov salvaged something from that garbage ass Blueprint 3 album.