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  Critics liked the project enough, mainly for where they felt Aaliyah existed within the Black female R&B artist paradigm of the nineties. Billboard described it as “Essential for those fiending for Mary J. Blige–style Hip-Hop/R&B,” while Dimitri Ehrlich of Entertainment Weekly remarked: “Imagine En Vogue packed into one teenage body and backed by hip-hop Svengali R. Kelly, and you have Aaliyah.” Dimitri also ran a comparison to Blige, though he argued that Aaliyah’s vocals were more “agile” than Mary’s. However, once later lined up against her work with Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Static Major, Aaliyah’s first album loses its luster after witnessing her potential once she’s washed from R. Kelly’s artfully soiled hands. In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, it’s argued that Aaliyah’s debut was overshadowed by the later controversy involving its collaborators.

  Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number reached the Top 20 on the Billboard 200 (at Number Eighteen) and Number Three on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, with the two singles “Back & Forth” and “At Your Best (You Are Love)” being Certified Gold. When “Back & Forth” reached Number One on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, it ironically knocked R. Kelly’s single “Your Body’s Callin’ ” from its chart-topping pedestal. To date, the album has gone Double Platinum, moving over 3 million units in the United States, and Gold in the UK, Japan, and Canada.

  Beyond sales, the album showed promise in a rising star, whose inherent mystique and vocal capabilities were the real star of the show. Everything else was purely an added bonus. Her promotional photos showed a budding fashion maven, as Aaliyah’s dark shades, cutoff tops, and baggy jeans were first introduced during this era.

  The album’s music videos remained in line with that specific aesthetic, as well. Director Millicent Shelton—whose career started as the wardrobe assistant on Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing—was the music-video director for all three of the album’s singles (“Back & Forth,” “At Your Best [You Are Love],” and “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number”). “Back & Forth” has kids and R. Kelly hanging out and dancing, with Aaliyah taking center stage. The camera then switches to scenes of Aaliyah and R. Kelly in matching tracksuits sitting on the bleachers.

  The video for “At Your Best (You Are Love)” shows Aaliyah singing into an old-school Kellogg telephone in a booth, while R. Kelly waits for her in the car. The two then start step dancing with each other against a brick overlay before pivoting to the obligatory hip-hop music video parking lot scene. The “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” video travels along that same vein with the parking lot posse shots. The one thing all of the videos have in common is they all possess a vignette effect, where Aaliyah is almost haloed, as the color schemes change from warm earth tone tints to black and white.

  The visuals seemed to reflect Aaliyah’s personality. “She was very quiet and she was very shy,” Shelton said on BET’s TV special Aaliyah: One in a Million in 2011. “A lot of people thought she was wearing the sunglasses because there was something wrong with her eyes, but she was wearing the sunglasses because it helped calm her down because she was nervous.” Shelton remarked how Aaliyah was kind to everyone on set from director to extras, yet she also made note of how Aaliyah had a distinctive ability to embody her music early on. “A lot of new performers that I work with, you have to really teach them how to sell their own song,” she continues. “Aaliyah, you didn’t have to teach. I mean, she was a natural, and she just turned it on.”

  While the music videos took a deeper dive into Aaliyah’s musical personality, behind the scenes they reflected something else to some of the people in the room during filming. April Walker, Kimya Warfield-Rainge, and Nicole “Cola” Walker of famed heritage lifestyle clothing line and styling company Walker Wear, styled Aaliyah and R. Kelly for her “Back & Forth” video.

  Prior to the video, the Walker Wear team was brought on as image consultants for both the video and also the album’s promotional photos. “April and I started with the Aaliyah record,” Kimya remembers. “We were given an unofficial copy of the album to be able to hear where she was going with her music.” They went back and shared it with Cola and “began building upon where we thought her image should go and how we planned to take it there,” Kimya says. “The next week, Cola and I had a meeting with Aaliyah and her management team, and that is when we met R. Kelly.”

  The meeting included Aaliyah’s team/family (mother, father, brother, Barry, Jomo) plus R. Kelly. “At that meeting, he pretty much took over,” Kimya says of Kelly. “He was the influencer. They already had an image set for her.” The image per R. Kelly was a “girl from around the way in Chicago.” When they questioned his vision for the young artist, he snapped, “Well, what do the girls in your hood wear?” He then requested that the Walker Wear team purchase an Air Jordan sweat suit that was several sizes too big for Aaliyah. He wanted multiple dark sunglasses and a focus on her bare midsection, with her pants slung low. In essence, he wanted Aaliyah to be dressed just like him, in female form. “We kind of joked that we’re just gonna dress her like Jodeci,” Kimya says with a laugh, “but we decided that it was best that we mimic his look for her, but put a little feminine touch to that look.”

  Kimya and Cola were then scheduled to meet Aaliyah and her team at Los Angeles’s Beverly Center shopping mall. The two put some looks together, making sure Kelly’s requisite dark sunglasses were paired with each outfit. When Aaliyah, R. Kelly, and the rest of her team arrived, they came with bags of clothing, having already chosen the looks for her. “They took the rest of our budget,” Kimya recalls.

  During the meeting, R. Kelly pulls out a leather vest from a plastic bag. It’s a vest created by the same designer who made his infamous ones that he would wear on his album covers and on tour. Only this vest had a license plate on the back side with his home state of Illinois and “LIYAH1” sprawled across it. “Our jaws dropped,” Cola says. “We were at a loss for words.” Not only was it peculiar that Aaliyah would be rocking a license plate from R. Kelly’s stomping grounds across her backside like you would on a vehicle, but the concept of wearing a license plate at all made no sense to the fashion team. Beyond looking like a symbol of ownership, it really didn’t fit Aaliyah’s vibe.

  “Aaliyah was adamant about wearing that,” says April Walker, founder of Walker Wear. “I felt it was very country, so to speak. We always felt like it was important to keep the artist authentic to who they were, but this was such a sticking point. So we were like let’s just go with it.”

  That vest made its grand appearance in the “Back & Forth” video a few days later.

  The video had some parts shot in Detroit and was partially filmed on Aaliyah’s fifteenth birthday at a gymnasium in Los Angeles. The next day, the infamous Northridge Earthquake hit and production was halted, resuming once the coast was clear. The earthquake reached 6.7 on the Richter scale, sending violent rumbles throughout Southern California and causing multi-billion-dollar damage. The earthquake was so intense that R. Kelly claimed to the ladies of Walker Wear that he slept in his car out of fear once the earthquake struck at 4:30 AM. When the aftershocks of the earthquake shook the trailers on location for the video later that day, everyone was a little triggered.

  On set, the chemistry between R. Kelly and Aaliyah was shockingly palpable. Kelly would watch her as her makeup was being applied and hair being done, rubbing her back and telling her how beautiful she looked and how she was going to be the best. Aaliyah would look up at him with doting eyes. “Any time we asked for her opinion, the response we would get was, ‘Whatever Robert says,’ ” Kimya adds. “Her whole family was around, so it was interesting how they can say they didn’t know anything.” Cola continues, “Everyone was so comfortable with all of the interaction that was going on there.” A particular scene in the video shows R. Kelly and Aaliyah wearing matching red, white, and black tracksuits. “That was a very Chicago thing,” Cola remarks. “Couples would wear matching outfits. Some of them still do!” When they went ho
me after filming, Kimya and Cola agreed that their instincts told them there was more going on between R. Kelly and Aaliyah than just friendship and mentorship. “It wasn’t something we kept thinking about,” Kimya explains, “but once the world found out about them, let’s just say we weren’t surprised.”

  The Walker Wear team was called right after they wrapped “Back & Forth” to style R. Kelly for his “Your Body’s Callin’ ” video, which Kimya saw as a deliberate attempt to quiet them with more work. “It felt like ‘if we keep it going, they won’t say anything,’ ” she expresses. A few years later, when Walker Wear attempted to work again with Aaliyah, they were shut down because they previously worked with R. Kelly. “They said if you worked with R. Kelly, you couldn’t work with her,” April Walker explains. “We had already worked with both of them, so I didn’t even understand that.”

  All awkward witnessing of an inappropriate dynamic aside, they too saw something in Aaliyah. “She definitely was a star,” Kimya says enthusiastically. “When they were shooting that video, you could tell she was a natural. She didn’t even need R. Kelly.” Contrary to their opinions, R. Kelly was front and center for every part of the process.

  Promotion for Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number was often conducted by Aaliyah and R. Kelly together. The two were often dressed identically, at times in flannels with Disney’s Mickey Mouse logo or matching shirts wearing Looney Tunes character Pepé Le Pew, the predatory skunk who would attempt to romance a female black cat with a fraudulently painted white stripe. Other times they were both dressed in all black with their eyes concealed by those dark sunglasses. Their jewelry was also strategically matched. Aaliyah was often spotted during album promo wearing a gold chain of a silhouette of R. Kelly on his 12 Play cover, alternating with a chain of another Looney Tunes character, the Tasmanian Devil. In his Vibe winter 1994 cover story, R. Kelly is described wearing a Tasmanian Devil chain, which he says is “lucky.” Aaliyah later sported a Pepé Le Pew chain well into the recording of her second album.

  During their interviews together, R. Kelly would code-switch from grown mentor to boyish sidekick at the drop of a hat, while Aaliyah would hover between doe-eyed ingenue and knowing minx. Their combined wavering maturity allowed them to meet somewhere in the middle, making their disparity in age almost forgettable. Their banter was playful, a little less brother and sister and more like the handsome big brother of your best friend, leaving ample room for the unknown.

  That is, until it was made known.

  On August 31, 1994, Aaliyah and R. Kelly were married at the Sheraton Suites in Rosemont, Illinois. The marriage certificate shows R. Kelly at his real age of twenty-seven and Aaliyah’s age as eighteen, three years older than she actually was. Decades later in 2019, it was reported that R. Kelly allegedly bribed a government employee from his home state of Illinois for a fake ID reflecting Aaliyah at a legal age. The marriage certificate was registered in Illinois as well, so it would all add up. News of their marriage circulated, though they continued to deny it, even when further rumors started about Aaliyah being seen in Chicago, coming in and out of R. Kelly’s house and walking his dog named 12 Play. Kelly also bought Aaliyah her own puppy during the album run, which she named Tour.

  “I was a writer at MTV News then, and I called the Cook County Clerk’s office and got a copy of their marriage certificate—which said that she was 18, even though she was not—so Kurt Loder could break the story,” famed journalist Touré wrote in Rolling Stone in 2018. Kurt Loder then broke the story in a televised MTV News break: “Hip-hop star R. Kelly did indeed marry his protégé, the fifteen-year-old singer Aaliyah Haughton,” Loder reported. “Kelly stated his age as twenty-seven, two years older than he previously claimed to be, and Aaliyah produced two pieces of ID that appeared to show her to be eighteen.”

  Loder continued to say that Aaliyah’s age was already publicly a point of contention, since she was dropped from the Budweiser Superfest Tour that year due to her being under eighteen, so there’s really no way that anyone could allege they weren’t aware that she was a minor.

  Vibe magazine was the first to publish the story in print, dropping the bomb about the marriage officially in their December 1994/January 1995 issue, where they printed a copy of the false documentation that reflected the two as being married. On the cover of the issue was R. Kelly with the giant words “THE SEX, THE SOUL, THE SALES—AND THE SCANDALOUS MARRIAGE TO TEENAGE SUPERSTAR AALIYAH” beneath his face and his name. In the article, the writer, Vibe editor-in-chief Danyel Smith, tells a quick story of how an anonymous caller phoned the Vibe offices to say that the relationship between Aaliyah and R. Kelly was “sick” and when she was asked her name her response was “Ms. Snoop with the scoop.” The marriage was eventually annulled in February of 1995 by Aaliyah’s parents, and Aaliyah later had the marriage record expunged in 1997, when the file was sealed shut. Case closed. In future interviews, she denied that it ever happened.

  “I’m not married. That’s all I really want to say about it. I like to handle the scandal; I don’t let the scandal handle me,” she told writer kris ex for Vibe in 1996. “I don’t like to go into the details on it, because it was a very… scandalous thing. I don’t like to get into details and add fuel to the fire. I had a lot of drama back then, and I don’t really want any more. And out of respect for my family and what I went through, I just answer, I’m not married. At all.”

  Her father came the closest to even confirming it on her family’s side in an interview with i-D magazine in their March 1995 issue, where he tells interviewer Frank Broughton: “I’d rather not comment on that. To be honest with you, it was a situation that happened. It’s gone now. She’s getting on with her life.”

  There was no real shock at learning that there was a supposed relationship between the two; it was really the marriage that threw everyone off. Earlier, in the summer of 1994, Aaliyah and R. Kelly both appeared on BET’s Video Soul Gold and the hosts almost immediately inquired about their connection to each other. It was a fair question, one that everyone was wondering during that time. “Everybody seems to think that y’all are either girlfriend and boyfriend, or cousins or friends. Let’s get the record straight,” the co-host Sherry Carter says, to which Aaliyah responds. “Well, no, we’re not related. At all. We’re just very close. This is my best friend in the whole wide world.” Prior to her responding, R. Kelly mimicked a nervous “hot under the collar” gesture and quipped, “I better go get me a white Jeep. Uh-oh.” Kelly was referencing the then-recent event on the evening of June 17, 1994, where O.J. Simpson hopped in his white Ford Bronco and peeled down the freeway in Los Angeles for two hours while the cops chased him in an effort to arrest him for the alleged murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson. In essence, Kelly was insinuating that he was fleeing from guilt. That joke would quickly speak volumes following this televised moment.

  In the same interview, Aaliyah is asked about her age. “That’s a secret,” she says coyly, placing her index finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh.”

  For the first year of her career (and arguably those thereafter), Aaliyah did exist in this world of ambiguity. She defied age, presenting as far older yet still holding on to pieces of girlish giddiness. She defied race, with long straight hair and light skin—a combination of Jamaican roots mixed with Native American blood, and an Arabic name to boot. And she defied the confines of gender, as her baggy clothes were paired with a fully made-up face, making her visually the best of both worlds. Aaliyah was unclassifiable.

  While that made her both mysterious and alluring, the lack of disclosure of her age early on served to implicate her once everything involving R. Kelly was made public. The first question isn’t whether there’s foul play happening; it’s “Where are this girl’s parents?” The sped-up maturity is presumed to be the product of a young girl’s upbringing, not the older man who kicked it into overdrive. There’s also this age-old tale of younger girls wishing to “grow up too fast,” again placing little
blame on the man who helped her get there. During that time, there was a bigger debate of whether or not Aaliyah was concealing an eye deformity beneath her dark glasses than there was over whether it’s proper if it’s proper to call an unrelated grown man your “best friend in the whole wide world.”

  Music has a tangled history with older men and younger women finding romance with little consequence. Elvis Presley was twenty-five and Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) was fourteen when they first got together. Celine Dion was twelve years old when she had begun being managed by René Angélil, who was thirty-eight. They eventually married, so who really knows when their romantic involvement started? Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman was forty-seven years old when he started dating thirteen-year-old Mandy Smith. And of course, who could forget twenty-three-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra Williams? A more recent example is reality TV star and young mogul Kylie Jenner’s relationship with rapper Tyga. The two went public when Jenner was seventeen and Tyga was twenty-five, though footage has shown the two being flirtatious when Kylie was as young as fourteen. That’s the effect of being followed around by cameras your entire life. These instances are all suspicious, some even downright illegal.

  At face value, the relationship between R. Kelly and Aaliyah was just another case of history repeating itself. When two artists work together extensively to create art, feelings sometimes seep into the work. The creative and romantic pairing seems almost idyllic, where in one breath you exchange meaningful glances and the next you’re sharing a love for whatever it is you create, be it songs, paintings, whatever. Take John Lennon and Yoko Ono, or even Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean. The story is retold in so many different versions, all with a similar theme: they came for the art and stayed for each other.