‘R&B was never the same’: The life and legacy of Aaliyah

Okemi Alemoru remembers the place she was when information of Aaliyah’s dying broke. “I used to be on vacation in America,” says the tradition editor of gal-dem journal, “and I heard my mum let loose this blood-curdling scream.”

“I bumped into the opposite room as a result of I assumed my dad might need keeled over,” she continues. “However they’d the information on TV – and it stated Aaliyah had died. My mum simply saved repeating ‘no, no, no!’”

“I will need to have been about seven, however I knew it was vital.”

It was August 2001, and the R&B singer, mononymously often known as Aaliyah, had been on board an overloaded constitution airplane that had nosedived within the Bahamas, killing her, the pilot and 7 members of her workforce. The artist had launched her self-titled album only a month earlier, 20 years in the past tomorrow (7 July 2001). She would by no means see its mammoth international success. Her music would proceed to dominate the airwaves lengthy after her dying, with Aaliyah happening to high the charts and promote greater than 2.6 million copies, its idiosyncratic sound setting the tone for R&B within the early 2000s.

Aaliyah’s passing was felt throughout generations, although her legacy has an nearly otherworldly high quality to it. For older followers, her dying felt mindless, and the artist grew to become iconised as a trailblazer whose life and profession have been reduce brief. For youthful followers like me, she was shrouded in thriller, persevering with to scoop awards and dominate the R&B charts properly into the early 2000s, with “In Loving Reminiscence” tributes tacked on to her posthumously launched music movies. She stays extensively referenced throughout hip-hop and R&B, with name-checks in songs by Jay-Z, Noname, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar and J Cole, although it may possibly really feel like her legacy is much less extensively celebrated than it needs to be. As Gen-Z YouTuber Julia Boateng requested in a current video: “Why doesn’t the industry talk about Aaliyah?”

And but her legacy is a towering one. “Aaliyah is the blueprint,” says R&B singer Paloma Ford, of how the star’s profession was one thing that artists would try to emulate for years after her dying. Ford is among the many numerous variety of singers – together with Beyoncé, Rihanna and James Blake – who credit score Aaliyah with having a formative affect on their work. “She’s nonetheless unmatched… The way in which she approached her data along with her comfortable voice and assured lyrics is a significant affect on my artistry.”

That delicate vocal is without doubt one of the standout points of Aaliyah’s brief however influential profession. The princess of R&B had already had a formidable profession that spanned the whole lot of the Nineteen Nineties by the age of twenty-two, having made her debut at 10 on a televised expertise present known as Star Search. She then made her debut in 1994 with Age Ain’t Nothing However a Quantity, produced by her mentor R Kelly. But it surely was the follow-up album two years later, One In a Million, signed to Atlantic, that actually marked Aaliyah out as a star with a novel tackle R&B. It had a daring, expansive imaginative and prescient, with tracks effortlessly bouncing from trip-hop to sensual sluggish jams to jungle beats – proof, if any was wanted, that producers Timbaland and Missy Elliott have been a dynamite workforce.

When Aaliyah arrived 5 years later, once more produced by Timbaland, it was an period of latest jack swing rhythm, gangsta rap cool and belting soul ballads. However the album mixed all of those components and blasted it into the long run. The title observe’s soulful vocals have been underpinned by a warped, metallic, avant-garde manufacturing that may not hit the mainstream for years to return. Tara Joshi, co-host of the popular culture podcast Twenty Twenty, says: “Nobody else was actually making music like that at the moment. It aligns her with Janet Jackson – there’s this actual sensuality, and a channelling of previous and new on this actually attention-grabbing means.”

Joshi says that it was round this era that Aaliyah started to take extra inventive gambles – echoing her nickname “child lady”, her 1998 single Are You That Any individual, closely incorporates a cooing child pattern from an obscure compilation of sound results. It may not appear precisely groundbreaking in 2021, however within the mid-Nineties, at the same time as hip-hop was splicing previous data in new and creative methods, this extra avant-garde type of discovered sound was comparatively uncommon. Right here, Aaliyah and Timbaland have been deliberately sneaking one thing bizarre and provocative right into a mainstream pop bundle. And these dangers have been at all times contrasted towards Aaliyah’s easy, pared again, 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, writer of the forthcoming biography Child Lady: Higher Often known as Aaliyah, says that by the point the singer got here to her magnum opus, she was additionally extra assertive within the writing and manufacturing course of. It was echoed by the strikingly confident cowl picture of the singer in a glittering gold halterneck high, fairly than hiding behind her signature sun shades. “Along with her debut, she was hiding on this very massive shadow of R Kelly’s, the place her identification on the undertaking was dictated by his personal twisted thought of what her picture and sound needs to be,” she says. “With the second album, we noticed her inching into her personal individual, because of Timbaland and Missy form of guiding her on this path the place they threw warning to the wind… However by her eponymous third undertaking, we noticed Aaliyah in her full type.

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“Her voice had modified a bit since she was now an grownup… and he or she was nonetheless very prepared to take extra dangers,” Iandoli continues. “By her last undertaking, it had been 5 years since she launched an album, so there was a lot room to develop, to analyse the R&B panorama that she herself helped change in ’96, after which to determine the place she each match and stood out.”

Sonically, the change was evident – as Aaliyah labored creeping classical samples on “We Want a Decision”, wild rock electrical guitars on “What If”, and different sounds that have been atypical for the style. Even at her most poppy, “Extra Than a Girl” contains clean and candy self-harmonisation amid darkish, minor-key strings – it’s enchanting, has a harmful, addictive high quality, and will slot simply alongside a Shakira, Nelly Furtado or Beyoncé observe from the center of the last decade. Belting no extra, Aaliyah’s voice dances above tinkling piano keys on “It’s No matter” – with an angelic ease, says Joshi, that’s akin to something up to date by Solange.

“On self-titled, there are issues there that Solange will take in a while – like the usage of self-harmonisation on ‘Extra Than a Girl’,” agrees Joshi. On the time, nonetheless, Aaliyah’s manufacturing was really out by itself. “I feel the sonics of it are a little bit bit unusual, and a bit ethereal nearly. There’s a futurism that undercuts all of it… and this album comes a few years earlier than that sound turns into the pop mainstream. Timbaland and Missy each stepped into the mainstream within the early 2000s, however that’s all after this album. So it did form what occurs subsequent, in an enormous means… She was the second. I do know that’s a tacky factor to say, however I feel it’s true.”

Within the years following, beat-driven R&B grew to become the usual, with artists like Future’s Little one, Amerie, Ashanti and Cassie choosing up the baton. After setting an ordinary for a extra stoic R&B singer, you might additionally hear the affect of Aaliyah’s pared-back vocal phrasing in artists like Rihanna and Ciara. Drake additionally cited her vocal sensitivity as his largest affect, and he even sports activities an Aaliyah tattoo: “She conveyed these wonderful feelings however by no means obtained too sappy,” he has stated.

Immediately, Iandoli says she sees the spirit of Aaliyah in all places, from the music of SZA to the Swedish pop singer Tove Lo, in addition to within the reputation of rising genres comparable to various R&B. Shortly after the star’s dying, journalist Kelefa Sanneh had identified that “lots of [Aaliyah’s] songs weren’t actually songs in any respect, however easy vocal riffs, repeated and refracted to echo the manipulated loops that create digital rhythm”, lots of which have been lifted and sampled more than 320 times throughout the genres.

Aaliyah wasn’t simply influential in music. Paloma Ford factors out that by the point Aaliyah died in 2001, her identify had grow to be synonymous with a mode, a really feel and an period, along with her tomboyish sports activities jerseys, low-rise denims, physique chains, crop tops and slinky robes having come again into trend up to now two years (below the label Y2K). Vogue’s trend editor Janelle Okwodu has described Aaliyah as “a bona fide muse for designers who cite hip-hop and the early ’00s as a reference level… There doesn’t appear to be a present streetwear development that Aaliyah didn’t sport first – one thing to recollect the subsequent time you see somebody stepping out in Timb[erland]s and overalls.”

On the time, Aaliyah grew to become a spokesperson for Tommy Hilfiger in 1997, and the saggy crimson, white and blue denims she wore in an advert for the model offered out. The identical yr, she branched out into performing, enjoying herself within the police drama tv collection New York Undercover, touchdown a lead position reverse Jet Li in Romeo Should Die, filming vampire flick Queen of the Damned and, earlier than her dying, being lined up for a job in The Matrix Reloaded. Ford tells me: “She completed a lot past music with trend and films, all by the age of twenty-two.”

The jack-of-all trades celeb is a well-known idea as we speak, however Joshi says this wasn’t the standard profession trajectory for a singer within the Nineties. “In some ways, she was the prototype. Trying broadly at her physique of labor, there are loads of parallels with what Beyoncé’s profession is now,” she says, pointing in direction of the truth that, like Beyoncé, Aaliyah made her debut as a toddler on a expertise present, continued to work by means of her teenagers, and tried her hand at performing (and, unlike Knowles, was met with extensively optimistic evaluations). After all, everyone knows what Beyoncé went on to attain, so it’s laborious to not think about a parallel timeline during which Aaliyah might need been the paradigm-shifting mononymous R&B star that modified the trade throughout a variety of a long time. In a way, Aaliyah walked so Beyoncé might run.

Regardless that her reminiscence is saved alive by present-day goliaths and old-school followers, it may possibly typically really feel as if we don’t discuss Aaliyah sufficient – or as if an elevated thought of the singer overshadows the tangible contribution she made to the R&B panorama. Iandoli says: “For the [forthcoming] era of followers, Aaliyah has been idealised in a means as this legendary determine who lives on by means of video clips and photographs. As a result of she was simply so forward of her time, it nearly brings her updated in her presence by means of this multimedia, since she by no means actually comes throughout as dated. It’s weird, actually, but additionally a testomony to the truth that Aaliyah was a visionary.”

Joshi provides that Aaliyah’s shortage on Spotify and Apple Music provides to the star’s legendary, out-of-reach picture. Her first album is freely accessible, however the context surrounding R Kelly – who, following their unlawful marriage, has since been the topic of quite a few allegations of abuse – implies that a darkish shadow is solid over the album for a lot of followers. It’s each uncomfortable to take heed to and to consider.

Neither of her subsequent albums, that are owned by Aaliyah’s uncle and former supervisor Barry Hankerson, can be found on-line (past low-quality YouTube uploads). “Lately I’ve been making an attempt to get a vinyl copy of Aaliyah nevertheless it’s lots of of kilos,” Joshi tells me. “It’s attention-grabbing, as a result of it means she’s grow to be considerably intangible – somebody whose legacy hovers over all the things.”

Relating to the streaming barrier, Iandoli agrees: “I feel [this] has led to many followers creating their very own variations of Aaliyah, in a way. They take fragments of her and amplify them as her complete, when actually she was the sum of those elements.”

Then in fact, there may be the position that dying, significantly at a younger age, can play in elevating musicians to iconic standing. Aaliyah’s life was reduce tragically brief, and so there’ll at all times be a query mark that surrounds what she might need executed after her 2001 masterpiece. And because the a long time roll on, developments shift and in addition start to return again round, always offering recent contexts during which we will situate Aaliyah, her work and her type. Iandoli says that, on this sense, Aaliyah’s dying left her legacy “open-ended and in a relentless state of flux”.

Alternatively, her dying implies that some components of the story are mounted and immutable. “As a result of Aaliyah handed at 22 years previous, she’s for ever younger,” Iandoli continues. “She didn’t age, so youthful followers latch on to her as she’s frozen in time. I’m undecided that if she have been a 42-year-old recording artist as we speak, had she had a fourth, fifth, sixth, tenth album, {that a} 13-year-old would resolve they have been a fan of hers,” she says.

“Who is aware of, although. Aaliyah was so completely different and so dynamic that possibly she would have galvanised followers of all ages if she have been nonetheless alive – like she’s doing from above.”