Alicia Keys-I found a sampler of her album, "The Life," that's supposed to drop sometime this summer. It includes five songs and was only a couple of bucks, so I decided to buy it. For those of you who don't know, she's supposed to be the next "phenom," you know the child prodigy, picked up an instrument as a fetus, musical genius who's supposed to be on some "nextra (I kinda coined that term, feel free to spread it)." Well, that's all well and nice, but I don't see how that talent is translating into good music. I mean, I only have five songs, so maybe she's saving the truly mindblowing material for the album, but I doubt it. What we have here in "Fallin'," the first song, is a track with classical piano--she was classically trained--and some drums with some singing; not by any means a bad song, but lacking a certain "damn girl, sing that song, play dem instruments" quality. She re-interprets a Prince song, "How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore," and does a nice job cuz she can sing, but I never saw the point of remakes that add nothing. I especially despise the somewhat canned drums in the background. The next song I simply can't remember, for it wasn't memorable. Oh yeah, her voice was really annoying on this one. You know those people who can sing, but they try too hard to "sang" and it doesn't work? Ditto. The next I actually like, it's cool; nice instrumentation and singing, but Isaac Hayes did arrange the strings. The last samples "Brooklyn Zoo," the Big Baby Jesus song, and is just fine, but you can tell that Jermaine Dupri had something to do with it. Well, in all, the sampler isn't bad. I did say that she can sing, quite well actually, and she did pretty much produce and write (did I mention that the lyrics aren't terrible?) everything, but it just didn't do it for me. I can see that her promotion team will give this album the ole army try so you will hear plenty of her when she drops and people will like it, rave even, but as for me, I'm picky and I want some "nextra."