Amerie: Miss Congeniality
By: Serena Kim

July 14, 2005

She’s addicted to the tabloids, obsessed with control, and determined to be a diva. But is there more to AMERIE than the beauty contestant poise, exotic looks, and angelic voice? Serena Kim investigates the scandal-less star.

Photographs by Michelangelo Di Battista 

Music is not about singing the right notes. It’s a connection thing. And it’s.... Why are you laughing at me?” asks Amerie Rogers over a plate of crab cakes. “Your eyes are red, and you look like you’re about to bust out laughing.” “No, I’m drunk,” you say between nervous giggles, sipping on your second rum and Coke. “Ohhh. Is that what happens?” Amerie says, her eyes quizzical. She’s taking advantage of a little downtime from her promo tour inside a nondescripthotel restaurant in Charlotte, N.C. “Let me tell you!” she exclaims. “I did a photo shoot, and my manager was like, ‘Did you notice the dude was high?’ I was like, No, I didn’t know that. He was like, ‘Yeah, his eyes were puffy and glazed over.’”

“That’s nothing,” you say, remembering the time you interviewed a DJ while on ’shrooms.

“What are ’shrooms’?” Amerie asks, as if she’s trying to pronounce a foreign word, elongating the o’s.

“Oh, they’re hallucinogenic mushrooms. When you take them, you hallucinate and have revelations about life,” you say. “It’s kinda like when Buddhist monks meditate to achieve nirvana, but it’s a shortcut.”

“What do you mean by nirvana?” asks Amerie.

“It’s kinda like what you were saying about why you loved performing, about how you were yourself to the 10th degree but without all the hard work,” you respond.

“So five years from now, if you see me on Behind the Music and I’ve become some kind of drug addict, it’ll be your fault,” Amerie says with a straight face. “Won’t that make you feel bad?”

Maybe so, but it’s hard to believe that during Amerie’s college years, she’d never heard of ’shrooms. Then again, that’s the kind of sheltered lifestyle 27-year-old Amerie has had on her path to divadom. “I never had a rebellious period,” she says. Though she’s the “exotic” combination of Korean and black, she’s really the all-American ideal; she doesn’t drink, smoke, or curse, never gains weight, and prays before every meal. She makes you want to shake her modelsized frame and shout, “What are your vices, woman?” But it dawns on you with terrifying clarity that Amerie’s vice is, in fact, her vicelessness. The “1 Thing” is no thing.

This frustration comes largely from the pressure on celebrity journalists to dig deep into their subject’s lives, find the scandal, expose the flaw. Artists are just like you and me, right! But are they? With their drug addictions, their pedophilia scandals, and their domestic pistol-whipping, celebrities aren’t like us at all. They’re rich, they’re famous; they’re difficult and sensitive. They have nervous breakdowns. And that’s mainly because artists like Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, and Mariah Carey are, well, artists.

But Amerie offers an alternate celebrity paradigm: a Disney version of an R&B diva, a tireless entertaining machine, impervious to the temptations of fame and fortune, who produces a gleaming smile for every photo op and a cheerful signature for every autograph seeker. “I feel like I give a lot when I’m around people,” she says. “Like, I don’t like to say no to autographs. I don’t like to say no to my fans ever.”

But don’t confuse her good-girl naiveté with being air-headed. Vicelessness for Amerie is a form of control. It’s what she expects from herself, and it’s what she wishes she could assure in others. Leave nothing to chance. Order is primary. When her sister Angela, 26, leaves her flip-flops splayed out in a dance studio, Amerie will stop rehearsal to set them straight. When eating dinner out, she monitors the butter intake of her manager, Lenny Nicholson, like a hawk.

Amerie went above and beyond conceptualizing a video treatment for “1 Thing”; she meticulously drew up a storyboard. “I’m anal to the point where nothing goes without my approval,” she says. “The cereal boxes in my house all face the same direction.”

Spend any amount of time with Amerie, and you’ll begin to realize how her desire for a pristine, orderly world translated into how she manages her career and relationships. “I’m a Capricorn, and Capricorns are control freaks,” she says.

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