Album Review: Unplugged by Alicia Keys

Forget that it's awfully hard to call this live recording Unplugged. Unlike the early installments of the MTV series, which focused on a performer accompanied only with an acoustic guitar, resulting in unsurprisingly simple affairs, Alicia Keys' Unplugged is big, splashy, and immodest -- even if her guitarist is playing acoustic and she plays a piano, not a synth, the extra vocalists, horn section, strings, and full rhythm section complete with electric bass makes this anything but "unplugged. " But that doesn't really matter, since this is presented and marketed as a live album more than an acoustic record, and, as a live album, it's OK.

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