25 years after Aaliyah’s death, we’re still wondering who she may have become
TheGrio...
The singer Aaliyah died at age 22, 25 years ago on August 25, 2001, in a tragic plane crash in the Bahamas.
In August 2001, Julian Hawkins, a 19-year-old Morgan State sophomore from Baltimore, won a Cadillac Escalade and $20,000 while in the audience of BET’s “106 & Park.” However, that particular episode of “106 & Park” is memorable for an entirely different reason — R&B superstar Aaliyah was there, too.
She hopped out of the black 2002 Escalade to a screaming audience of adoring fans, dressed in a head-to-toe white ensemble that consisted of a tank ripped down the center, white flare denim, and tennis shoes. Her signature silky-smooth, bone-straight hair — which legions of tweens and teens would wrap theirs at night to emulate — framed her bright-eyed, wide smile. She was on hand to help hosts A.J. Calloway and Marie “Free” Wright announce the contest winner and share details about her upcoming music video shoot in the Bahamas for “Rock the Boat,” a single from her third LP, “Aaliyah,” which had been out for just over a month.
“I shoot the video tomorrow, as a matter of fact,” she explained while seated across from the hosts. “And that video should be out, we’re hoping like beginning of September. We’re actually doing singles back-to-back.”
When Calloway asked her what “Rock the Boat” was about, Aaliyah shot him a sassy look before quipping, “We’ll have to talk backstage.”
She added, “It’s a very sensual song about being with somebody you love and how it takes you to another place and like a natural high.”
She was dead just days later, on Aug. 25, at the age of 22, after a plane carrying her and eight others crashed shortly after takeoff from Abaco Island in the Bahamas, shocking and devastating fans around the world.
The award-winning songstress, often dubbed the “Princess of R&B,” died at the height of her career. She had made her film debut just a year earlier in 2000’s “Romeo Must Die,” wrapped filming for 2002’s “Queen of the Damned,” and was riding the success of three studio albums, including “Aaliyah,” which was leading her into a more grown and sultry era than the teenager introduced to the world with “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number” and its follow-up, “One in a Million.” Twenty-five years later, while many of her millennial fans have grown up, part of what makes her death still so haunting is not only how young she was or the tragic circumstances surrounding it, but how much of her story she never got to tell.
Aaliyah, the niece of Gladys Knight (by marriage), who was born in 1979 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Detroit, first arrived on the scene at just 15 with her debut album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” With her signature smooth, agile, and hypnotic vocals, she gave us hits like “Back & Forth” and “At Your Best (You Are Love),” helping usher in the funky hybrid of hip-hop and R&B that would define much of the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Her style was just as influential. She sang about love and desire dressed in her own girlified version of streetwear, pairing baggy pants worn low and slouched with tiny tops, sunglasses, and hair always sleek. From there came the Timbaland-produced beats, futuristic videos, and choreography that helped define a generation. During her final interview, she gushed about the dancing in the video for “Are You That Somebody.”
“‘One in a Million’ is definitely one of my favorite music videos and ‘Are You That Somebody,’ as well, because that was all just dance and you know I love to dance,” she shared.
The details surrounding her death have also developed a lore of their own. Just moments after the twin-engine Cessna 402B carrying Aaliyah and her crew took off from Marsh Harbour Airport, it crashed roughly 200 feet beyond the runway and burst into flames.
In the immediate aftermath, reports raised questions about everything from possible engine trouble to the amount of luggage and equipment aboard. Investigators eventually determined that the aircraft was substantially overloaded and improperly balanced. The pilot, Luis Morales III, was also not authorized to fly the aircraft and was later found to have cocaine and alcohol in his system.
After her death, Knight remembered the bright star she got to watch grow up.
“I watched her grow up, and, with the rest of the world, saw her achieve success with her special and unique talents,” Knight said at the time, according to Hello! Magazine. “From an early age I knew she had enormous talents, an intrinsic gift. When she first performed with me in Las Vegas, she was still quite young, but she already had it – that spark the world would later see and fall in love with.”
With Aaliyah, there really is a crushing sense that we will never get an answer to what could have been, and this is beyond her music or budding acting career.
Her death occurred nearly two decades before the entertainment industry underwent the reckoning of the Me Too era, which helped many of us develop language and a different understanding around some of what happened to her that we did not have while she was alive. Chief among them is her relationship with R. Kelly, who wrote and produced her debut album and illegally married her in 1994, when she was just 15, and he was 27. The marriage certificate falsely listed her as 18, and the union was annulled months later.
There is also the misogyny and adultification woven into the beginning of her career. She was a teenage girl singing material written by a grown man about decidedly grown themes, packaged under a provocative album title that takes on a far more disturbing meaning in light of what we now know.
Kelly would eventually face the kind of public and legal reckoning that had not happened by the time Aaliyah died. She never got to participate in it. There was no later-life interview, memoir, or documentary in which she could look back on being a girl thrust into fame and tell the story in her own words. For someone so famous, so beloved, and so influential, there is still so much about Aaliyah herself that we simply never got to know. The “Try Again” singer was just beginning to show the world who she might become as an adult, an actress, and an artist with greater control over her image and sound. It’s truly a tragedy that, as we’ve all grown up, she remains frozen at 22.
When the video for “Rock the Boat” was released after her death, it landed like an eerie tribute. After a crescendo of the singer dancing rhythmically on a boat and along a Caribbean beach, she ascends through the water toward the sunlight, waving goodbye and flashing that bright smile one final time.