Her career was, in short, the nascent career of any number of up-and-coming pop stars. Aaliyah clearly had beauty and talent; she was innovative and honey-voiced and worked with great producers; she seemed poised and gracious. She could very well have gone on to do great things. But the nonstop hype about her death seems slightly out of proportion with the greatness of her life. Was her music really that seminal, her message that fresh and genre-busting?
Since her music doesn't really suit my taste, perhaps I'm not qualified to ponder these questions. It doesn't matter though, really. Now that she's dead, tragically dead, she's a bona fide superstar -- regardless of her talents during her life. Sales of Aaliyah's latest album, "Aaliyah," skyrocketed last week, up from number 27 to 19 on the Billboard charts; sales had been shrinking since the album's release in July.
You can also bet that the music video for "Rock the Boat," which Aaliyah was shooting in the Bahamas before she died, will be released and put in heavy rotation as soon as humanly possible. When the vampire flick "Queen of the Damned" is released later this year, expect the movie to be a hit regardless of whether it's good: The tragic death of the movie's star guarantees the film plenty of attention. There will be odes to Aaliyah released by other R&B singers; there may be a posthumous album or two, tracks cobbled hastily together and released in order to capitalize on the sudden interest in the singer. Her family will speak at the MTV Video Music Awards on Thursday, which will certainly devote a segment to the star.
Aaliyah is better known today, after her death, than she was two weeks ago. It's much the same story that we got with the Notorious B.I.G and Tupac Shakur: Again, two popular hip-hop stars died tragic deaths that propelled them into greater infamy as corpses than as stars. (The conspiracy and mystery behind the murders, of course, gave the fascination with their deaths an extra boost). And the formula seems copped originally from Kurt Cobain -- a truly seminal artist, founder of a whole new school of music, whose death seven years ago is being dutifully observed this fall. With Cobain, the mourning seemed fresh, since it was the first surprise tragedy of the MTV age; with Aaliyah, genuine as much of the sadness and loss may be, the public wake feels formulaic. It's as if, even as the label executives cry real tears at the funeral, they are also gleefully noting that album sales are on the rebound.
The age of MTV and VH1 has given us public deaths, made-for-TV-movie tragedies that are spun before our very eyes. The making of a pop star wake is almost as big a production as the creation of the star itself: the biographies, the reminiscences, the posthumous releases, the limitless adulation, all a part of the same machine that created the stars in the first place. It's a soundtracked opus wrought from wistful "what-could-have-beens" -- those deceased lives are frozen eternally in a web of potentialities spun by fawning critics who would never say anything negative about the dead. It's a slow-motion shot of a dove being released into the sky juxtaposed against a wistful smile of a 22-year-old girl; a smartly packaged sound bite, ready to go into heavy rotation on VH1, MTV, and BET.
About the writer
Janelle Brown is a senior writer for Salon Technology.
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