aaliyah transformed
Aaliyah [Blackground, 2001]
a slave to her beats, but a proud slave ("We Need a Resolution," "U Got Nerve") ***
Is what Robert Chrisgau says about Aaliyah’s 3rd album.
Relistening to “We Need a Resolution,” “More than a Woman,” and “Are You That Somebody,” I can exactly recall the moment before each song actually “starts.” Before Aaliyah comes in on “We Need a Resolution,” I’m struck more by the violin piercing the air in a wail-like tone, coming back into harmonic. For “Are You That Somebody,” the parts I catch myself humming are the instrumentals, not her melody.
I was surprised by how long I had listened to Aaliyah and how little I had understood that rhythmic motion, the way that I was able to move over her words and just think uncritically, really not being able to think at all.
Once, I had thought that Aaliyah’s music kind of became a similar drone once you had listened to enough of it, but I had attributed that to a headache rather than a serious critical idea. I didn’t have the ability to see or describe that the production could sound samey because it was mostly done by the same people. And as Aaliyah’s vocals depend so much on that production, there is no creation of a sound or idea beyond the beats. Her voice doesn’t fly up and down and challenge the sounds she works with, unlike someone like Joni Mitchell. Her voice is rather woven between the melodies with such technical skill that it becomes impossible to separate it. Like concrete, her voice can take in sand and water and gravel to become one strong, iconic block of things, but that’s all. The lyrics are almost meaningless.
It amazes me a little that Robert Chrisgau can say all of what I felt in such a succinct sentence. Nine words in all, (translating from his website grade key) he notes that “We Need a Resolution” and “U Got Nerve” are notable and enjoyable songs for people who might just be listening to her for that kind of sound in the first place. Scaruffi notes “Are You That Somebody” as one of “the most original singles of rhythm'n'blues of the era,” but fails to rate any of her albums, a consequence, maybe, of her albums not being journeys but rather mere presentations of her skill to blend in different environments.
But at the same time it kind of disturbs me, the way Robert Chrisgau so easily uses these words. A slave to her beats? To talk about an R&B artist… to talk about Aaliyah. A slave to her beats could be reread as taking away credit from Aaliyah’s own artistry. She of course chooses to make her musical style that way.
But that’s covered by “but a proud slave.” But a proud slave seems to conjure up images of an Uncle Tom figure, someone who is submissive but happily so, someone who is proud to achieve the musical needs of a beat that is above her as a lowly singer might be, especially one who chooses happily to be subservient to that beat.
Zadie Smith says in her article “Some Notes on Attunement,” she began seeing Joni Mitchell as just some other white woman. She ends the article by letting Joni Mitchell stand on her own. The ending line is about Joni Mitchell talking about the first book she wants to write, her autobiography, that would start with the line, I was the only black man in the room…
Did this mean Zadie Smith had transformed Joni Mitchell from a white woman to a black man, a transformation that allowed her to accept Joni Mitchell’s music into her own heart? Zadie Smith seems to be arguing, as she does with her piece “Speaking in Tongues,” that voices must reach a “proper and decent human harmony.”
To reach that harmony, does it require a white woman necessarily transform into a black man, like Obama can transform between “jive talk[ing] like a street hustler” and “orat[ing] like a senator?” Zadie Smith explicitly seems to want to take away race, in a move unlike the right-wing idea of race blindness. Or maybe she wants people to go above race through “shared humanity.”
I don’t believe in this idea. How could I possibly know what it’s like to be black? I haven’t lived through that life. I don’t think any amount of anthropology or ethnography can replace years of living through a specific experience. Every time I read about what it’s like to be working class or talk to someone who lived and grew up working class I realize that I know nothing about what it’s like to live like that. It doesn’t matter how educated I am. I sit and listen.
And can’t we accept someone who is not like us even without transmuting them into something that we are?
When Chrisgau calls Aaliyah a slave is it because she is black and he wants to be black? Or because he is white and he wants her to be white-enough that he can call her that?
The one other review Robert Chrisgau has of Aaliyah is after she died. He gives her final album an A-.
A half measure that's anything but "definitive" and the best we're likely to get until she's a trivia question: both soundtrack smashes plus a hit-or-miss best-of and six previously unreleaseds whose consistency rescues the project. From "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" when she was 15 to "More Than a Woman" just before she died (the latter included, the former discreetly not), she was lithe and dulcet in a way that signified neither jailbait nor hottie--an ingenue whose selling point was sincerity, not innocence and the obverse it implies. Timbaland's beats add essential eccentricity, but R. Kelly's ditties suited her almost as well. And what can it mean that a good new one celebrates the machinations of the bitch queen of All My Children? Such mysteries are beyond the ken of mortal males like me. A-
How is it possible for Chrisgau to switch up on his thoughts on Aaliyah so quickly? He now calls her an ingenue whose selling points was sincerity instead of innocence, obverse of the idea that she was just a slave to her beats.
Was it because of consumer hype? Was it because he began to feel that he was too harsh on her in her lifetime? Is it because he was finally connecting with her as a person because she became a celebrity, because she died in such a momentous way?