FEATURE:
Groovelines
Aaliyah - Try Again
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THIS phenomenal track…
turned twenty-five on 26th March. Aaliyah’s Try Again was a single taken from the soundtrack of Romeo Must Die. That film, where Aaliyah starred alongside Jet Li, was not especially well received. However, Aaliyah was a fine actor and there was this huge promise. You could have imagined future roles that saw her act in coming-of-age stories, Black comedies and socially gritty films that would have made her this esteemed actor. Unfortunately, Aaliyah died in a plane crash on 25th August, 2001 on her way from The Bahamas following filming of the music video for Rock the Boat. That single was included on her eponymous album – released just over a month before she died. Try Again was included as a bonus track on international editions of Aaliyah. Losing such an amazing artist at the age of twenty-two, it was a huge shock! Redefining contemporary R&B and Hip-Hop, Aaliyah was dubbed the ‘Princess of R&B’ and ‘Queen of Urban Pop’. Her legacy was enormous. Artists including Beyoncé inspired by her. Try Again is one of her most popular songs. Produced by Timbaland and written by Timothy Mosley and Stephen Garrett, the song was a huge international chart success. I am going to get to some features around Try Again. First, here is some information about the reception for Try Again:
“Robert Hilburn from the Los Angeles Times gave a mixed review of the song saying, Toni Braxton "would have brought more vocal presence to this smash from the Romeo Must Die soundtrack, but Aaliyah does express the youthful optimism of co-writer-producer Timbaland's gently taunting ode to romantic resilience".[42] In his review of Romeo Must Die: The Album, Christopher O'Conner from MTV News said "It's been a long time/ We shouldn't have left you/ Without a dope beat to step to, Timbaland proclaims in his murky voice as the electronica fuzz bass of "Try Again" kicks off the album. He's not bold. He's not out of line. He's just honest. And he's right". Music Week labeled the song as a "funky uptempo workout" and highlighted its early on radio support. Stephen Dalton from NME mentioned that the songs production was "veering increasingly close to the far fringes of left-field electronica", and that it wouldn't "sound out of place in an underground German techno club".
Renee Bell from Radio & Records said "Try Again" "shows a more mature Aaliyah", and explained that its "positive and encouraging lyrics move the single up the chart, and it continues to receive much love from radio. Who says sex sells? Not all the time". Bell's colleague Rob Neal felt that Aaliyah "hasn't missed a beat" and that her "smooth vocals, along with Timbaland's trade-mark production, are a hit for the urban audience. Neal also praised the song's lyrical content saying, "An encouraging message with clean lyrics and an uptempo beat make this song a winner in three different areas". While reviewing Romeo Must Die: The Album, The Ledger said that Aaliyah steals the show on the soundtrack and that she "makes 'Try Again' and 'Are You Feelin' Me?' soft and sexy" Writers from Variety concluded that Aaliyah "demonstrates her confidence in love" on the song”.
I would advise people to read about Aaliyah. Such an incredible artist who has inspired so many others, I would point you in the direction of this article and this. This article from 2012 discusses how Aaliyah’s influence is everywhere. Before getting to some more in-depth analysis of Try Again, in 2023, producer Timbaland revealed that Try Again – or its incredible sound – was sort of a ‘mistake’:
“Timbaland has revealed one of his biggest hit records, Aaliyah’s “Try Again,” was made by mistake.
During his sit-down conversation with the I AM Hip-Hop podcast, Timbo explained how playing around with his keyboard led to creating the hit 2001 record, which served as a bonus track off Aaliyah’s self-titled third and final album. It was also released as the lead single off the soundtrack to the 2000 film Romeo Must Die.
“I was playing with the keyboard and it was a mistake, and my engineer Jimmy Douglass caught it,” he said. “I said ‘Jimmy did you catch that lil rhythm?’ [and] he said ‘I sure did. So [after] he caught it and played it back, I put the beat on it. I said ‘Ooo chop it right there,’ and he chopped it right there.’”
The Virginia native also revealed the late Static Major wrote Aaliyah’s verse and that Jay-Z told him the record was a hit. However, it took Timbo some convincing as he wasn’t sure of the track’s success at the time.
“When Jay-Z came in the studio he was like ‘Oh my God,’ and then I was like, ‘yeah we got one,’” Timbaland said.
Timbaland surely did have “one” with the song as it rose to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the first track to do so strictly off airplay as it wasn’t commercially released in the United States. It also peaked at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Airplay, No. 3 on the Mainstream Top 40 and No. 4 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts.
If that weren’t enough, “Try Again” was also nominated for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards, and the accompanying Wayne Isham-directed music video won two MTV Video Music Awards in 2000”.
I want to move to a very in-depth feature from Stereogum. Try Again was a number one in the U.S. in June 2000. This feature explores the background and lead-up to Try Again and beyond that: the legacy Aaliyah left. She changed so much in her short life. Such a distinct and instantly memorable song, Try Again is still played widely to this day:
“The coolest person in the world. In the last few years of her way-too-short life, that was Aaliyah. I can’t think of any other way to describe her. Aaliyah made futuristic brain-scramble music, and she did it on a huge stage, helping introduce wild and psychedelic new sounds to the mainstream. But Aaliyah never made a big deal about the way that she updated the pop-music vocabulary. Instead, she found ways to float effortlessly over non-Euclidian alien soundscapes, making them sound as natural as a shrug or a sigh.
Aaliyah could sing, and she could sing in ways that most of her ’90s R&B peers never even attempted. While the rest of the R&B landscape was locked in a melisma arms race, everyone competing to see who could sing the most notes, Aaliyah flattened her delivery out into a pillowy glide. There was never any sweat in her sound. Instead, her voice was an ethereal flicker that fully internalized the twists and turns of the strange new tracks that she chose.
Aaliyah’s cool went far beyond her power as a musician. She was beautiful enough to stop your heart, and she did interesting things with her beauty, carrying it with a sense of adventurous poise. The people who worked with Aaliyah have always remarked on her lack of ego, her collaborative verve. She seemed to enjoy her fame, even though she’d been exploited in every way that a person could be exploited. When Aaliyah died, she’d already left a deep impact on pop music, and she was standing on the precipice of movie stardom, too. There’s no telling what she could’ve become if she hadn’t boarded that overloaded plane in 2001.
tatic Major and Timbaland wrote “Try Again,” and Timbaland produced it. Static’s original lyrical idea was that “Try Again” should be about the importance of persistence. But Barry Hankerson, still managing Aaliyah, told him that it had to be a love song, so Static reworked the lyrics. You can kind of tell. The chorus, presumably unchanged, riffs on the old cliché about trying again if at first you don’t succeed. The verses make vague allusions to some kind of romantic situation, and they’re a little slapdash. Aaliyah still sells them. Her narrator is into somebody, but she’s not willing to give in to her feelings fully. She wants this other person to keep courting her, but she won’t commit to anything: “This ain’t a yes, this ain’t a no/ Just do your thing, we’ll see how we go.” Maybe she’s stringing this other person along. Maybe she just hasn’t made up her mind yet. Either way, it seems totally plausible that this other person would want to keep trying.
On a song like “Try Again,” though, the lyrics are entirely secondary. It’s the sound that hooks you. When Timbaland made the “Try Again” track, he was in a whole other zone, seemingly reinventing his style from one song to the next. On the “Try Again” intro, Tim lays out his intentions: “It’s been a long time; we shouldn’t have left you without a dope beat to step to.” With that line, Tim paraphrases something that rap god Rakim had said on Eric B. & Rakim’s 1987 single “I Know You Got Soul.” (Eric B. & Rakim’s only charting Hot 100 single, 1992’s “Juice (Know The Ledge),” peaked at #96. They also guested on Jody Watley’s 1989 hit “Friends,” which peaked at #9. That’s an 8.) With that quote, Timbaland paid tribute to a rap elder, and he also made sure to point out the dopeness of his own beat.
Tim actually hadn’t made anyone wait a long time without a dope beat to step to. He was making dope beats all the time in the late ’90s and early ’00s. But if Tim wanted to draw attention to what he’d done on “Try Again,” then fair enough. The “Try Again” beat is something special. It starts out with echoed-out hi-hats coming in from all sides, as extremely synthetic strings and horns recall the burnished-steel gleam of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score. The drums come in from odd angles — some sounds seemingly played backwards, others hitting at irregular intervals. Tim layers his own murmured, echoing hypeman vocals all over the beat, making himself a part of his own textured track. When the beat kicks in, it’s driven by the same kind of wriggling 909 bassline that drove so many Detroit techno and acid house classics.
There are sonic ideas all over “Try Again”: ghostly wandering sitars, eerie synth whistles, Tim doing the “vicky-vicky” DJ-scratch imitation that he always loved so much. Given all that, you’d think that “Try Again” was a domineering dancefloor track, but that’s not really what it is. Instead, “Try Again” is all insinuating atmosphere. It winds and wafts its way through the air like incense smoke. Timbaland and Aaliyah’s vocals are narcotically understated. Aaliyah breezes through Tim’s sound effects. She’s an island of self-assurance in all that nervous rhythmic play. She’s fully locked in with Timbaland; I love the blithe ease of her “you don’t wanna throw it all away” bit.
The other night, I got high, threw “Try Again” on in my headphones, and took my dogs out for a walk. It might’ve been the highlight of my week. “Try Again” casts a spell. It wiggles and worms and darts and hiccups. Sometimes, the track sounds like it’s breathing, with all sorts of gasps and sighs from both Tim and Aaliyah showing up everywhere. But the groove never dominates the melody. Instead, melody and groove support each other, blurring into one another until it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. “Try Again” doesn’t really have a bridge, and it repeats its chorus a whole lot of times. In most cases, that would come across as lazy songwriting. With “Try Again,” it’s different. Every new chorus repetition is just an invitation to bask in that sonic world for a few seconds longer. It’s a strange, striking, beautiful song. I loved it in 2000, and I love it now.
Wayne Isham, the veteran glam-rock director, made the “Try Again” video. Nothing much happens in the clip. There’s a room full of mirrors and floating platforms, and Jet Li and Aaliyah dance with each other via Hong Kong wire-work. But Aaliyah, rocking an extremely sparkly bra/choker situation, brings her strange angular star power to every frame she’s in. She’d come a long way from the baggy leather jeans and skullies that she’d been rocking a few years earlier. Here, her swagger comes across as pure glamor.
When “Try Again” reached #1, it became a significant pop-chart first. At the time, “Try Again” hadn’t come out commercially as a single. Billboard had always used a combination of single sales and airplay to figure out the Hot 100. Through most of the ’90s, the magazine wouldn’t list songs that weren’t available as singles. Even after that rule changed, songs that weren’t singles were at a distinct chart disadvantage. “Try Again” still broke through to become the first-ever airplay-only #1 hit. (After the song reached the top, Virgin pressed up a vinyl single.)
More importantly, though, “Try Again” is the first Timbaland production to reach #1. Tim had made plenty of hits, but his imitators, producers like Rodney Jerkins and Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs, had broken through on the Hot 100 first. (Those Timbaland ripoffs were mostly pretty great, too. That’s just how cool that sound was.) “Try Again” proved that Timbaland wasn’t just a sonic pioneer; he was also a guy capable of making the biggest song in the country. Timbaland will appear in this column again, both as producer and lead artist. But “Try Again” was the only #1 hit from Tim’s true heyday as both a craftsman and an experimentalist.
Aaliyah wouldn’t get a chance to repeat what she’d done with “Try Again.” After Romeo Must Die, she flew to Australia to film her second movie, the vampire flick Queen Of The Damned. While working on the movie, she also recorded her third album, the self-titled LP that came out in July 2001. As far as I’m concerned, that album is Aaliyah’s masterpiece. It’s even spacier and slinkier than her past records, and it sounds more grown, more confident. Timbaland only produced three of the tracks on Aaliyah, but the feeling of those Aaliyah/Tim collabs is all over the LP”.
I want to end with an extract from an interview from Vanity Fair from 2021. Kathy Iandoli, author of Baby Girl: Better Known As Aaliyah, wanted to dispel myths around Aaliyah and flip the narrative. This is an artist that should be talked about more. There is one particular question and response that I wanted to highlight:
“What do you think it is about her as an artist and a person that has made her so continuously beloved and revered?
I think that she and her collaborators, like Missy, Timbaland, Static, they created a sound that wasn’t built for that decade. You can play that music now and it’s still relevant because what they were doing was so futuristic; it was eons ahead of what was going on. So I think sonically, there’s that. There is the whole allure, this mystique where you’re not able to access her music without actually burning it, and I think a lot of these kids, especially Gen Z, they’re not used to being told no. So keeping that in mind, they will go the extra mile to discover her because of that curiosity, because of that mystique. It brings on this curiosity for this new fan base. The other thing is, she passed away so young. Fans are discovering her while other fans have grown up with her. And then her fashion sense. Kudos to her eye but also Derek [Lee]. Everything Aaliyah wore then is still relevant now. Again, she was just years ahead of herself”.
The stunning Try Again is a song that I heard first around the time it came out in 2000. It still sounds fresh. Maybe it is that Timbaland production. I think it is the charisma, energy and cool that Aaliyah brings to the track! A once-in-a-generation talent, she has inspired so many – though few match her brilliance. Try Again is a moment of genius from…
A music icon.