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  A year later, in 1991, while R. Kelly was working on his debut album, Born into the 90’s with Public Announcement, Barry brought his twelve-year-old niece to the studio to meet him. “I sang for him,” Aaliyah told Vibe in 1994, “and he liked my sound.”

  Barry Hankerson was hoping to use R. Kelly as leverage to secure a record deal for Aaliyah, since R. Kelly was not only growing in popularity as a star but also a hit-making songwriter/producer for other artists. Labels weren’t quite ready for Aaliyah, but Aaliyah was ready to be a star. While Barry’s son Jomo was in his last year at Pepperdine University, he and his father decided to start a record company once Barry’s attempts to lock a record deal for Aaliyah failed.

  In 1991 Blackground Entertainment was formed, and two years later its flagship artist started working on her debut album.

  CHAPTER TWO: AGE AIN’T NOTHING BUT A NUMBER

  It was basically like listening to an R. Kelly album, but with a little girl singing.

  —Jeff Sledge, Vibe magazine, 2016

  “May 5, 1993. Aaliyah’s Diary. Got it,” Aaliyah says with a coy giggle on the intro to the title track off her 1994 debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, as pen scribbles accent dramatic, rolling piano keys like she’s about to tell her whole life story. It’s a subtle nod to the simplicity of being a teen, documenting life between the pages of some glittery Lisa Frank journal with a unicorn jumping over a rainbow on the cover and a padlock on the side, while simultaneously alluding to the idea that her project was semi-autobiographical.

  Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number was a complex work, for a number of different reasons. Adhering to the date that Aaliyah herself set on that song, she was fourteen years old when the process had begun for piecing together her big debut. While her uncle Barry Hankerson previously couldn’t secure an exclusive major-label deal for her, his newly minted Blackground Entertainment was able to score her a deal with Kelly’s label, Jive Records.

  R. Kelly released his solo debut album, 12 Play, on November 9, 1993. His first Jive release, Born into the 90’s with his group, Public Announcement, was met with mild critical acclaim. Hankerson was executive producer on both projects. Kelly’s pre-solo work with Public Announcement made him a prominent fixture in music’s teetering New Jack Swing Era. Groups like Jodeci were becoming the face of that movement, making sure a de facto figurehead (in Jodeci’s case, it was singer K-Ci Hailey) could always saunter to the front of the stage during choreographed performances to woo the ladies with his abs exposed. Kelly was primed to stand out among his group members, but he needed to do more. It was his solo album that marked him as a sexual dynamo.

  12 Play’s cover shows R. Kelly gripping a black cane that extends outward across his baggy black denim, a position proudly extending his cane as a phallic symbol, since it’s sprouting directly from below his belt. At the end of the cane is a tiny mirror, which used to be a device for young boys to mischievously look up girls’ skirts. Kelly is inconspicuously staring off into the distance in blacked-out shades concealing his eyes, wearing a vest with no shirt on underneath. In the nineties this was popular for both R&B singers and college men. In fact, historically Black fraternity members would carry canes as accessories to twirl and make thuds to the floor with the tips, adding bass lines to their step show routines. Series like A Different World popularized this Black college lifestyle and brought it to television. However, R. Kelly was nearing twenty-seven when this project was released, despite presenting far younger during the album promo with this collegiate flair.

  12 Play was brilliantly executed, by erotic R&B standards. Songs like “Bump n’ Grind” and “Sex Me (Part I) / Sex Me (Part II)” cast sexual innuendos to the side and cut straight to the chase, while “Your Body’s Callin’ ” and “It Seems Like You’re Ready” were more suggestive, leading women to believe he understood their bodies perhaps better than they did. It was a power play that worked incredibly well for him, especially when he learned to translate it live. While his early performances opening for R&B acts such as Gerald Levert and Glenn Jones during their tours bruised his ego due to low attendance, Kelly started infusing his live sets with more sexuality. The world caught on, and in 1993 12 Play hit Number One on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and Number Two on the Billboard 200.

  12 Play’s success was enough to prove R. Kelly could craft hits, so Hankerson knew what he was doing when he introduced the star to his niece. Theoretically, the creative pairing of R. Kelly and Aaliyah seemed perfect, considering both had strong classic soul foundations and Aaliyah’s goal was to mix that old-school sound with the new school, much like what R. Kelly had already done with his career thus far. It was a win-win situation, and when Aaliyah first met R. Kelly at twelve and sang for him, Barry knew that Kelly could mold her into something more successful than anyone had ever imagined.

  By the time they began working together, Aaliyah was a freshman attending Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts, majoring in dance. The school was on par with Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City, also known as the school from the movie Fame. Using her first name as a mononym, Aaliyah took part in school talent shows. She quickly built a buzz within her high school. Barry had Aaliyah cutting demos well before that, at Detroit’s Vanguard Studios, bringing her to record-label meetings everywhere from Warner to MCA to take meetings. Aaliyah was also no stranger to Jive, as Barry was shopping her to the label at eleven years old, though they were reluctant to sign her so young and wanted to wait a bit longer. Once Aaliyah was a teenager, signed to her uncle’s company and working with R. Kelly—who was already considered a talent and a genius under their own roof—Jive was all in. R. Kelly was brought on board to both write and produce the entire project, a dream for any label since there were no publishing complications and, again, it would be in the hands of a certified hit maker.

  So at fourteen years old Aaliyah entered the studio with R. Kelly to create her debut album.

  It took about nine months to record Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number. Aaliyah recorded some at the top of 1993 but picked it back up around May of that same year. During her summer break from school, Aaliyah flew to Chicago from Detroit, where she spent two months on and off with R. Kelly to create the project at the nation’s largest independent studio, the Chicago Recording Company. It’s the same studio where R. Kelly would later record his massive commercial hit “I Believe I Can Fly.” They hung out together in Chicago, outside of the studio, going bowling, playing video games at arcades, going out to dinner, and watching movies—all of the cutesy activities high school sweethearts do on their date nights. Throughout their time together, R. Kelly would observe Aaliyah and her behaviors, even her interactions with her peers, listening in on their girl talk. He and Aaliyah continued to work on the project until around February of the following year. All of this time together was credited as his technique for gaining inspiration and fodder to write her album material. The product proved he had done his homework, in the most unconventional sense.

  “Working with him, he’s unpredictable,” Aaliyah said of Kelly in an audio interview circulated by Jive to press in 1994. “It’s not like when we go in the studio we have the song written out and we just go in and we just sing it through. Really, this whole album came off the top of his head. We’ll just go in, go to the mic, and he’ll tell me to say something and sing it and I’ll sing it. If we like it, we keep it; if we don’t, we don’t. It’s really a special kind of way we do that. It’s something that’s not written out and planned; it’s something that really happens.”

  When the promotional copies of the album circulated to press and music critics, the back cover showed a picture of Aaliyah with R. Kelly. Aaliyah is grinning in red lipstick and a white bandana, cupping her hands across R. Kelly’s bald head. He’s smirking and wearing his usual vest with no shirt on underneath. They both have on matching sunglasses. The back cover reads: “AGE AIN’T NOTHING BUT A NUM
BER was written and produced by R. Kelly. specially for Aaliyah.” (Yes, they included those typographical errors.) It also reveals a release date of June 14, but since the music video for “Back & Forth” became an MTV rotation darling, Jive opted to push the album up three weeks early.

  On May 24, 1994, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number was released. On the cover, Aaliyah is up close within focus, leaned up against a white wall with her face turned toward the camera. She’s dressed in all black, with a beanie, blacked-out shades, a black hoodie from nineties fashion staple Karl Kani, and a leather vest. Out of focus in the background stands R. Kelly, wearing the same leather vest with nothing on underneath, staring longingly at Aaliyah and leaning his head on the top of his omnipresent black cane. He too is wearing blacked-out shades. What was once regarded as symbolic imagery of a mentor watching his protégé flourish has taken on new meaning over the years. In the upper right-hand corner of the album cover is Aaliyah’s name written phonetically (“ah-lee-yah”) since she was still a newbie and people struggled with pronouncing her name correctly.

  The project was expertly sequenced by former Jive A&R executive Jeff Sledge to allow for a non-stop playing experience, where the goal was to start at the intro and end at the final track, “I’m Down.” With twelve songs, the album cuts straight to the point. R. Kelly’s fingerprints are all over the project, with the exception of Aaliyah’s cover of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best (You Are Love),” but even there, when the song was released as a single with a video, R. Kelly produced it, touted as “the remix.” His influence was apparent throughout. “It was basically like listening to an R. Kelly album, but with a little girl singing,” Sledge told Vibe in 2016.

  From the top to the bottom, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number is the perfect mid-nineties R&B album. It adheres to everything that made that era great—part soul, part hip-hop, with flecks of New Jack Swing. It is, in fact, an R. Kelly album… sung by a little girl.

  That little girl, however, was portrayed as far older, and we’re only reminded of her age in small doses on the project. Spending enough time with such a young girl could have theoretically given R. Kelly an advantage to write breezy tracks about young love and growing up. He instead took it in another direction in moments, where the project was more seeped in Aaliyah rebelling against her age rather than embracing it. There were only flecks of innocence sprinkled throughout an adult-leaning project, when in reality it should have been the other way around.

  Tracks like “Throw Your Hands Up” have lighter messages woven into the lyrics like, “If you’re not down with the crack, throw your hands up!” While lines like those err on the side of cheesy, it’s really the only reminder of Aaliyah’s age, since she was still an early teen on the project, and the “Just Say No” initiative and the D.A.R.E. campaign were still popular in middle schools and high schools during that time period. Another young artist, Tia Hawkins, provides guest vocals and ad-libs on this track and a few others. Hawkins was around sixteen when the songs were recorded.

  The album feels light and airy, filled with young love. It’s no wonder why both R. Kelly and Aaliyah spent so much time together in Chicago that prior summer, hanging out and having fun. The album perfectly captures that spirit of a summertime love story. It speaks of uncertainty, flirtation, gaining confidence, moving forward with cautious optimism, and eagerly solidifying love. Only this story is about a fourteen-year-old girl and a twenty-six-year-old man.

  In the liner notes, Aaliyah thanks R. Kelly as her “mentor, best friend, and producer.” The ranking bookended by “mentor and producer” is only a tiny red flag, though peeling back the layers of the album reveals something far more sinister than what the radio allowed. “Back & Forth” is a clear hit, bouncing through synths and heavy drums, as Aaliyah is talking about going to the club, while R. Kelly commands in the background, “Let me see you go back; now let me see you come forth.” These instructions on 12 Play would theoretically be perceived as sexual directions, and here he is inserting them into Aaliyah’s first single about dancing at a party with her friends. The album track “No One Knows How to Love Me Quite Like You Do” opens with Aaliyah and Tia at the studio talking about a boy named Chris when R. Kelly bursts into the room to get Aaliyah back in the booth to work on music. His ad-libs on that song are repeated over and over: “Liyah, you’re the only one for me.”

  Other songs have little innuendos and overgrown flirtatious subtleties, indicative of the fact that these were not lyrics for Aaliyah to be singing at her young age. The person wielding the pen made millions off songs about straight-up sex, so while R. Kelly could create purely sanitized songs on the album (check the song “Young Nation,” where Aaliyah really just carries on about being young), the moment there’s any reference to love he forcibly inserts a reference to sex. It’s almost as if it’s beyond his control and there’s just involuntary blurting in song. Take the track “I’m So into You,” where in the midst of cheeky banter about checking out a guy, Aaliyah sings the line “Take control of me; fulfill my fantasies.”

  The most glaring example by far is “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number.” On the album’s title track, Aaliyah is portrayed as the instigator, luring an older man as she sings about him knocking and her letting him in. Throughout the song, she’s asserting that her age means very little in the way of experience. A part of the song where Aaliyah sings, “ ’Cause tonight we’re gonna go all the way,” was later changed during some live performances to “ ’Cause tonight we’re gonna chill ’round the way,” perhaps due to the obviously suspicious lyrics, again penned by R. Kelly. Three years later, a lawsuit was filed against Aaliyah specifically by music publisher Windswept Pacific. The agency alleged that Aaliyah copied the 1978 track “What You Won’t Do for Love,” by Bobby Caldwell. Ironically, the suit was filed against Aaliyah only, and years after she stopped working with Kelly, who both wrote and produced the song. Caldwell was ultimately given credit for the interpolation of his song.

  * * *

  The album version of “At Your Best (You Are Love)” encapsulates the remnants of Aaliyah’s innocence through her delicate vocals. Her candy-coated falsetto shows that there’s more to her range than she was offered to express on the rest of the project. It’s here that you remember the young girl from Motor City, raised on Motown. Her soulful roots were strong. She wanted to be a singer, perhaps even more than she wanted to be a star. This song, this version, is the heart of who Aaliyah was at the time, and it was the only part that R. Kelly didn’t have complete control over, as it was originally an Isley Brothers song. In interviews, Aaliyah herself says it’s her favorite track on the album.

  R. Kelly appears on five of the fourteen songs on the album (including the bonus Mr. Lee and R. Kelly Remix to “Back & Forth”). On one of the first songs recorded for the album, “Old School,” R. Kelly dedicates the entire third verse to telling his career story, from listening to old records to waiting tables and hoping for his big break. He even sends a nod to Barry Hankerson on the verse: “ ’Til I met the B.H. and bust down A Capella to him / He said you got talent and you’re going places.” It was a poorly placed homage, though only further proved how so little of the project’s direction was within Aaliyah’s grasp. The only thing she could preserve was her undeniable ability to take someone else’s musical vision, interpret it, and somehow make it her own. That would prove to be her superpower throughout her entire career.

  In the midst of Aaliyah’s own release, R. Kelly had her slide in two remixes for his projects: “Summer Bunnies” and a “His & Hers Extended Remix” for his hit single “Your Body’s Callin’.” These came within months of Aaliyah’s album release—and again, while she was only fifteen on a grown man’s love songs, she continued to show her versatility.

  * * *

  Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number arrived at an ideal time during music. The year 1994 had a mixed bag of R&B hits, leaving room for some innovation, since so much of what was being pushed throug
h the music industry pipeline was beginning to sound formulaic, despite the slew of career artists searching for reinvention. While groups like Boyz II Men topped the charts with their fan favorite hits like “I’ll Make Love to You” and Jodeci with “Cry for You,” TLC was swapping condoms on their clothing for silk pajamas with CrazySexyCool. Janet Jackson’s janet. arrived the year before, so Ms. Jackson was still riding high off her latest reinvention as a soulful sexy bohemian. The same successful stability can be said for Mariah Carey, since Music Box dropped in 1993 and she was still surfing that wave a year later. Newcomers were being added to the fold too. Brandy, Xscape, Brownstone, Changing Faces, and BLACKstreet were all introduced in 1994. Aaliyah not only fit into that roster, but she also stood out. While she fell in line at times with the New Jack Swing Era sound, there was still something forward thinking about her vocals. She wasn’t belting, but her coos were so unique and smooth; this offered her the balance of being very in the now, but not completely written off as a trend. Many artists of that era leaned too heavily upon what was current, and within a few short years their careers were over.

  Not Aaliyah. She was soulful, but not too intimidating. Pop, yet not too mainstream. R&B without being too niche. A flair for hip-hop gave her an edge, which again set her apart from some of her peers, like the aforementioned Brandy, whose big hats and childish suspenders as she sang saccharine love songs created a “do no wrong” air to her. That might work for a younger audience, but certainly not for the adults. Brandy, however, was also creating age-appropriate music, which can inevitably narrow her lane. Aaliyah could serve any listener, and she did so very well. Like the born actor that she was, she knew just when to turn one side of herself on and the other side of herself off. It was felt in both the music and her interviews.