Static changed the lyrics and it became a love song.” In addition,Aaliyah had begun an acting career that was taking off. Cast in the Joel Silver–produced kung-fu crime flick Romeo Must Die as well as the Anne Rice vampire thriller Queen of the Damned and the Matrix sequels, Aaliyah hadn’t released a full-length album in the five years. “I wanted to take a break after One in a Million to just relax, think about how I wanted to approach the next album,” she told journalist Elon Johnson that April.“Then, when I was ready to start back up, Romeo happened, and so I had to take another break and do that film and then do the soundtrack, then promote it.The break turned into a longer break than I anticipated.” Back in the Meatpacking District that August night in 2001, I gathered with friends at the then-popular club APT where DJ Chairman Mao spun old-school hip- hop and soul as high-heeled girls sipped crimson-colored cosmopolitans. Two hours later, a strange vibe could be felt in the wood-paneled room as folks began looking strangely at their Blackberries, pagers, and cell phones. Standing beside me, a female friend suddenly blurted, “Oh my God, it says here that Aaliyah died in a plane crash.” Seconds later, along with other women in the room, she began to weep. The accident occurred when she and her team were returning to Miami, Florida, from the Bahamas, where she shot the video for “Rock the Boat,” the third single from Aaliyah , her third album finally released in 2001.Their small twin-engine Cessna plane was several hundred pounds overweight and crashed after takeoff, exploding on impact. The pilot was found to have had cocaine and alcohol in his system and had falsified data in order to receive his FAA license. At the age of twenty-two, Aaliyah Dana Haughton became the latest pop star to enter that rock-and-soul heaven that the Righteous Brothers sang about so many years before. Glancing around at the crying females, most no older than Aaliyah herself, it became obvious to me that she was much more than a star—she was one of them. Harlem resident and former Jive Records executive Jeff Sledge, who had known the songstress since she was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, had returned from the movies with his fiancée when he heard the news.“It was supposed to be hip-hop night on Hot 97, but they were playing a mix of Aaliyah songs instead,” he recalls thirteen years later.
“And then [DJ] Red Alert announced that she had died. I was stunned.” Of course, he wasn’t the only one. For days, the world mourned the young star with television specials, radio interviews with her contemporaries and friends, and a candlelight vigil in front of her alma mater, the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts. Furthermore, her stunning movie-star features were plastered on the covers of newspapers and magazines. Although she had the looks of a femme fatale, she was a sweet girl who’d been forced to grow up much too fast and died too young. However, as we all know, icons never die, because the images are forever. In her short lifetime, Aaliyah must’ve had her picture taken a million times, made countless videos, and created music that is still relevant to fans as well as to fellow pop idols Beyoncé, Drake, Chris Brown, Rihanna, and others. “There are so many artists trying to re-create the Aaliyah vibe in their music,” says singer Courtney Noelle, who was in seventh grade when the Black pop princess died. Growing up on the East Side of Pittsburgh, Noelle made up dances to “One in a Million” while watching the video constantly. “Aaliyah was so relatable and cool; she wasn’t over-sexualized, so we didn’t worry about Mom disapproving,” Noelle continues. “She sang, danced, and acted, but she did it all so effortlessly. She was just so beautiful and graceful.” While One in a Million was a landmark, the adolescent wonderfulness of Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number is often overlooked when Aaliyah’s small canon of work is examined. Of course, as Jason King points out, “ Age has been marred by their troubling marriage and the [statutory] rape/ pedophilia allegations that would come later. I don’t think we can now hear Age , particularly given the title, without taking the issue of teenage rape into account. So when I’m listening to Age , I’m struggling to try to listen to it out of context, but mostly I’m hearing R. Kelly as an alleged predator presenting to us his sonic and musical vision of how he wanted Aaliyah to exist in the commercial marketplace.” Still, for me, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number connects with many memories of the ’90s soul years that gave us debuts from Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, D’Angelo, Faith Evans, Maxwell, Erykah Badu, and the era’s most successful singer, writer, and producer, Robert Sylvester Kelly.
By 2001, Aaliyah released a handful of Timbaland-produced, soundtrack-supported singles that pushed the experimental sound even further—including the Grammy- nominated scorchers “Are You That Somebody?” from 1998’s Dr. Dolittle and “Try Again” from her costarring vehicle Romeo Must Die in 2000.As pop critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote in 2001 in the NewYorkTimes , “ ‘Try Again’ helped smuggle the innovative techniques of electronic dance music onto the pop charts, establishing Aaliyah as pop’s most futuristic star.” The lyrics of both songs were penned by former Playa member Static Major, who also wrote “We Need a Resolution.” Like Missy and Timbaland, the songwriter was once a protégé of Jodeci producer DeVante Swing. Engineer Jimmy Douglass, who has worked side by side with Timbaland on every production since the early days, says of the late songwriter, who died in 2008 from myasthenia gravis: “Static was like a brother to Tim, and he knew exactly how to write to Tim’s music. The first record they did together was Ginuwine’s ‘Pony,’ and that led to their [musical] history. “We recorded‘AreYouThat Somebody?’ at Capitol Records’ studio in Los Angeles,” Douglass recalls, “and it was a soup-to-nuts session, which means we did the entire song in one session.Wrote it, tracked it, and mixed it from 11:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m.; the next to last thing we added was the sound of the baby, and the very last time was Tim saying, ‘Dirty South.’ It was a union studio, so they weren’t used to working overnight; we were trying to finish that song as quick as possible.” Douglass also engineered the “Try Again” sessions, which began with Static writing a song that was inspirational. Recorded in New York City at Sound on Sound Studios, “Try Again,” as Douglass recalls, “was originally written to inspire young people, but Barry [Hankerson] heard it and told them, ‘It’s got to be about love.’ The melody and hook were the same, so
56
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting