FEATURE:
You Are That Somebody
Remembering the Pioneering and Extraordinary Aaliyah at Forty-Five
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BORN on 16th January, 1979…
IN THIS PHOTO: Aaliyah modelling for Tommy Hilfiger in 1997/PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Berliner/BEI/Shutterstock
the Princess of R&B, Aaliyah, sadly left us in 2001. Her eponymous and final album came out a mere matter of weeks before her death at the age of twenty-two. Born Aaliyah Dana Haughton, the New York artist has inspired so many others since she died. A true star and queen during her lifetime, the impact of her loss was huge. The music industry has not seen anyone like her. So many artists owe a debut to her. There have been plans for a long time to release a posthumous album, Unstoppable. How wise it would be I am not sure! Like so many posthumous albums, it is unreleased vocals and half-finished songs with modern artists on them. I think that it would be a mistake releasing a posthumous album that is going to be underwhelming. Leaving us with such an individual and strong album, there would be this tarnish and sense of disrespect if Unstoppable sees the light of day! I think that Aaliyah would hate to have her material out in the world without her blessing. In 2021, there were a lot of articles written about Aaliyah and her impact. Not only to mark twenty years since her death. It was also a look back twenty years since her remarkable eponymous album came out. Ahead of what would have been her forty-fifth anniversary, I am going to compile a playlist of Aaliyah’s best work, in addition to a selection of songs from artists influenced by her. I will end with a review of the magnificent Aaliyah album – one of the best and most influential R&B albums ever. I want to start with The Independent and their 2021 feature. They looked back at Aaliyah’s career and legacy twenty years after we lost her:
“Aaliyah’s passing was felt across generations, though her legacy has an almost otherworldly quality to it. For older fans, her death felt senseless, and the artist became iconised as a trailblazer whose life and career were cut short. For younger fans like me, she was shrouded in mystery, continuing to scoop awards and dominate the R&B charts well into the early 2000s, with “In Loving Memory” tributes tacked on to her posthumously released music videos. She remains widely referenced across hip-hop and R&B, with name-checks in songs by Jay-Z, Noname, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar and J Cole, even though it can feel like her legacy is less widely celebrated than it should be. As Gen-Z YouTuber Julia Boateng asked in a recent video: “Why doesn’t the industry talk about Aaliyah?”
And yet her legacy is a towering one. “Aaliyah is the blueprint,” says R&B singer Paloma Ford, of how the star’s career was something that artists would attempt to emulate for years after her death. Ford is among the countless number of singers – including Beyoncé, Rihanna and James Blake – who credit Aaliyah with having a formative influence on their work. “She’s still unmatched… The way she approached her records with her soft voice and confident lyrics is a major influence on my artistry.”
That delicate vocal is one of the standout aspects of Aaliyah’s short but influential career. The princess of R&B had already had an impressive career that spanned the entirety of the 1990s by the age of 22, having made her debut at 10 on a televised talent show called Star Search. She then made her debut in 1994 with Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, produced by her mentor R Kelly. But it was the follow-up album two years later, One In a Million, signed to Atlantic, that truly marked Aaliyah out as a star with a unique take on R&B. It had a bold, expansive vision, with tracks effortlessly bouncing from trip-hop to sensual slow jams to jungle beats – proof, if any was needed, that producers Timbaland and Missy Elliott were a dynamite team.
When Aaliyah arrived five years later, again produced by Timbaland, it was an era of new jack swing rhythm, gangsta rap cool and belting soul ballads. But the album combined all of these elements and blasted it into the future. The title track’s soulful vocals were underpinned by a warped, metallic, avant-garde production that would not hit the mainstream for years to come. Tara Joshi, co-host of the pop culture podcast Twenty Twenty, says: “No one else was really making music like that at that time. It aligns her with Janet Jackson – there’s this real sensuality, and a channelling of old and new in this really interesting way.”
Joshi says that it was around this period that Aaliyah began to take more creative gambles – echoing her nickname “baby girl”, her 1998 single Are You That Somebody, heavily features a cooing baby sample from an obscure compilation of sound effects. It might not seem exactly groundbreaking in 2021, but in the mid-Nineties, even as hip-hop was splicing old records in new and inventive ways, this more avant-garde style of found sound was relatively unusual. Here, Aaliyah and Timbaland were intentionally sneaking something weird and provocative into a mainstream pop package. And these risks were always contrasted against Aaliyah’s effortless, pared back, low-register vocals, which stood out amid a sea of vocal runs, as popularised by the likes of Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera and Alicia Keys.
Kathy Iandoli, author of the forthcoming biography Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah, says that by the time the singer came to her magnum opus, she was also more assertive in the writing and production process. It was echoed by the strikingly self-assured cover image of the singer in a glittering gold halterneck top, rather than hiding behind her signature sunglasses. “With her debut, she was hiding in this very big shadow of R Kelly’s, where her identity on the project was dictated by his own twisted idea of what her image and sound should be,” she says. “With the second album, we saw her inching into her own person, thanks to Timbaland and Missy kind of guiding her in this direction where they threw caution to the wind… But by her eponymous third project, we saw Aaliyah in her full form.
“Her voice had changed a bit since she was now an adult… and she was still very willing to take more risks,” Iandoli continues. “By her final project, it had been five years since she released an album, so there was so much room to grow, to analyse the R&B landscape that she herself helped change in ’96, and then to figure out where she both fit and stood out.”
Sonically, the change was evident – as Aaliyah worked creeping classical samples on “We Need a Resolution”, wild rock electric guitars on “What If”, and other sounds that were atypical for the genre. Even at her most poppy, “More Than a Woman” includes smooth and sweet self-harmonisation amid dark, minor-key strings – it’s enchanting, has a dangerous, addictive quality, and could slot easily alongside a Shakira, Nelly Furtado or Beyoncé track from the middle of the decade. Belting no more, Aaliyah’s voice dances above tinkling piano keys on “It’s Whatever” – with an angelic ease, says Joshi, that’s comparable to anything contemporary by Solange.
“On self-titled, there are things there that Solange will take later on – like the use of self-harmonisation on ‘More Than a Woman’,” agrees Joshi. At the time, however, Aaliyah’s production was truly out on its own. “I think the sonics of it are a little bit strange, and a bit ethereal almost. There’s a futurism that undercuts it all… and this album comes a couple of years before that sound becomes the pop mainstream. Timbaland and Missy both stepped into the mainstream in the early 2000s, but that’s all after this album. So it did shape what happens next, in a huge way… She was the moment. I know that’s a cheesy thing to say, but I think it’s true.”
In the years following, beat-driven R&B became the standard, with artists like Destiny’s Child, Amerie, Ashanti and Cassie picking up the baton. After setting a standard for a more stoic R&B singer, you could also hear the influence of Aaliyah’s pared-back vocal phrasing in artists like Rihanna and Ciara. Drake also cited her vocal sensitivity as his biggest influence, and he even sports an Aaliyah tattoo: "She conveyed these amazing emotions but never got too sappy,” he has said”.
Vanity Fair spotlighted Aaliyah and her legacy in a 2021 interview. They spoke with music journalist Kathy Iandoli. She is the author of Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah. Iandoli also discussed the long-held secrets she uncovered and the narrative about the much-missed Aaliyah that she wants to flip:
“This is a book by an Aaliyah fan, for the Aaliyah fans,” writes music journalist Kathy Iandoli in Baby Girl: Better Known As Aaliyah (Atria). Even 20 years after the singer’s death in a plane crash, Aaliyah has continued to impact music, fashion, and culture. But in a time of reexamination, Iandoli saw an opportunity to “really hold a magnifying glass to the narrative and show who she was: an incredible talent, an incredible singer and songwriter, and a survivor,” says the writer, referring to Aaliyah’s secret marriage, at 15, to R. Kelly, who is now facing trials for, among other charges, widespread sex-related crimes. “She was always so gentle and delicate and angelic,” Iandoli says, “but that woman was made of steel.”
Vanity Fair: What made you decide to tell her story?
Kathy Iandoli: As a journalist, I’ve been writing for over 20 years now, and the thing that I always keep at the front of my mind is, I remember being that young girl who would watch MTV and BET and VH1, and just the fandom that brought me to journalism. It wasn’t J school; it was being a fan of the artists and the music. The first book I did was with Prodigy of Mobb Deep. The next one I did was God Save the Queens, about women in hip-hop. When I finished God Save the Queens, [I was] thinking, What was another moment, or who was another artist, that shaped me—because all the women in hip-hop shaped me, hip-hop shaped me, but Aaliyah was one of the artists who made me who I am today.
Over the last two decades, the conversation that’s surrounded Aaliyah has been so disjointed. We’re now getting the most negative parts of the highlight reel, and I wanted to not only flip the narrative but really hold a magnifying glass to the narrative and show who she was.
IN THIS PHOTO: Aaliyah, photographed in the mid-’90s, from Baby Girl/PHOTO CREDIT: Eddie Otchere
Was there anything about her story that you wanted to dispel that you learned?
Oh, 100%. I think the way that Aaliyah was written into that part of the narrative was kind of this teenager with raging hormones. There was never any talk of how she was groomed or tricked. There was never any talk of how she was a victim of the circumstance that so many young girls have fallen victim to, but also how the music industry and the media creates this environment where you had boy band members who are 27 years old singing love songs to 13-year-olds in the audience. There’s an overall lack of protection of young Black girls. It’s how all the articles and the media presented the whole situation like it was Aaliyah’s dirty little secret and not R. Kelly’s. When you take all that information into account and then you read all the legal documents, and you really get a full picture of what happened, including how Aaliyah was blackballed after it and R. Kelly wasn’t, it just changes the entire narrative from [how you understood it as] a young fan reading in Vibe magazine about this marriage certificate between the Pied Piper of R&B and the Princess of R&B. We had no idea.
Were there any other aspects of her story that you learned that stood out to you?
She was an opera singer. Before she would warm up in the studio, she did opera runs. [I learned about] the original version of “Try Again,” which was just so weird. It was about being what you want to be, pursuing your dreams. Instead of “try again,” it was like, “you could be a fireman.” I learned about that, some of the fun little fan tidbits: One of her cousins was in Boot Camp Clik, and that’s how she got on that remix [for “Night Riders”]. And a lot of never-before-heard stories about the plane crash, which I think will also give us a little bit more closure.
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”.
That final album, 2001’s Aaliyah, is iconic. It is a landmark! A moment that changed the music landscape. One that so many people love. I am going to wrap up soon. I want to quote the entire Pitchfork review of Aaliyah. They looked back on the album in 2019. One that is even stronger and more important considering the artists it has inspired since its release:
“Whether you believe in the afterlife or not, it’s easy enough to picture Aaliyah in heaven. The video for “Rock The Boat,” the 2001 single that would be her last, looks as if it were beamed down from one of the mythical seven heavens: gently lapping water, the flare of a bright sun, women dressed in all white. She seems peaceful, softer than in previous clips. In August, after wrapping her scenes in the Bahamas, Aaliyah boarded a flight home. The Cessna twin-engine crashed moments after takeoff, killing the singer and eight others. She was 22. In life, Aaliyah was often described by friends and collaborators as angelic; in her death, that image persists.
Just weeks earlier, she had released her third album, Aaliyah, a well-received collection of songs that mapped her personal growth during the five years since her second full-length, 1996’s One In A Million. During that hiatus, she’d taken an interest in acting, starring in a couple of films and lining up others, including two upcoming Matrix movies. But in between being on set during the day and in the studio at night, Aaliyah also had a lot to reckon with. In 1995, she’d ended a professional and allegedly predatory sexual relationship with R. Kelly, who’d produced her 1994 platinum-selling debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. Today, especially following testimony aired in Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly,” Aaliyah is understood to have been a survivor of his predation, but at the time, many people blamed her for the secret relationship and the falsification of her age on a clandestine marriage certificate.
Internally, there was a concern that her career would flounder, that she would not be able to match Kelly’s production and songwriting elsewhere. But with members of the Supafriends—Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and, eventually, the late Static Major—by her side, Aaliyah easily eclipsed her work with Kelly. “Tim and I were new producers," Missy told Rolling Stone in 2001. "From day one, she had that much faith in our music that she treated us like we already sold a million records, when we hadn't sold anything yet. She really helped make us what we are today.” The gamble paid off. Where Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number was defined by Kelly’s rote new jack swing and carried by her vocal depth, One In A Million was clever, fun, and forward-thinking. A couple of years later, “Are You That Somebody,” a single made for the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack, changed everything: Aaliyah wasn’t just sweet and sly; she revealed herself as endearingly weird and aspirationally cool—over a bizarre drum pattern and the sample of a baby’s coo, at that.
Aaliyah took that many steps further. By the time she began working on the album in 1998, she had developed an interest in both the experimental and traditional, and her collaborators on the album—the Supafriends as well as producers signed to her family’s Blackground record label—were up to the task. She veers wildly, but cohesively, between the futuristic, triple-time experimentation of singles like “We Need A Resolution” and “More Than A Woman” and the throwback soul of “Never No More” and “I Care 4 U.” It was Aaliyah’s voice that strung it all together. Her falsetto had earned an edge, and her multi-part harmonies, arranged ingeniously, added grace and texture. Even Timbaland’s grating, awkward raps and ad-libs are softened.
This time, Aaliyah had added Static, who’d cut his teeth working with Ginuwine and in the R&B group Playa, as a writer. The result was something that diverged from the pop language du jour, yet somehow remained in conversation with it. Though Aaliyah hadn’t yet become a writer, she was inordinately good at picking songs, absorbing them, and interpreting through her bright, wispy soprano. The album’s singles—“We Need A Resolution,” “More Than A Woman,” “Rock The Boat,”—are among her best, boldly off-kilter, imaginative, and alternately mellow and razor-edged. But the deep cuts are just as solid. “Never No More” is an emotional song about enduring and then rejecting abuse at the hands of a partner, “U Got Nerve” and “I Refuse” are formed around a similar suspicion and self-assurance. Her primary currency was an effortless cool matched only then by Janet Jackson and, all these years later, by Rihanna.
In reviews and profiles from the time, Aaliyah is praised, at the expense of some of her peers, for eschewing the “candy-coated” sound and style of the charts; actually, she was simply pre-empting the trends many of her peers would eventually try on. The glossy girl- and boy-band era was at its peak at the turn of the century, and before pop acts would attempt to replace that sheen with cool, calling on “urban” producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, Aaliyah modeled the perfect balance of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. Months before Britney Spears made headlines for performing with a snake at the MTV VMA awards in 2001, Aaliyah had done it in the video for “We Need A Resolution.” Her personal style, creative direction, and choreography were legendarily inventive. She made comfort look luxe as the original little shirt, big pants girl, and tore through dark-and-mysterious years before Keanu Reeves made leather trench coats trendy (in the early years, her omnipresent sunglasses and then side-swooped hair prompted widespread rumors of a lazy eye). By the time of Aaliyah, she’d reinvented herself yet again, this time brighter and more streamlined. Her dancing, unlike that of many of her peers, was fluid and interpretative, designed to communicate more than to be imitated by fans in bedrooms and basements around the world. Her image was like her music: risky and adventurous, with a fondness for just the right amount of cheek.
Nearly 20 years after her death, she persists as a moodboardable influence, finding lasting presence not purely of nostalgia but as aesthetic inspiration for a generation that came to age in her absence. Searching Aaliyah’s name on Tumblr brings up thousands and thousands of images—watermarked red carpet photos, GIFs and photo sets ripped from music videos, and the occasional ode of fandom. One photo, of what appears to be a performance look, appears to be a direct inspiration for Solange’s current tour wardrobe: a triangle bikini top with straps crisscrossed across the torso and a pair of flowing, loose-fitting pants.
But Aaliyah has been a reference for Solange, and others, elsewhere, too: The multiple-part harmonies that have become the younger Knowles’s signature were in fact once the signature of Aaliyah, most in focus on, Aaliyah. On what would have been Aaliyah’s 36th birthday, Frank Ocean shared his own take of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best,” which she’d first covered more than 20 years earlier, in 1994. She’d updated it with a spare, solemn almost-whisper, and Ocean’s version, which was eventually given a proper release on Endless, draws equally from Aaliyah’s falsetto as from the Isley Brothers’ original. There are traces of her influence elsewhere, too; the layered harmonies and gentle melodies of Beyoncé’s “I Miss You,” co-written by Ocean, could easily have been recorded first, albeit with more restraint and whimsy, by Aaliyah. Understandably, among the most common refrains about the singer was that she was ahead of her time.
And yet, paradoxically to its significance, the legacy of Aaliyah is now diminished by its absence from streaming services. After her death, Blackground Records, run by her uncle and cousin, faced some operational and legal issues. The label’s domain name has lapsed, and a final release promised by an associated publishing company has not materialized. There have been a couple of false starts—a posthumous album helmed, and then abandoned, by Drake and 40; an unsanctioned greatest hits release; the sale of her catalog to a publishing company—but most of Aaliyah’s catalog has remained unavailable to stream or download. Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, the album written and produced by her abuser, is the only accessible release. For many artists, this could mean being written out of history, forgotten to more convenient nostalgia. For Aaliyah, it means something rarer—a legacy defined not by industry profiteers and hologram start-ups but by friends, fans, and kindred artists”.
I think that there should be new documentaries made about Aaliyah. One of the most important artists of her generation, even though she was with us twenty-two years, the impact she made in that short time is huge! A clear source of influence for so many artists today (including Beyoncé), the relevance of her music will be felt for generations more. I remembering hearing news of Aaliyah’s death on 25th August, 2001. It was an immense tragedy! Less than a few weeks after that, the terrorist attacks in the U.S. happened. It was a very weird time. So much changed in the music world after Aaliyah’s premature death in a plane crash. There was new interest in her previous work. With the Aaliyah album new out, it was quite bittersweet. Hearing this amazing work from a singular artist. Also, this knowledge that what could have been and what we would never hear again. I think things should be left as they are. No posthumous albums or anything that would dishonour her or damage her wonderful legacy. On 16th January, the world will remember Aaliyah on what would have been her forty-fifth birthday. I don’t think there has been anyone like her since. A queen and diva whose debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, was released in 1994, she achieved so much in a short career. Such a wonderful warm human whose music touched so many lives, it is clear the genius and legacy of Aaliyah will…
BE felt forever.
