Fifteen years ago today, on July 7, 2001, Aaliyah released her third and final studio album, a self-titled album that had come five years after her sophomore album “One In A Million.”  A few weeks later, she died in a plane crash after having recorded a music video in the Bahamas in a plane that had too much baggage, much of it likely to have been involved win the filming, and with a pilot who was unlicensed and under the influence of drugs and alcohol.  What had been a modestly successful album in her life became a massively popular album after her death at the age of 22, and Aaliyah’s career remains one of the more fascinating counterfactual questions of urban music, as people wonder what might have been in the face of her premature death.  What I would like to discuss today is the enduring influence and complexity of her relationship with her first musical mentor, the enigmatic and complex R. Kelly, who produced Aaliyah’s immensely successful and problematically named debut album “Age Ain’t Nothin’ But A Number.”

How did Aaliyah get into music in the first place?  Like many people who succeed at a young age in the music industry, she had an inside connection, in that her maternal uncle Barry Hankerson, who had been married for several years to famous singer Gladys Knight, was a record producer and manager who had managed and produced acts like The Winans, Toni Braxton, and R. Kelly.  Her mother had been a vocalist as well.  R. Kelly had been a recently successful artist himself and had released a couple of well-regarded and successful albums, and he wrote some startlingly adult-oriented albums for the young Aaliyah, whom he met when she was twelve and whose debut album was released when she was only fourteen.  Somewhat awkwardly for both of them, there was apparently a clandestine and illegal marriage between the two that Aaliyah dealt with for the rest of her life with a frosty silence and a determined unwillingness to talk about, and which R. Kelly denied but admitted having fallen in love with the young ingénue, despite the fact that after the secret marriage became widely known she would monosyllabically deny ever wanting to work with him again or talk about him again if she could possibly help it.

R. Kelly apparently, and lamentably, did not learn from this mistake.  Although he appears to have regretted the rift, and though it likely cost him quite a lot to admit his love for someone who made it plain that she wanted nothing to do with him, whatever intimacy they had once shared, he has been dogged throughout his career by the same problem that he faced in marrying the teenager Aaliyah without her parents’ consent.  What accounts for this fatal lure and for the vulnerability of R. Kelly to this particular problem?  It is easy and tempting to simply condemn R. Kelly as being monstrous in his behavior, but the truth appears far more complicated, in that he appears to have a deep and conflicted aspect of his own soul, with deep spiritual and protective instincts as expressed in songs like “I Believe I Can Fly,” “You Are Not Alone,” “I Wish,” and “I’m Your Angel.”  His life, and his art, is immensely complicated—one need only think of his epic “Trapped In The Closet”—and for all of his glorying of sexuality and his clear weaknesses in this regard, this sexuality sits uneasily with a sense of deep torment and difficulty.  The compartmentalization and birfucation of his character in this regard suggests that far from being a monster he is a troubled soul seeking redemption like most people, despite his failures.

One wonders why Aaliyah was unwilling to come to grips with this herself.  To be sure, R. Kelly failed in his job as an adult in protecting Aaliyah from herself.  But even had R. Kelly acted with restraint, the mere ridicule that resulted from scrutiny, and Kelly’s obvious attraction to the underage Aaliyah and the disapproval of her family to the intimacy that they shared, or would have shared even had they merely been flirtatious friends engaged in a common passion for music, would likely have made their close friendship impossible to maintain in the face of the stress and pressure that resulted.  The fact that for the rest of her short life Aaliyah was unwilling to admit her love for R. Kelly, even when it was an open secret to everyone else who cared to know about it, suggests that she was deeply hurt by what happened, and struggled greatly with intimacy.  Perhaps the two talented people related as peers, despite their considerable age difference and despite the awkwardness and problems it brought to both of them, and the pleasure of the friendship and whatever else existed could not survive the immense hothouse atmosphere of their celebrity status.  One could say that Aaliyah did not entirely learn the lessons from her problems with R. Kelly either, in that she took roles in the movies “Romeo Must Die” and “Queen of the Damned” that focused on forbidden love and dark sexuality, and that her next producer, Timbaland, was no angel himself when it came to sexuality himself—witness his chart-topping collaboration with Nelly Furtado in “Promiscuous.”

In the end, both Aaliyah and R. Kelly appear to be the same sort of souls, both of them interested in neo-soul, both of them tormented by the tension between living life as famous and wealthy celebrities while desiring privacy, both of them struggling with the fact that they were mature at different levels in different parts of life, and both of them conscious of their sexuality but unwilling to be boxed in by it.  If R. Kelly’s soul was laid bare by the tormented and immensely complicated “Trapped In The Closet,” Aaliyah bore her heart out in songs like “The One I Gave My Heart To” and, perhaps most notably, “Are You That Somebody?,” where over a syncopated beat she sings a restrained soprano in a sense of quiet desperation while the sound of a baby in a crib serves as musical background and the likely reason for the singer’s distress in the context of the song.  R. Kelly faced the threat of jailtime in the face of later accusations, while Aaliyah popularized ghetto goth in her wearing of black.  Perhaps the two of them were too close in their shared distress to remain friends for long, and perhaps Aaliyah was simply unwilling to forgive R. Kelly for his mistakes—we can be sure he made some serious ones—and come to grips with her own feelings and vulnerability.  Hopefully both of them came, however privately, to a recognition that they were two of the same sorts of people in a large world, and that their lives were better for the sparks that flew and for the music they made together, even if neither of them were willing to entirely acknowledge all that had happened between them.  Age may only be a number in our eyes when we are dealing with other people [1], but it has far larger implications and ramifications in the world that we live, and we would be foolish to ignore those consequences in a heedless rush to enjoy our own personal and private pleasures.  The wise learn from the experiences of others; fools do not learn even from their own mistakes.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/has-anybody-seen-all-my-wasted-love/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/has-anybody-seen-all-my-wasted-friendship/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/what-would-dietrich-bonhoeffer-do/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/apologia-pro-vita-sua/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/06/25/if-i-was-half-a-man-i-wouldnt-sleep-alone/