When Aaliyah died on August 25, 2001 in a plane crash, she was 22 and ready to become the biggest pop star in the world. I remember her on the cover of the English magazine iD, as beautiful and fascinating as a Diana Ross of the new millennium. The article, accompanied by memorable photos of Matt Jones, spoke of her as the African American artist who was ready to conquer not only the charts but also the box office: a new album of hers had just been released, she was finishing the shooting of a film of vampires, The queen of the damned, and her look, which she called “street but sweet”, was overheard and swiped everywhere. Too bad that when that cover came out Aaliyah was already dead.
Aaliyah’s third and final album, titled Aaliyah and also known as “the red album”, it was released in July 2001 and it photographs her in her moment of grace and at the same time freezes her in time. It was an album full of promises, a forerunner of a thousand possible evolutions and instead it became, artistically, his grave.
Aaliyah was very young and very ambitious. As a singer he did not come from the gospel tradition and therefore he never relied on volume. It wasn’t one belts, a strong singer, but she was a soft performer, gifted with a small but clear and precise voice; a Diana Ross or a Minnie Riperton more than a Beyoncé or a Whitney Houston.
Aaliyah starts singing very early and too soon enters the entertainment industry, thanks to her uncle Barry Hankerson who, having sensed its potential, builds a small industry around her. Aaliyah was only 11 when she accompanied on stage Gladys Knight, a great star of Motown and ex-wife of her uncle, and was just 12 when she was signed by Jive Records and Blackground Records owned by Hankerson himself.
It is precisely her uncle who entrusts her, still a child, to R Kelly, already well known as a brilliant author and producer and already talked about as a dangerous sexual predator. At just 13, Aaliyah works on her first album with R Kelly who becomes morbidly attached to her, manipulates and sexualizes her in a way that today appears chilling but which in 1994 seemed normal to everyone. Even to his family.
Aaliyah Aveva swag, had the right moves, sang like a consummate diva and, in the videos, appeared with R Kelly dressed like him. Were they just pupil and teacher? Were they like brother and sister? Were they very, very friends? The public was unaware that there was a relationship between the two based on plagiarism (according to Vibe magazine they would even get married using false documents) and saw only a great complicity, a beautiful artistic understanding. Years later, in 2016, critic Jeff Sledge wrote on Vibe that Aaliyah’s debut album, which was also called Age ain’t nothing but a number (“Age is but a number”), it felt like “listening to an entire album of R Kelly sung by a little girl”. R Kelly continued his recording career and his parallel activity as a serial predator of minors, until on September 27, 2021 he was convicted of exploitation, kidnapping and abuse of minors.
Like so many other child stars before her, Aaliyah carried a heavy burden on her shoulders. The words of African American critic Margo Jefferson come to mind: “When it comes to gender roles, child stars play a double game,” writes Jefferson in his book. With Michael Jackson. “They are the male of the family: the food hunters, the economic pillar. But I am also the female: the aesthetic and sexual object that must remain young and attractive ”. Aaliyah was a money making machine for her family, for her uncle in particular but also for many of the people who gravitated around her. He was the male of the house because he brought the money but he was also the virgin to be given as a sacrifice to the dragon. And the dragon was not just R Kelly but an entire industrial chain that formed, used and ultimately killed her.
The only noteworthy biography published on Aaliyah is titled Baby girl: better known as Aaliyah and the American journalist Kathy Iandoli wrote it. It is not a good book from the point of view of music criticism but it is an excellent book from the point of view of the documentary. Iandoli reconstructs Aaliyah’s last hours and tells us about an exhausted girl, flown from Miami to the Bahamas to shoot a video and hurried back to the United States, once the shoot is over, to record new music in the studio.
At the time it was written that Aaliyah had died as a capricious diva: that she had wanted her entire entourage aboard a small plane and that she had basically died from overloaded baggage. In fact, the Cessna 402-B on which it was supposed to fly for just over an hour and a half from the Abaco Islands, where the video of Rock the boat, in Miami she was tiny and overloaded with luggage, equipment and passengers (eight other people died with her). What no one knew at the time, and which has been reconstructed over years of trials, is that Aaliyah didn’t want to get on that plane. She was terrified of flying with all those people and all that luggage. She and her entire crew of assistants, record companies and hairdressers spent hours on the dance floor without getting on the vehicle. And finally Aaliyah was loaded on board a few hours later in a state of unconsciousness. “He had a headache and took a sleeping pill,” was the explanation given by his management. The plane barely managed to take off to crash a few minutes later and catch fire killing all passengers. The investigations and trials (all reconstructed in too much detail in Kathy Iandoli’s book) were long and laborious but what emerges is simple: Aaliyah had to be in Miami in the evening to work and was flown on an inadequate vehicle, piloted by a man on whom traces of cocaine were found in the autopsy. To save money? To hurry? For carelessness? For willful misconduct? This can only be known only by Aaliyah’s managers who, however, were also her family to a large extent.
The fact that Aaliyah had died just a couple of weeks before the attack on the World trade center only fueled a distorted and somewhat consoling narrative of her death: the world is on fire and Aalyiah is an angel who has flown to heaven. too soon. End of the story. Even the funeral was not paid for by the family, who demanded that it be reimbursed by Virgin, the deceased’s record label, so much so that in the end it was singer Maxwell who, with extreme discretion, covered all the expenses.
Aaliyah’s red album is not her testament because a 22-year-old artist with a promising career ahead of her certainly doesn’t think about making a will. Yet it necessarily has something definitive: it fixes it at a precise moment in its history, that of the great leap towards true success. It’s like a still image of a perfect moment. In Aaliyah the stars had aligned: great producers (Timbaland, Buddha, Eric Seats, J. Dub, Rapture and Missy Elliott), great pieces (More than a woman, We need a resolution, Loose rap, Rock the boat) and a young artist to the fullest of her potential, capable of giving voice and flesh to different musical visions, even very courageous ones, with naturalness and charisma.
When it comes to pop productions, one often thinks that the singer, especially if a woman, is the least important part of the equation. All the credit for the success of certain characters seems to go to the authors, producers, videomakers, stylists and managers. Yet the strength of an album like Aaliyah it’s all in the presence, even spiritual, of the singer. In these pieces, especially those produced by Timbaland, his old and trusted collaborator from whom he was moving away, there is a perfect fusion of production, beat and personality of the singer. Without Aaliyah, without her style, without her soft but confident voice, without her personality evolving from child prodigy to mature artist, Timbaland could not have written We need a resolution O More than a woman. These pieces are haute couture, they are beautiful dresses made to measure just for her. Above all they are pieces in which the ex child prodigy, the ex nymphet, the ex victim, began to find her voice, she began to find what in feminist theory is called agency, that is, the ability (and independence) to act.
Try again it is the oldest track on the album, added as a bonus track in some editions. Timbaland composed it with Static Major and produced for Aaliyah in 1999. It is a classic rnb track in vocals and harmonies, but it incorporates a lot of electronic and dance elements. The chorus, in particular, is sampled, manipulated and hypnotically repeated in a loop. A radical solution that a star of those years, a Whitney Houston, a Mariah Carey or a Toni Braxton, would never have accepted. In a dance remix, perhaps, but not in a radio edit. Aaliyah, on the other hand, was young and loved to take risks: the producers felt they could dare with her and she was projected into the future. A future that unfortunately he would never have seen.
Aaliyah
Aaliyah
Virgin, 2001
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