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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The fate of Aaliyah was a made-for-TV movie tragedy spun out before our very eyes.
Sep 6, 2001 | The funeral for Aaliyah last Friday was one fit for a fairy tale princess. The soul singer, who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas on Aug. 26, was paraded through the streets of New York in a white, glassed-in antique carriage drawn by two pure-white ponies. At the funeral, her mother released 22 white doves -- one for each year of Aaliyah's short life. Thousands of fans watched the procession and wept, waving placards aloft.
I know all this because I turned on the television this weekend, vainly thinking I'd watch some music videos on MTV or VH1. But alas: It's been all Aaliyah, all the time ever since the singer's untimely death. I'd never been a big fan of Aaliyah's, though her existence and her music glimmered on the edges of my awareness -- I'd seen her videos, could recognize a few of her catchy songs, and knew that she'd made an appearance in the film "Romeo Must Die." It seemed sad that she'd died.
Still, it came as a bit of a shock to see such a fuss being made over her death. MTV News has run constant updates on the shocking crash -- the overloaded plane, the pilot who had been caught with crack just a week earlier -- along with the half-hour special "The Life of Aaliyah," a cobbled-together montage of interviews and homages from mourning fans, friends and peers. VH1 has a similar lineup, and a similar biographical special, running several times a day. The funeral was covered by everyone from the New York Times to the Washington Post. (No one, incidentally, mentioned the equally tragic deaths of the other eight people in the plane crash other than in passing.)
One particularly poignant video clip, an interview from an MTV "Diary" that Aaliyah taped in July, was repeated ad nauseam all week. "There are times when I sit back and look at my career as a whole and realize I am truly blessed to be doing something I love," Aaliyah says, smiling happily at the camera. "Sometimes I'm taken aback. I'm very happy. There's so much more I want to do in my career, it's beyond words." Feeling weepy yet?
But the media outpouring over Aaliyah shouldn't come as a surprise. She was a creation of the music-media machine, a budding talent whose potential stardom was identified and then manufactured before she'd even grown out of her training bra. Now that she's dead, those same star makers are crafting a "legend" for her, à la Kurt Cobain, Notorious B.I.G or Tupac Shakur. In the world of pop music, death has become as much of a commodity as life itself, a chance to turn popular stars into bona fide legends through the coincidence of their untimely deaths. Not to put too cynical a touch to it, but everyone loves a tragedy.
Aaliyah was a new-generation teen soul queen, popping onto the scene when she was just 15. Her sudden stardom was due in no small part to the influence of her uncle, Barry Hankerson, who was Gladys Knight's ex-husband and the manager of the R&B star R. Kelly. Kelly produced her first album, "Age Ain't Nothing But a Number," but -- perhaps taking the title of the album too literally -- married the teenager. (Details about the marriage are sketchy; neither spoke about it publicly.) With his backing, her career chugged along nicely, churning out hits from her subsequent album. In July, she released her third album and rocketed back into the charts, thanks to heavy rotation of her videos on MTV. She had roles lined up in a number of movies, including parts in "The Queen of the Damned" and "The Matrix" sequels.
