FEATURE:
Groovelines
Aaliyah – More Than a Woman
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BECAUSE 25th August…
IN THIS PHOTO: Aaliyah visiting Berlin on 14th May, 2000/PHOTO CREDIT: Mika Väisänen
marked twenty years since we lost Aaliyah, I wanted to include one of her finest songs in Groovelines. It is heartbreaking to think how far she could have gone had she lived – aged twenty-two, she was killed in a plane crash. My favourite song of hers is More Than a Woman. It was a posthumous chart-topper (released on 29th October, 2002) than showcased what could have come from the New York-born star. I am going to bring in an article that collates the critical reception of a magnificent song. Before then, Freaky Trigger dove deep into More Than a Woman back in 2016:
“Implicitly, it’s Static Major we have to thank for the song’s lushness, breaking off from Aaliyah’s two previous Timba-produced tracks, the playful “Try Again”, garlanded with acid squelches, and the bubbling, desperate paranoia of “We Need A Resolution”. Brilliant, but emotionally ugly and self-lacerating, that song had been only a modest hit. After finishing the vampire flick, Aaliyah shot a video in the Bahamas for a more conventional follow-up, gorgeous R&B sex jam “Rock The Boat”. She took a plane back to the States. It crashed on take-off. All nine aboard died.
Posthumous hits by rock stars tend to come under particular scrutiny – listened to a little harder with hindsight, whether for fatal signs (“Love Will Tear Us Apart”) or unbearable, poignant hope (“Just Like Starting Over”). Aaliyah escaped this: she died like Buddy Holly had, in a sudden, stupid accident, and with a similar sense of might-have-been. “Rock The Boat” was a big, deserved hit; there’s no darkness in it, and it can stand as a celebration of a remarkable woman.
But it was “More Than A Woman”, released months after her death, in the chill of winter, that performed better, in the UK at least. And even when you’ve filtered out tragic coincidence and cinematic pantomime, this song does contain a darkness.
It hides in the track’s opulence. While “Rock The Boat” is honestly and happily about the joy of sex, “More Than A Woman” is about its promise. The juddering bassline, the luscious swirl of the string sample, and more of Timbaland’s low-end blurts, make for a heady, overpowering combination even before Aaliyah starts singing. When she does, she adds to the sense of sensual derangement, with multi-tracked vocal lines first overlapping and echoing each other (“Tempt me (tempt me), drive me (drive me)”), then ad libbing around the chorus and pushing it to the background, and finally – after the “Do you wanna” middle eight – being back-masked into a series of spectral gasps which haunt the mix at the back of the final chorus.
This fusion of vocal and production effects isn’t exactly foreign to early 00s pop – it’s similar to what I’ve been praising about Britney Spears tracks. But here it works differently, because Aaliyah is such a poised, controlled singer. She sounds neither incorporated into the production machine (like Britney) or using it to amplify her force (like early Beyonce). Instead – like all their tracks together – she treats Timbaland’s production as a space to play in, curling vocal lines around the hooks and beats. It was a role that could showcase her emotional range without her ever needing to overplay her hand and belt the songs out. On the tracks with more overtly experimental production Aaliyah could work as an anchor, teaching you how to feel about the sound-world unfolding around you. On “More Than A Woman” she gets to be the source of the strangeness herself.
And of the darkness. As the song unfolds, the relationship becomes more clearly an obsessive one, intoxicating but illicit. The markers are there from the start – “morning massages / new bones in your closet”, in the lyric’s best moment – and they only rise. “Chase me, leave me / There’s still no separation” coos Aaliyah – a verse later and she’s comparing them to Bonnie and Clyde. Like the entwining and retwining vocal lines, the lyrics intensify “More Than A Woman”, hint at a core of the uncanny and unhealthy in the song”.
Recently, news emerged that Aaliyah’s albums will be available on Spotify (her debut, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, was already there). Her excellent second album, One in a Million, was available from 20th August. As we have just marked twenty years since her death, there is going to be a lot of new interest around her music. I wonder whether there will be reissues of her albums and anything in the way of posthumous inspection. Whilst there were some mixed reviews for More Than a Woman , many were very positive:
“James Poletti from Dotmusic gave the song a mixed review; he praised the song's production by saying it was one of Timbaland's finest productions but he felt that "More Than a Woman" was a lesser song compared to Aaliyah's previously released singles. Overall he felt that the song did justice to Aaliyah's legacy and that "It reminds us that Aaliyah was a truly contemporary soul performer and will be sorely missed". In a review of Aaliyah's eponymous album, Luke McManus from the Irish publication RTE compared "More Than a Woman" to the work of French electronic music duo Daft Punk and praised her voice on the song as well. When reviewing Aaliyah, British publication NME described "More Than a Woman" as being "grandiose".
Brad Cawn from Chicago Tribune felt that Aaliyah had matured content wise and he described the song as being a "Mid-tempo come-on". Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine felt that the song would make the perfect theme song for a cartoon. Cinquemani stated, "If the beyond-burgeoning actress was ever approached to play a cartoon superhero, the synth-heavy “More Than a Woman,” with its millennium-ready empowerment and sensitive vocals, would make the perfect theme song for the fictional vixen (“You go, I go/’Cause we share pillows”)". Joshua Clover from Spin praised the song saying, "'More Than a Woman' isn't the Bee Gees song but pushes the jumpy tune until, finally, it meets you in the doorway (or is that the dance floor or the bed room?)". Quentin B. Huff from PopMatters praised the production of the song saying, "The production bumps and jerks, contrasting a smooth groove with the spikes and dips of its loops and cadences". He also felt that "Aaliyah manages to croon over this mechanical bull of a beat, and the lyrics are appropriately terse and frugal, as if she only needs a few key phrases to remind her significant other that she is in fact "more than enough for you”.
I am going to wrap up in a minute. Whilst it is sad Aaliyah is no longer with us, we have her incredible music. More Than a Woman is just one of the many original and timeless songs that will influence artists and listeners years from now. Last year, The Guardian named it as their fifty-sixth-favourite U.K. number one single. It is an amazing and compelling track from an artist who is…
VERY much missed.