Aaliyah: I Care 4 U

AALIYAH: I CARE 4 U (2002)

1) Back And Forth; 2) Are You That Somebody; 3) One In A Million; 4) I Care 4 U; 5) More Than A Woman; 6) Don't Know What To Tell Ya; 7) Try Again; 8) All I Need; 9) Miss You; 10) Don't Worry; 11) Come Over; 12) Erica Kane; 13) At Your Best; 14) Got To Give It Up (remix).

One thing the Blackground label did right was to name this compilation after Aaliyah's best song. One thing it did wrong, wrong, wrong, was to follow the hideous principle of 'best-and-lost', mixing well-known hits for neophytes with rarities and previously unreleased material for the fans. As a result, I don't see the neophyte falling head over heels in love with the late singer, and I see the fan in a thoroughly unsatisfied set of mind, yelling for more, more, more of these obscuri­ties and less of the hits that everyone already knows by heart.

Altogether, there are about five or six songs from Aaliyah's latest sessions that may or may not have constituted the bulk of her next album had she remained alive, a couple more B-sides and soundtrack tunes (from her starring vehicle Romeo Must Die and Dr. Dolittle), and then the hits. The hits are okay, except for 'Back And Forth' which never really suited her personality, but the new material is definitely as shoddy as the shoddiest stuff on Aaliyah.

Some of it is just bizarre, like the unexpected tribute to soap opera hero Erica Kane (!) which very quickly devolves into a trance-like chanting of the name and is oddly lifeless for a song supposed to express admiration for a character, even a soap opera one. Some is just dull in an adult contem­porary kind of way ('Come Over'). And some just seems to catch her uninspired, e. g. 'Miss You', which is supposed to sound about as desperate as 'I Care 4 U' but comes out very plastic, all empty, by-the-book melisma and no real feeling behind it. These auras are very hard to judge, of course, but if you play 'Miss You' back-to-back with 'I Care 4 U', you might understand my reaction better.

In the end, the only moderately interesting tracks are two oldies that involved the participation of Timbaland: 'Are You That Somebody?' and 'Try Again'. With Timbaland's trademark "futuristic" production, incorporating non-trivial bits of electronica, and repetitive, but not generic vocal hooks, they are two cool grooves that deserve attention. Too bad they really don't require Aali­yah's participation to make them interesting.

To make things worse, the compilation ends on a completely unnecessary and, I'd even say, ugly remix of 'Got To Give It Up', "toughening" up the original by inserting lots of extra clinketing noises that do nothing except take one's attention away from Aaliyah's sexy performance. (At least it's shorter than the original.) In short, I Care 4 U — much as I hate to admit it — is really just a cheap cash-in on the girl's tragedy, assembled hastily, without due respect or consideration, and presenting a far less adequate view of her achievements and talents than could have been possible. Perhaps today, several years after the fact, saying this won't be considered sacrilegious, especially since there are now much better Aaliyah compilations on the market, whereas the bulk of the "new" stuff on I Care 4 U is best relegated to history.

Thumbs down from all possible points of view, although let this final note on this final "album" not deter anyone from checking out her better stuff. Her death may have made her a legend far quicker and somewhat less deservedly than needed, but she obviously was a sweet, intelligent, even "classy" artist with a mild knack for innovation, and anybody with that pedigree deserves to be remembered, live or dead.

Aaliyah: Aaliyah

AALIYAH: AALIYAH (2001)

1) We Need A Resolution; 2) Loose Rap; 3) Rock The Boat; 4) More Than A Woman; 5) Never No More; 6) I Care 4 U; 7) Extra Smooth; 8) Read Between The Lines; 9) U Got Nerve; 10) I Refuse; 11) It's Whatever; 12) I Can Be; 13) Those Were The Days; 14) What If.

Five years in the waiting and the final result just goes to show that in a genre like R'n'B, waiting isn't gonna do you much good. Maybe One In A Million showed some flashes of a new type of sound, but this third and, alas, last effort doesn't. It doesn't even show a lot of "maturation" — how, in fact, can one ever become more "mature" if all the artistry is placed into other people's hands? She just looks older on the album cover, that's all.

Maybe we needed more Missy Elliott/Timbaland cooperation on the record. It is their stuff, after all, that made One In A Million ultimately stand above competition, and it's no surprise that their only joint product on Aaliyah is easily its best track, and, in fact, easily the best thing Aaliyah was ever given in her life. She must have known that, and her vocal delivery on 'I Care 4 U' lite­rally makes my hair stand on end. It's got a smokey, sultry, dimmed-lights Seventies retro sheen to it, something in the Isaac Hayes ballpark, and although the lyrics, basically just about wanting to comfort someone who's just been dumped by his lover, are trite, the sheer effect of them is anything but. It's the best mainstream R'n'B ballad of the decade I've known so far.

As for the more lightweight material, some of these dance numbers are cute enough to merit a smile, but the groove isn't really all that tight or trance-like to justify the repetitiveness: 'Rock The Boat', after a short while, begins to look like an audio sex manual ('stroke it for me, stroke it for me, change position, change position'), and 'More Than A Woman', after showing initial promise with its odd Eastern rhythm, doesn't show anything else (not to mention that its title inavoidably brings on comparisons with the far superior, although, of course, entirely different, Bee Gees song). The best of these 'bouncy' numbers is arguably 'Extra Smooth', with its weird 'descending' loop that hearkens back to the days of disco and, from there, even music-hall.

I don't really know, though, why one should bother describing these songs. I don't get the feeling they meant a lot to Aaliyah or even those who saddled her with them. It's pretty obvious that she really only felt at home with the ballads: 'I Care 4 U' is the top number, for sure, but 'Never No More' and 'I Refuse', although far less memorable, at least give me a bit of ground to empathize with the singer. Nothing else does: she just doesn't connect. The album closer, 'What If', is a weird mess of electronic bleeps and hard riffs, maybe the "heaviest" number in her catalog, but the vocals could as well have been synthesized. Maybe they were, who knows.

There is a minor critical tendency to describe Aaliyah as a masterpiece, most likely influenced by her tragic death within a few months of its release. But, like I said, I see no progress, in fact, quite the contrary, I again see a talented girl fall under the supervision of hacks who'd most likely just go on sabotaging her career for the next decade. So both the heart and the brain give this a big fat thumbs down rating, not before Superman comes and rescues 'I Care 4 U', though.

Aaliyah: One In A Million

AALIYAH: ONE IN A MILLION (1996)

1) Beats 4 Da Streets (Intro); 2) Hot Like Fire; 3) One In A Million; 4) A Girl Like You; 5) If Your Girl Only Knew; 6) Choosey Lover; 7) Got To Give It Up; 8) 4 Page Letter; 9) Everything's Gonna Be Alright; 10) Giving You More; 11) I Gotcha Back; 12) Never Givin' Up; 13) Heartbroken; 14) Never Comin' Back; 15) Ladies In Da House; 16) The One I Gave My Heart To; 17) Came To Give Love (Outro).

Like so many albums around it, One In A Million suffers from ceedeetis: it pastes its limited amount of attractions over such a vast surface that, by the end of it, I feel a strange sort of satis­faction, as if having just returned from the task of gathering the remains of a shipwreck scattered all over the beaches of a desert island.

But if you do gather the best tracks together and trim them down to, say, half their length (actual­ly, length of the individual songs is not a problem per se; they usually do not seriously run over four minutes, with the exception of 'Choosey Lover', which is really two songs in one), anyway, if you do this, it becomes easier to appreciate One In A Million as a high-class R'n'B album whose creators were sincerely interested in developing a new kind of groove sound rather than merely making an extra pile of bucks on the existing trends.

I say 'creators' because, again, it is unclear just how much Aaliyah herself was involved in all this except for just building up the required feeling. Some of the songs, in fact, are completely domi­nated by Timbaland's production, e. g. 'Hot Like Fire', where he straightjackets Aaliyah into a futuristic-robotic vocal part complementing his tricky choice of synth tones — I'm not complai­ning, because the effect is clever and inspiring, but whether Aaliyah's presence is necessary here, I have no idea about that. Could just as well be Margaret Thatcher.

Likewise, 'If Your Girl Only Knew' is mostly memorable for its hypnotic "post-disco" bassline, lovingly wrapped in a web of funky guitar and even electric organ (!). However, on the softer, balladeering stuff Timbaland does allow to let the girl loose, and if you are fond of her singing style, 'Heartbroken', '4 Page Letter', and the title track can all be lovely; singalong choruses and moderately tasteful arrangements don't hurt, either.

The best news is that there is not a single track on the record that feels really strained or 'image-carving': the forced street vibe of 'Throw Your Hands Up' has been purged completely, and pretty much every single track gives you a sentimental, fragile Aaliyah — very soft, very smooth (she used to be a big Sade fan, and it shows), ultimately, boring, but true to the soul, at least.

The non-Timbaland tracks are generally weaker, because there's no experiment (many of them just sound like standard Whitney Houston fare), but, odd enough, the one song that stands above everything else is a V. H. Herbert production: a terrific cover of Marvin Gaye's 'Got To Give It Up'. When Marvin recorded it in 1979, he sang it in falsetto, for understandable reasons; Aaliyah gives a very faithful rendition, down to the individual intonations of the syllables, but she sings it in her natural voice, and the effect is even more believable and seductive than on the original (one could do without the extraneous rap sections, though). They also slow down the tempo just a bit, and enhance the power of the rhythm section, so it doesn't at all sound like a retro-disco sound, but, on the contrary, looks appropriately modern.

Things don't work so well on the 'Old School/New School' version of the Isleys' 'Choosey Lover', because, frankly speaking, the 'old school' part, graced with hair-metal guitar, sounds very much like mainstream Eighties school (bad, bad, bad!), and the 'new school' part was not produced by Timbaland and is therefore rather generic. The only saving grace of this and every other so-so track on here is the singing. It's hard not to like the singing.

One In A Million has received tremendous critical praise, with people calling it one of the most epoch-defining R'n'B albums of the time and suchlike. I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't care much if it really had the kind of historical influence as is sometimes assigned to it — whether that would be a good thing is debatable. But it deserves to be heard, at least the better half of it, for combining some exciting approaches to the genre with the talents of one of the best singers in the genre, so my heart feels fine about it, surreptitiously giving the record a fast thumbs up while the brain is still collecting itself, trying to come up with some nasty cynical statement. We'll hastily leave it in this state and move on to the next one.

Aaliyah: Age Ain't Nothing But A Number

AALIYAH: AGE AIN'T NOTHING BUT A NUMBER (1994)

1) Intro; 2) Throw Your Hands Up; 3) Back And Forth; 4) Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number; 5) Down With The Clique; 6) At Your Best (You Are Love); 7) No One Knows How To Love Me Quite Like You Do; 8) I’m So Into You; 9) Street Thing; 10) Young Nation; 11) Old School; 12) I’m Down; 13) Back And Forth (Mr. Lee And R Kelly Mix).

Bland, effortless R'n'B was certainly not invented by Aaliyah, but she did have the unlucky fate of being born right into the midst of it. I do not know how much creative control she had in the studio when recording her three albums — not much, apparently, since she never wrote or arran­ged anything herself — but it is hardly indecent to state that her legend was, at all times, mostly in the hands of her "seconds", in this particular case, producer/songwriter R. Kelly's, and therefore, these records do not so much tell the story of Aaliyah The Artist as they tell you what was "hot" and what was "not" about R'n'B in the mid- to late Nineties.

The title of the album is a thinly veiled hint at Aaliyah's (14 at the time the songs were recorded) flirt (and even a short-lived marriage) with R. Kelly himself, and, while I might somewhat cautiously agree with the statement in general — and so might pedophiles all over the world, for that matter — in the case of Aaliyah, her age was definitely more than just a number: it meant that she, an obviously gifted vocalist, would be exactly whatever her mentors would want her to be. And they didn't want much: they just wanted her to rap like Mary J. Blige and to sing sweet sappy ballads like Whitney Houston.

Now I'm not much of a Whitney Houston fan, but let me tell you this: Aaliyah is much more convincing as a balladeer than when she is practicing these street-wise funky grooves. Maybe it's because she never really had as much "street culture" inside of her as they sometimes try to make it seem — she was, after all, strictly middle-class, and "tough" numbers like 'Throw Your Hands Up' just don't cut the mustard. R. Kelly must have known that, since after that particularly dumb album opener, he mostly keeps the "tough" stuff to himself, on a few numbers playing the hip-hop counterpart to Aaliyah's 'sensitive' personality. Most of the time it sounds very stupid, but at least his parts help break up the monotonousness of the balladry.

The "music" on here is best left in peace — if you've heard one generic mid-90's R'n'B album, you've heard them all — but some of the vocal choruses are pleasant and catchy, and amazingly, the record's best asset, after all, IS Aaliyah's singing: seductive, but not cooing, making use of melisma but not going overboard with it, and, in general, coming off very naturally as if she really meant all these things. As it often happens, the best tracks are not the album's main singles ('Back And Forth', a so-so dance groove, and a sugary cover of the Isley Brothers' 'You Are Love'), but rather the shadowy, ambiguous title track; the Stevie Wonder-ish (R. Kelly must have had stolen Stevie's chromatic harmonica some time in the past) 'Street Thing'; and 'Young Nation', the closest thing to an anthemic track but still a pleasantly subdued one. Kudos to R. Kelly, by the way, for at least realizing this girl should have been reared in the Sade mold rather than the Madonna one.

So what's the resolution? This is an album strictly for the heart, not for the brain (unless you want to spend some time pondering what lines like 'young nation under a groove, keeping it smooth with a jazz attitude' really mean), but even the heart orders a general thumbs down — for incon­sistency, occasional phoniness, and propagating sex with minors (okay, maybe not). Nevertheless, she does have a very, very lovely voice.

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