That's what made her special – she stood out from the balladeers of the era (the Mariahs, Whitneys, En Vogues) and the teen pop stars (Brandy, Britney, Christina), in part because she seemed in command without needing to do too much. You'd assume she was a grown woman, because if you're below the age of 12, everyone older than you seems ancient, and what young person is able to assert that much control? Yet she wasn't even 18 when she recorded One In A Million. And if you were a young Black girl in the '90s like I was, of course you were probably going to look at her and be struck by how cool she seemed, without thinking twice about it. This was true in her other songs from that era as well, from " If Your Girl Only Knew," a self-assured midtempo joint in which she boasts how she won't "be no fool" for a guy who's trying to cheat with her, to " Are You That Somebody?" an earworm where she insists on keeping a hookup on the low until he can prove he's serious. She seemed fully formed, utterly confident and secure in her body. Her various looks in the video were sleek, sexy, and mysterious, as she donned low-rise pants, crop tops and bras, and, in one scene, a silver eye-patch that seemed to come straight from a sci-fi dystopia playbook.
In Timbaland's skittering production, Missy Elliott's staccato phrasing of the lyrics, and Aaliyah's mellifluous interpretation you can hear the descendants that have followed in their wake – Drake, Jhené Aiko, Syd, Normani. It's been said many times before, but really it can't be overstated: " One In A Million" sounds as if it was predicting the future indeed, it sounds like now. But while Age Ain't Nothing But A Number is forever tainted in the minds of fans, it's impossible to ignore how crucial it was in establishing Aaliyah's continuous appeal even as she distanced herself from Kelly. It remains infuriating that (alleged) victims of sexual abuse are forever linked in name to their abusers, often to the detriment and overshadowing of everything else they accomplished. A part of me would love nothing more than to never have to mention Kelly – who would later go by the ghastly nickname " The Pied Piper of R&B" – when discussing Aaliyah. More difficult, at least for me as both a fan and critic, is to reconcile that early part of her career with the rest of her body of work. Kelly, was penning songs for a 14-year-old to sing as a come-on to an older "lover." The music industry shouldn't have swept the revelation of Kelly's illegal marriage to Aaliyah when she was just 15 (or the many other allegations that have arisen over the years) under the rug.
In death, as in life, Aaliyah has deserved better.īut what, exactly, does "better" entail? Especially within the last couple of years, some things have become undeniably obvious: She deserved to have been better protected by those around her, to have had someone who saw the writing on the wall when a grown man, R. Because for far too long, only her first and most fraught album, Age Ain't Nothing But A Number, had been widely available, a fact that felt like a slap in the face to her legacy. Her third and final studio album is set to arrive in the fall, and an equilibrium of sorts will have ultimately been restored.
Pop Culture Happy Hour Aaliyah: Essentials
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