Further, R. Kelly’s desire to keep young girls in baggy clothing in an effort to prevent them from being ogled by other men would explain his desire to have Aaliyah wear that same loose-fitting gear during her first album campaign. Add to that having her eyes concealed by dark shades, where now he simply has his victims face the wall. None of these similarities are coincidental, and there was one person who added it all up in real time: Barry Hankerson.
It’s not to say that Aaliyah never believed she was in love with R. Kelly. She probably did at one point. His affirmations, charisma, and guidance built Aaliyah’s confidence as she started her road to stardom. We’ve heard this story countless times, but R. Kelly had a responsibility to Aaliyah as the adult in the room, and he failed her with behavior that is now known to be pathological. This was more than a one-off coincidence of “accidentally” falling in love with a child. This is who R. Kelly is, and considering the new information consistently being made available implicates him even more as an abuser, it’s painful to fathom his concealed treatment of Aaliyah. We may never know the depths of the abuse she specifically endured or when she even realized that what was happening was wrong.
Aaliyah didn’t just have a crush on an older man; she was violated by her mentor. And while she wasn’t able to tell her story of surviving R. Kelly while alive, the hope is that maybe one day her family will do it for her. “I wish that Aaliyah’s family would speak, because I think there are so many young Black girls who have been hurt,” DeRogatis reflects in Surviving R. Kelly. “What it would mean to know that Aaliyah was hurt that way too…”
CHAPTER FOUR: TABULA RASA
…it was really like Aaliyah kind of got villainized somehow.
—Jomo Hankerson, V-103 interview, 2014
The show must go on.
The year 1995 was a transformative one for Aaliyah. On January 14, just a few short days before her sixteenth birthday, she performed at the legendary Apollo Theater. Prior to that performance, she spoke with Video Music Box’s DJ Ralph McDaniels and for the first time hinted at her true age. “You know I don’t tell you my age; it’s a secret,” she says with a smile, her eyes no longer concealed by dark shades. “I’ll give you a hint… it’s gonna be a very ‘sweet’ birthday.” She also confirmed in this interview, “I’m Aaliyah, not Aaliyah Kelly,” after being asked about the marriage rumors. Aaliyah also went into detail discussing some of the first album’s video concepts, including “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,” where she mentions coming up with the treatment with her brother, Rashad. She never mentions R. Kelly. In an interview a month later with Brett Walker of BET’s In Your Ear, she says that there won’t be any more singles off Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number and that the plan was to jump right into her next album.
Her label did later attempt to squeeze out two more singles that went straight to the European market—“Down with the Clique” in May and “The Thing I Like” in August, the latter bringing her early soundtrack success when it appeared on the soundtrack to the 1994 film A Low Down Dirty Shame. Both songs had very little traction Stateside (and weren’t officially released as singles there), though Aaliyah was bubbling overseas. She had embarked on a world tour, touching places like Western Europe (England, France, the Netherlands), South Africa, and Japan. Her stage setup included a live band, with some choreographed backup dancers and singers, as Aaliyah alternated between dancing and singing during her performances. She was going global, and fans who didn’t even speak English were latching on to her songs. Plus, she was making all of that happen while still a sophomore attempting to continue her high school education. That made her, in many ways, so relatable to her core fan base. In music industry speak that’s the perfect time to get to work on your follow-up album, striking while the iron is hot, as they say. However, controversy is a double-edged sword. While Aaliyah and her team managed to keep a tight lip (via NDA or otherwise) about her now-faded connection to R. Kelly, the music industry didn’t forget. It remained a mystery waiting to be solved, yet in the wake of her making new music it resurfaced in a way that was creatively unimaginable.
It was clear that while Aaliyah’s interchangeable family and music team wanted her name removed from sentences including R. Kelly, he was the force behind that debut project that brought her to the public eye and ultimately made her a star. In addition, following their creative and personal split, it was Aaliyah’s reputation that was hanging in the balance and not R. Kelly’s. In March of 1995, during the airing of the Soul Train Music Awards—when Aaliyah’s name was mentioned during her nominations for Best R&B Soul or Rap New Artist and Best R&B/Soul Album, Female (for Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number)—the audience booed. In those early days following the R. Kelly scandal, Aaliyah suffered through several negative responses from audiences near and far. A teenager, who just endured so much, was being chastised for choosing to leave a volatile situation. Further, all she had was her music to keep her going, and the threat of losing that came with every boo, hiss, and howl. It was psychological warfare, but Aaliyah endured it with grace.
“What was surprising to me was after it all came out, it was really like Aaliyah kind of got villainized somehow,” Jomo Hankerson told Atlanta’s V-103 radio station in 2014 about the aftermath of her R. Kelly storm. “That’s the part that I never understood. And that’s what made the transition to the second album very difficult.”
Coming off a successful debut album, the move to the sophomore project is supposed to be smooth. Sure, there’s the theory of the “sophomore curse,” where the success of your start doesn’t materialize into an entirely successful career. Oftentimes artists are regarded as a “one-hit wonder” once that first project leaves and little success follows. It’s tough for anyone labeled as a “star,” especially when you’re young and wondering what the future has in store for you and your craft. However, in Aaliyah’s case, she had the makings of a hit maker: she had a highly musical pedigree since childhood, she was able to readily adapt to the music she was given and adopt it in a way that felt seamless, she already had a trendsetting style in place, and she had a voice that wasn’t like any other artist out there. With all of that talent, she still couldn’t find collaborators.
Hankerson stated that while the label had a few key relationships, they struggled with finding more producers who would work with them. Calls weren’t returned, especially when the bigger-named producers learned that they’d be producing a song for a fledgling sixteen-year-old singer and no longer the protégé of superstar R. Kelly. It almost felt like Aaliyah was being blacklisted. There was no way that Aaliyah was going to give up, but she had to hit the reset button.
Blackground eventually parted ways with Jive Records, where they let Aaliyah out of her contract through Jive founder Clive Calder in an effort to continue her disassociation from R. Kelly. Geoff Edgers reported on the details of what happened in the Washington Post. “In 1994, Hankerson and the Haughtons came to Calder’s office,” he wrote. “There was no talk of reprimanding Kelly. Instead, the family demanded that Jive let Aaliyah go.” The further argument from Aaliyah’s family was that she wouldn’t be promoted as fairly with R. Kelly as her labelmate. While it was agreed upon that she could cut ties with Jive Records, Aaliyah had to forego a percentage of her future album sales to Jive, despite being with a new label. Aaliyah was then signed by Atlantic Records.
Craig Kallman, who was the vice president of A&R at Atlantic Records at the time (later moving up to chairman and CEO in 2005), signed Aaliyah to Atlantic when she was sixteen. He told Vibe in 2016 that she was a “complete package” and he saw that from the moment he met her. “She immediately had this kind of electrical charm about her,” he shared with Vibe. “She was incredibly charismatic and just the sweetest, nicest artist, but also carried herself with a real, kind of almost mysterious air about her. She had this way about her that was very intriguing and telling.”
The goal for Aaliyah was to rebrand: find a new team, work with new people, and wip
e the slate clean. It was the best and only way for her to truly break free from her ties to R. Kelly, while building upon her own identity as she was growing up and going further into her teenage years. The press was still regarding her as a “new” artist—evidenced by a small spot in the February 1995 issue of Ebony magazine, where she’s flanked by Brandy and Larenz Tate as the “New Teen Sensations.” There was still time to fix things, despite the reluctance of new collaborators.
So Aaliyah started spreading her wings.
In April 1995, Aaliyah appeared alongside top female hip-hop and R&B artists like Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, TLC, and many others on the soundtrack to the film about the Black Panther Party, aptly titled Panther. Aaliyah sang a part on the film’s powerful theme “Freedom,” a song about resisting the discriminatory practices set in society for generations against Black people. While the project didn’t bring mainstream appeal, it did diversify her portfolio a bit. Here was an artist who broke moments before her other female R&B counterparts like Brandy and Monica hit the scene. “She came out before Monica and I did; she was our inspiration,” Brandy told Billboard in 2011. “At the time, record companies did not believe in kid acts and it was just inspiring to see someone that was winning and winning being themselves.”
And while Monica is also featured on the “Freedom” song, Aaliyah wasn’t always offered the luxury of starting out with a squeaky-clean slate, so every new endeavor beyond her Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number period was a step in an entirely new direction since she was now doing it alone.
The producers invested in her were scarce, but they were there. Sean “Puffy” Combs showed interest early on in working with Aaliyah and had even thrown his hat into the ring to take the bulk of production duties on her follow-up album. (The stars never completely aligned there, but that didn’t stop them from later working together in other capacities.) Two producers stepped up to start working with Aaliyah once her recording budget was sorted. There was Craig King, who produced on R&B duo Zhané’s breakout album, Pronounced Jah-Nay, in 1994, along with other nineties acts, later working with the likes of Ludacris, Kanye West, and Wiz Khalifa among others. There was also Vincent Herbert, who worked with Dionne Warwick, The Winans, Toni Braxton, Al B. Sure!, Babyface, and many other acts before working with Aaliyah. Later Herbert was credited for his work with Destiny’s Child and Lady Gaga. He also assisted with later Blackground artists like JoJo.
King told Vibe in 2016 that for three months they were staying in a condo over in Detroit, cranking out songs at Vanguard Studios (the same place where Aaliyah cut her very first demos) that would later appear on Aaliyah’s second album. The goal here was to diverge from the sound R. Kelly had created for her; this would be a 2.0 version of Aaliyah. It was time to transform her and make her the star of the show. After all, by the mid-nineties R&B was yet again in need of a reboot as hip-hop stars were growing accustomed to sampling soul, funk, and jazz records, leaving a run-of-the-mill R&B songs in the dust if it didn’t have some gusto. “Vincent [Herbert] and I were the first people she called; we were the first group,” he told Vibe. “That’s why we had so much freedom to go in and create a sound because we didn’t have to do a song here or there. They wanted us to go in and build a sound. We built a sound and it was a departure from R. Kelly.”
When Aaliyah arrived in the studio to work, King had her sing “At Your Best” with him at the piano to test her range. “I turned the lights down, she sat next to me on the stool, and we started to play the song,” King continued, “and I got chills all over my body.”
Together (with Herbert) they recorded eight songs; three made it to the album with one on a Japanese bonus release. That moment singing “At Your Best” stuck, as the songs they recorded in the studio included another Isley Brothers cover, the smoothly R&B “Choosey Lover (Old School/New School),” which was produced by Vincent Herbert with Rashad Smith, a hip-hop-accented Marvin Gaye cover of “Got to Give It Up” (featuring rap pioneer Slick Rick), and the nineties soulful “Never Givin’ Up” (featuring Tavarius Polk), co-written by Monica Payne. The mid-tempo song “No Days Go By” made it as a bonus track on the Japanese release, co-written and coproduced by Rheji Burrell, and co-written by Aaliyah.
Aaliyah was then bound for Atlanta with her mother and brother. The Hankersons reached out to Jermaine Dupri, who was already building a movement with his label So So Def Recordings, breaking acts like the backwards-clothing-wearing Kris Kross, Da Brat, and even working with Lil’ Kim. “I think it was fly that she took chances on her music,” Dupri told MTV News in 2001. “Just the softness of how she sang over them hard-ass beats, it was something different.” With Dupri (and producer Carl So Lowe) she cut “I Gotcha Back,” a rhythmically breezy love song. She enlisted new producer J. Dibbs to write and produce the contemporary R&B cut “Giving You More.”
Legendary songwriter Diane Warren also requested to work with Aaliyah. Warren has penned hits for everyone, from Cher to Patti LaBelle, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, and later Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and many, many others. “I remember really liking Aaliyah and wanting to work with her,” she told Vibe in 2016. “I think I reached out to Craig Kallman at Atlantic and said I wanted to work with her. They were down.” She wrote the ballad “The One I Gave My Heart To,” and while Babyface was the intended producer, he couldn’t make it to the session with Aaliyah. He was in Los Angeles, and she was still in Atlanta at the time. Babyface tagged in Atlanta-based co-collaborator Daryl Simmons, who scored a major hit co-writing and coproducing Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” with L.A. Reid and Babyface. When Simmons arrived at the studio, it was with Aaliyah and her father. He had her warm up and was floored. “She started singing and I heard this voice. I looked out in the room, and I was like, ‘Is that you?’ ” he told Vibe. “She goes, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how I warm up.’ She was doing all this incredible opera. It was the furthest thing I would have ever thought that she could do. It just blew my mind.”
The then-new producer Rodney Jerkins produced and co-wrote the dancy track “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.” Jerkins, going by the stage name Darkchild, moved on to produce for Brandy, Monica, Mary J. Blige, and Destiny’s Child among others. He also produced the Gina Thompson single “The Things That You Do”—the song in which Missy Elliott appeared on the remix, which for many was the first time they’d heard Elliott.
New Jersey rap trio Naughty by Nature was already a force, thanks to songs like “O.P.P.” and “Hip Hop Hooray.” Group member and producer KayGee produced the song “A Girl like You” for Aaliyah and it features Naughty’s group leader, Treach. The song is very much in line with a Naughty by Nature–style song, with harmonizing horns and strong bass lines. “She was like my li’l sis,” Treach told MTV News in 2001. “She’d come up and put her arm next to me like, ‘Listen, we gonna make this song together. I don’t want you to do just one verse and it’s over. We gonna do the hook together.’ ” Aaliyah returned the favor in 1999 by appearing in Naughty by Nature’s music video for their single “Holiday.”
The consensus was that Aaliyah was highly musical but also shy and demure. She had a quiet roar about her, where once she entered the booth it was like she came alive. This idea of hopping around and working with multiple people was something entirely new for her. After all, she came from a setup where it was a one-on-one creative process. As predatory and traumatic as it was, R. Kelly created a world where only the two of them existed. He watched her, observed her, and wrote about her. Sure, the product was a certified hit (while simultaneously incriminating him with a whole album about what he hoped were her thoughts about him), but there can be some comfort in isolation, especially when it’s made to feel like it’s just the two of you. Now Aaliyah was seeking out new collaborators, hoping she could find a second life for her music. And yes, while some requested to work with her themselves, there was still an overarching hope that this could all work. It wasn’t a surefire win, no matter how talented the artist and her assemble
d team were.
Plus, the nineties were defined by artists and their “crews” and Aaliyah still needed one.
Puffy was perhaps one of the first to invite Aaliyah into a new sense of community. Puffy discovered the late Notorious B.I.G. in 1992, after seeing the Brooklyn-bred phenomenon’s spread in The Source’s “Unsigned Hype” column. From there, he signed Biggie to his newly minted Bad Boy Records after being fired from Uptown Records, led by the late industry visionary Andre Harrell, and home to future legendary acts like Mary J. Blige. Notorious B.I.G. dropped his magnum opus Ready to Die in September 1994, setting a whole new bar for hip-hop music. While Bad Boy was a record label, it was also very much a tight-knit crew. Aaliyah appeared to fit right in.
In June of 1995, Biggie released the single “One More Chance / Stay with Me (Remix)” and Aaliyah appears in the video mouthing the chorus alongside other R&B mavens like Mary J. Blige and the hook’s actual singer, Biggie’s then-wife, Faith Evans. Biggie’s crew (and also baby act) Junior M.A.F.I.A. released their own project Conspiracy in August, and while Faith Evans sings on the album version of their song “I Need You Tonight,” it’s Aaliyah who sang the hook when the track became a single and appeared in the single’s music video. Aaliyah maintained her ties to Bad Boy. In February 1996, Puffy orchestrated a trip to Trinidad to work on The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life after Death (a project that would eventually be released posthumously on March 25, 1997, as he died on March 9 before the album arrived). On this trip was production collective the Hitmen, who at the time was comprised of Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie, Steven “Stevie J” Jordan, Nashiem Myrick, Ron “Amen-Ra” Lawrence, and Carlos “Six July” Broady. The team holed up in the Caribbean Sound Basin studio in Port-of-Spain to create Biggie’s final project with him (unbeknownst to them). In addition, 112, Faith Evans, and Aaliyah flew out there to help on the album. Ironically, R. Kelly appears on Life after Death on the song “#!*@ You Tonight,” though he wasn’t a part of this now-infamous work trip. This was also going to be the trip where Aaliyah was going to cut a few tracks of her own for One in a Million, but time escaped them. “We started working together, but we couldn’t finish the songs on time,” Aaliyah told journalist Michael Gonzales in the November 1996 issue of Request magazine, the publication printed by former music retailer Sam Goody. “I had to leave, because I had to go to Atlanta to record with Jermaine Dupri.”
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