Aaliyah
The Detroit teenager who whispered where everyone else belted, and with Timbaland and Missy Elliott bent R&B toward the future. Aaliyah went from "Back & Forth" at 15 to "Try Again," the first song to top the Hot 100 on airplay alone, and died in a plane crash in August 2001 at 22, five weeks after her third album came out.
Aaliyah Dana Haughton was born in Brooklyn on January 16, 1979, and raised in Detroit from the age of five. She sang "My Funny Valentine" on Star Search at ten and performed in concert with Gladys Knight at eleven; her uncle Barry Hankerson, Knight's ex-husband, signed her to his Blackground label at twelve. Hankerson introduced her to R. Kelly, who wrote and produced her debut, Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, recorded when she was 14 and released May 24, 1994. "Back & Forth" reached number five and the album sold three million copies. Vibe later surfaced a marriage certificate dated August 31, 1994, listing the 15-year-old as 18; her parents had it annulled in February 1995 and she cut off all contact with Kelly.
She moved to Atlantic in 1996 and made One in a Million with two newcomers, Timbaland and Missy Elliott, who were nervous to work with her and found her "so warming." The album sold three million copies in the United States and more than eight million worldwide. In 1997 she graduated from the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts with a 4.0 average, became a Tommy Hilfiger spokesperson in red, white and blue baggy jeans, and sang "Journey to the Past" from Anastasia at the Academy Awards, the youngest singer ever to perform there. "Are You That Somebody?" (1998), from the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack, was so unlike anything on the radio that critic Simon Reynolds called it the most radical pop single of the year; it peaked at number 21 only because Billboard changed its rules that December to let airplay-only songs chart.
Romeo Must Die, opposite Jet Li, opened at number two in March 2000, and its single "Try Again" became the first song to reach number one on the Hot 100 on airplay alone; the Wayne Isham video won two VMAs. Her third album, Aaliyah, released July 17, 2001, debuted at number two. On August 25, after wrapping the "Rock the Boat" video in the Bahamas, she boarded a Cessna 402 at Marsh Harbour that was overloaded by more than 900 pounds and flown by a pilot not approved to fly it; it crashed just after takeoff, killing her and eight others. The album went to number one within weeks, "More than a Woman" made her the first deceased female artist to top the UK chart, and critics have since credited her soft-voiced records with changing how pop sounds, from Destiny's Child onward.
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