POP MUSIC - Alicia Keys rebounds (from all of that success)

IT might not rank with JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" as a phrase for the ages, but when Alicia Keys looked out from the stage at the crowd of striking Writers Guild members at their Hollywood Boulevard rally and declared, "I'm a writer too," it sounded like a ringing plea for legitimacy that a star of her stature rarely has occasion to make.

This was a rare appearance by Keys in which the audience wasn't automatically in her corner, and there were even some murmurs of skepticism under the picket signs about this showbiz adornment preceding their afternoon march down the boulevard.

But as Keys and her band punched into her new song "Go Ahead," the glamorous diva gave way to union rabble-rouser, and her lyric easily transformed from romantic reprisal into bargaining-table shout-down: "What have you given me but lies lies. . . . Must be crazy if you think I'm gon' fall for this anymore, everybody say no no no no. . . . "

Soon even the skeptics were waving their arms and singing along on the funk-flavored tune, a chorus of defiance that must have pleased Keys, a performer rooted in the socially conscious music of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

"I like doing things like that. I think that it's important to have something to say, something to stand for," Keys had said a few hours earlier, fueling up for the day with an egg-white omelet and Throat-Coat tea.

"I think that all of my songs have a message. I think that I will get a little more overt about what the message is. I think at this point, I'm feeling around the ways to talk about it, the ways to describe what's going on around me and the things that I see. Maybe a little bit more like how U2 does it, where they will be very specific about a specific issue and specific plight and write a beautiful song about it, and you totally get it."

Keys' appearance at the rally also had a symbolic edge that might not have been obvious to anyone but her. Like her audience there, the singer has learned the importance of standing up for herself. She jokingly calls herself "Little Miss Transition," but the process of escaping the crushing weight of demands and expectations was serious business -- serious enough to stretch the gap between her last album and the new "As I Am" to four years and deep enough to make it the most edgy and urgent work of her seven-year career.