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.
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?’”