Baby Girl

by Kathy Iandoli

  The video was released concurrently with the release of “Rock the Boat” as a single. While bittersweet at its best, the “Rock the Boat” video was released in Aaliyah’s honor. Hype Williams’s bright beachy visuals were a reminder of Aaliyah’s light and her ultimate place in the sun. From dancing on boats to the Bahamian beach side, she looked peaceful and happy. The final video didn’t feature Aaliyah at all. It was for the posthumously released single “Miss You,” which started as a song for Ginuwine. “We played her a couple of tracks and that particular track happened to kind of pass by. [Aaliyah] was like, ‘Wait a minute, back that up. I want to hear that again!’ ” producer and songwriter Teddy Bishop recalled to YouKnowIGotSoul in 2012. “We played it for her and she was like ‘I want to cut this record,’ and we were like ‘Well, this is Ginuwine’s record.’ ” Aaliyah wanted to cut the record for herself. “She got on the phone, called him, and said, ‘Hey, I know you cut this record already, but I would love to cut it.’ Ginuwine, because he was a part writer on the song, it benefited him anyway… Ginuwine told her to cut it and we cut it on Aaliyah and it went on to be a number one hit.” In the video, artists like Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, Tweet, DMX, Quincy Jones, Queen Latifah, Jamie Foxx, and many others all lip-synch the song in Aaliyah’s honor. A remix by Jay-Z followed, where he lists the people in Aaliyah’s life who all miss her, including Dash, Kidada, her brother, Rashad, and many others.

  Aaliyah had a mission with the Red Album, and despite her untimely passing, her vision was realized. From every visual, every lyric, every piece of music, her goal was to give her fans a deeper understanding of herself. She was an artist on the verge of something great. After setting trends for years, Aaliyah was on the path to icon. She got there, though not in the manner that anyone had planned.

  CHAPTER TEN: THINGS FALL APART

  I enjoy every second of my fame. If I could start my life all over again, I wouldn’t change anything. Honest.

  —Aaliyah, Die Zeit Online, July 2001

  It was right after she turned twenty-two when Aaliyah started having a series of dreams. They weren’t enough to rattle her into agoraphobia and keep her in her room, but they were impactful enough to make her bring them up to a complete stranger. And that wasn’t like Aaliyah, at all. Through the duration of her career, her mysteriousness was her handshake. She was vague, probably due to her turbulent beginnings, often conducting interviews with this invisible veil in front of her. She was still charming, she was still demure, and she was still sincere. However, she was still guarded. As she grew into her own, her interviews became increasingly more intimate. You started to feel like you were just getting to know her; much like her music.

  So during her final round of international press, Aaliyah sat in a hotel room in Paris and divulged to a German reporter what she had been feeling for the last month or so. The publication was Die Zeit Online and the writer’s name was Dagmar Leischow. For forty minutes on a sofa, Leischow sat and heard what many would continue to dissect for decades to come. Aaliyah was reserved at first, but once she let the words out they just kept flowing. She settled right back into the dream she was repeatedly having, along with all of its ebbs and flows.

  In the dream, it’s dark. Aaliyah is being chased and she’s scared, but then all of a sudden she takes flight. She describes it as “swimming in the air.” She feels free and weightless. “Nobody can reach me. Nobody can touch me,” she continues. Then she starts to talk out of concern for the dream. What does it even mean? Anxiety kicks in, as she thinks it means she’s becoming jaded and wants to “fly away” from her career, so to speak. She started to explain to the reporter how she doesn’t feel that way, almost trying to convince them both that this wasn’t the case. She goes on about her childhood, how the idea that she never got to be a kid was a total fallacy. She felt like a normal little girl, with some minor (read: major) modifications. She went on to discuss with the reporter her earliest beginnings, onstage with Gladys Knight, preparing for what she felt was her destiny: to be famous. “I worked towards this dream. Hard. Very hard. I took singing lessons, I took part in school performances,” she admits. “I did everything I could to become a good entertainer. Because a pretty appearance doesn’t make you a star.”

  But fear is one hell of a poison, and coupled with being shy it can be a prison. “I preferred to take refuge in my dreams,” she continued. That dreaminess about her followed her from childhood to adulthood, as she also admitted she kind of stares off into space when she’s around family and friends, thinking of something else beyond what is within her reach. “Where am I?” she hypothetically asks the reporter. “No idea. Probably in higher spheres.” Sometimes she doesn’t even know herself, basically joining us all in the enigma that is Aaliyah.

  Back to the dream of flying.

  Aaliyah is in Egypt. She walks the same sand-dusted ground that Cleopatra and the Pharaohs once walked. Egypt was one of her travel goals. She wanted to visit there, ever since she was a child, often burying her head in books about Egypt. When she bought her New York City apartment at 25 Central Park West, she decorated it in Egyptian iconography. Once she became a star, the goal was to bring her career closer to Egypt. She was aiming for a role as Cleopatra but settled on almost getting there, playing the Kemet-turned-Egyptian vampire queen Akasha in Queen of the Damned. Still, she wanted Cleopatra. Aaliyah wanted a lot of things.

  She wanted to get married, to have a family. The man she would marry would “be strong, as an Egyptian warrior,” she continued, making her dreams yet again come full circle. She also wanted to finally enroll in college. Her major? Egyptology.

  After this interview—which wasn’t published until a week after her passing—many surmised that Aaliyah had a premonition. She realized something was going to happen to her. Recurring dreams for nearly a month might make anyone else overtly cautious, refusing to step on cracks, walking around ladders, and paying heed to other superstitions. And as Aaliyah went through her dream in detail, it seemed as though she started with unease but allowed the story to unfold, and she eventually landed on peacefulness. She discussed the future after that. She mentioned her Dolly Pop clothing and accessory line that she had planned with Kidada Jones (which was slated for production the following year). She mentioned more music, more movies. Egypt had to wait, because there were other dreams she had to fulfill.

  But God had other plans.

  Two weeks before Aaliyah died, she was happy. Really happy. She was headed to the Hamptons by helicopter with her boyfriend of one year, Damon Dash. While Aaliyah had previously been loosely involved with his Roc-A-Fella business partner Jay-Z, it was Dash who won her heart. The two met through one of Aaliyah’s best friends, model Natane Boudreau. “I introduced her to her great love, Damon Dash,” Boudreau told Vogue in 2016. It seemed as though Dash and Baby Girl were perfect for each other. She chipped away at his tough exterior and opened his heart, while he created a safe place for her to explore her edgier side. Aaliyah was a lady but knew how to hang with the fellas. “We were in Dame’s house one day, when he had the big mansion, I believe in Alpine [New Jersey], and it had the movie theater at the bottom,” rapper Jim Jones remembers. “[Dame] had one of the first edits of the Paid in Full movie, and me and Cam[’ron] went over there to watch it. Him and Aaliyah were there. I had maybe a half an ounce of weed, and [Aaliyah] kept tellin’ me, ‘Roll up, n***a, you smokin’ that or what?’ ” Jones was shocked. He ended up smoking nearly the entire half of an ounce of weed with Aaliyah while she watched Paid in Full with the guys. “It blew my mind,” he continues, unaware that the Princess of R&B was not only a weed smoker but a champion one at that.

  “She damn sure was. She smoked with the best of them,” Jones punctuates with a laugh. Aaliyah fit right into Dash’s life, and he fit into hers. They had plans to get married; Aaliyah wore a Roc-A-Fella chain around her neck. Even Dash’s demeanor became noticeably different. “I’d known Damon for years,” Jimmy Douglass remembers, from w
orking with Jay-Z. “He was a bit of a difficult person, and he wasn’t kind.” After he met Aaliyah, things changed. “I’ll never forget this. One day, I’m in the Manhattan Center studio—[Aaliyah] is on the microphone out in the booth—and Dame comes in and he goes, ‘Hey, man, what’s going on?’ And I looked at him like, ‘Huh? What the fuck?’ and then [Aaliyah] comes out of the booth and she goes, ‘Hey, darling,’ or whatever. And I go, oh shit, he’s in love. Holy shit. It softened him up. Now he’s Mister Friendly ’cause he found love.”

  The couple spent their Fourth of July weekend in 2001 in the Hamptons for the Bad Boy versus Roc-A-Fella softball game. Aaliyah is sporting a Rocawear tee, along with Dame’s cousin, actress Stacey Dash, and Natane Boudreau. Aaliyah and Dame look as happy as can be together.

  On August 11, the couple was in that helicopter, back in the Hamptons. Journalist Touré was on assignment shadowing Jay-Z and he wrote of how Aaliyah was hugging a black pillow and nuzzled into Dame’s shoulder as she fell asleep on the helicopter ride. Touré observed her while he was there observing Jay, equally taken by her ability to remain sweet yet still sexy. “Throughout the weekend, she was quiet but not quite shy, quick to flash her wide, bright smile, quick to laugh at Dash’s jokes and quick to dance with him in the middle of the living room when Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall came on,” he wrote of Aaliyah for Rolling Stone following her death. “On Sunday, she slept hours longer than everyone else, on a bed strewn with rose petals. She and Dash seemed very much in love.” While she was in love with Dame, she was also in love with her life. Her eponymous album was on the charts, she was finishing up her role in Queen of the Damned and had begun preproduction for her roles in the second and third Matrix films. This was everything she had manifested. It was the moment in time that she had dreamed of, and everything from the past only made her strong in her present. The future looked bright.

  On August 21, 2001, she sat down for her last interview with BET’s 106 & Park. She was coming off the high of holding the biggest contest ever for BET, where a fan took home $20,000 and a Cadillac Escalade. She talked about never having a car before. For the years leading up to her passing, she moved back to the city she was born in, New York City, so a car wasn’t really necessary. Aaliyah spoke of her favorite videos she had done, from “One in a Million” to “Are You That Somebody?” and was preparing for the road ahead. She handed the Cadillac keys to the lucky winner and then headed back to her place to prepare for her flight to Miami. “Me, Aaliyah, and Missy were supposed to meet up,” Lil’ Kim remembers. The girls were going to convene at Aaliyah’s before she left. Kim was running late, so she called Missy to tell her. “So Aaliyah grabs the phone from her and was like, ‘If you don’t get your ass here… I have so much to talk to you about I have so much to tell you. I really need you, I need my sister,’ ” Kim continues. “But Aaliyah never stressed how much she needed me to be with her until that night. I just couldn’t understand it.” Kim hurried to get there, but arrived too late. Aaliyah already left for the airport. “It fucked with my soul, because I’d never see her again,” Kim adds with remorse.

  Aaliyah was bound for Miami.

  She had questions about her safety the moment she laid eyes on the airplane taking her to the Bahamas from Miami. For one, she hated flying; and even further, she hated the idea of boarding a tiny aircraft. She was anxiety ridden about that initial trip, as the flight felt unnecessary and downright dangerous. But Aaliyah was a team player and didn’t want to disappoint anyone. Getting there wasn’t a problem; it was returning that proved to be the impossible.

  “There is no chance that if I was there we would have been on that plane,” Damon Dash told The Real in 2016. “It would have never happened that way.”

  Both Aaliyah and Dash were in Miami a few days prior, but for different reasons. Aaliyah was shooting some preliminary footage for the music video to her upcoming single “Rock the Boat,” while Dash was with Roc-A-Fella Records crew State Property along with his son Damon “Boogie” Dash II and a few of his nephews. While there, Aaliyah was going to record a song with Roc-A-Fella’s State Property crew rapper Freeway when plans changed all around. She was going to come back from the Bahamas and then hit the studio. “When Aaliyah died in that plane crash, she was on her way to come meet me and Freeway to do a remix for ‘More Than a Woman,’ ” Just Blaze confirmed to Fuse in 2012. “We got a call saying, ‘She just got on a plane. She’ll be at the studio in an hour or two.’ Then, twenty minutes later, people are on the radio saying that she died. We didn’t believe because we had literally just got off the phone with her people. We got confirmation a few minutes later that it was true.”

  The director for the “Rock the Boat” music video, Hype Williams, made the call to move the filming over to the Bahamas. Dash had to fly back to New York because he had a court date pending and his son had a football game. He couldn’t join Aaliyah on the next leg of her work trip. On his way heading back to New York, he and Aaliyah had an exchange on their BlackBerrys about her last-minute Bahamas trip.

  She didn’t want to go to the Bahamas. She didn’t like the looks of the airplane heading there. Dame pleaded with her not to go. She had to. There were enough label issues and contractual obligations happening where Aaliyah knew that this wasn’t an instance where she could fold her arms and be defiant. Well, she could have, but that wasn’t in her nature. She wanted to keep the peace. This was one of the only times her family hadn’t been traveling with her. Her mother was having a medical procedure done and couldn’t be present for the shoot. There was no one around to understand the energy around Aaliyah’s concerns and effectively advocate that she not board that flight.

  The Bahamas are a frequent spot for filming, especially for footage that is geared toward creating an “out to sea” effect. Many film directors opt to shoot there, since certain areas are less crowded, beautiful scenery is within close proximity everywhere, and the cost to shoot is often less expensive. There are also many options for shooting, considering you can hop from island to island in an effort to nail the perfect shot.

  The Abaco Islands are a collection of small islands that sit within the northern extension of the Bahamas. They are east of South Florida. An air taxi ride from Miami to the Great Abaco is about an hour and a half. Aaliyah reached the Abaco Islands safely, traveling in a bigger aircraft, but she would never make it back.

  The shoot for “Rock the Boat” started on August 22, 2001, in Miami and concluded in the Bahamas on August 25, 2001. On August 22, the crew had a long day, nearly twelve hours of shooting green-screen footage at the Miami Broadcast Center. From there, they headed to the Florida International University campus, filming underwater shots in a campus pool until 4 AM August 23. In the finished product the shots are beautiful and free-flowing, where Aaliyah looks like a mythical mermaid. During the filming, however, Aaliyah’s anxiety got the best of her when it came to breath control underwater. “I’m trying to get it done quickly,” she says on camera for BET’s ALL ACCESS, who followed her throughout the shoot. “I don’t know how long I can last under there.” The shot involved intricate details at the floor of the pool, where an entire set was down there waiting for her, along with a blue screen to add other underwater imagery to the video. Aaliyah was supposed to use a breath regulator to stay under the water longer, but she struggled with quickly training herself to breathe through it, once she got farther beyond the shallow waters. I can’t do it, I can’t do it, she’s seen mouthing from a distance in a panic. It was not going to happen so easily. She finally completed the shots holding her breath for extended spurts in a nearly fifteen-foot pool. “It was worth it,” she says afterwards. “We got some really pretty shots out of it.” Following the mildly traumatic underwater scene, the crew moved forward to shoot the next batch of footage in the Bahamas. They flew later that day from Miami to the Treasure Cay Airport in Abaco, staying at the Treasure Cay Beach, Marina & Golf Resort for the next few days. Choreographer Fatima Robinso
n was there, and two-thirds of her glam squad known as Eric, Eric, and Derek or The Dream Team: stylist Derek Lee and hair stylist Eric Foreman. The second Eric, makeup artist Eric Ferrell (who died in 2020), was on tour with Macy Gray and didn’t make it to the shoot. His replacement was Christopher Maldonado. Foreman’s business partner Anthony Dodd was also there.

  On the morning of August 24, Aaliyah was up at 3:00 AM on the beautiful island, doing her hair and makeup to prep for her 6:00 AM call time. She watched the sunrise kiss the ocean in the distance as her makeup was touched up. She was urging everyone around her to see the beauty that she was witnessing. “It’s beautiful; did you catch that?” she tells the cameraman, making sure he pans the camera away from her for a split second just to capture the view on film. “It’s so pretty,” she continues.

  The next day, August 25, Aaliyah and her team were bound for Marsh Harbour to film the remaining shots for the video—out to sea, dancing on a stage built into a seventy-two-foot catamaran (known as the Fat Cat) that cut through the crystalline turquoise waters of the Bahamas. The shots were epic, and Aaliyah was ecstatic, lip-synching for the video shots but in between takes singing like a songbird, just out of pure joy. She was in paradise and had created visuals for a song that was as smooth as the calming waters she was gliding upon. It was all so perfect. “I live out my dreams of being an artist through Aaliyah,” choreographer Fatima Robinson tells the cameraman. “ ’Cause she’s on my same vibe.” The shoot was a wrap, and everyone agreed it was seamless, the kind where once it’s over, people feel as though a bond was formed. Aaliyah asked the crew if she could take some time in the water by herself. She hopped on a Jet Ski, and all alone (with two men guarding her from a distance) she traveled to the center of the sea and just sat there, gazing. She wanted that moment, to bask in her place in the sun and in solitude. After that she ventured back to land to conclude her trip. Some of the crew opted to stay behind and take an extra day to enjoy the island. The remaining crew, Aaliyah included, decided to head back that late afternoon, flying out this time from the Marsh Harbour Airport.