From the beginning of her career, the dichotomy between her actual and perceived age was integral to her image. Get blamed for corrupting America's tweens.Īaliyah was rarely granted the opportunity to display that kind of innocence – she was branded as "mature" out the gate. Suggest a sweaty, dance-orgy in your video get dirrty. The playbook for the biggest of those stars seemed to be this: Breakout by towing the line between virginal and sexy (and piss off religious groups and middle-class suburban parents in the process), then, a couple of years later, when you're in your late teens or early 20s, enter your "mature" period, i.e. Baby One More Time" that infamous Rolling Stone cover with the lingerie and stuffed Teletubby), but this was also true of Spears' contemporaries in the '90s and early '00s, from Christina Aguilera to Mandy Moore to Jessica Simpson. In hindsight, though, I've begun to wonder what it meant that she was introduced to the world as being fully formed, despite being a young teenager, an age where everyone is still trying to figure themselves out (and usually awkwardly so).įemale teen pop stars usually emerge with a hint of innocence baked into their public persona, even as they playfully suggest their own sexuality and fuel many a boy's or man's sexual fantasy: Britney Spears is the prototypical example here (the schoolgirl outfit and pigtails in ". Her theatrics were subdued and contained, more slinky and less in-your-face. That's what made her special – she stood out from the balladeers of the era (the Mariahs, Whitneys, En Vogues) and the teen pop stars (Brandy, Britney, Christina), in part because she seemed in command without needing to do too much. ![]() ![]() You'd assume she was a grown woman, because if you're below the age of 12, everyone older than you seems ancient, and what young person is able to assert that much control? Yet she wasn't even 18 when she recorded One In A Million. And if you were a young Black girl in the '90s like I was, of course you were probably going to look at her and be struck by how cool she seemed, without thinking twice about it. This was true in her other songs from that era as well, from " If Your Girl Only Knew," a self-assured midtempo joint in which she boasts how she won't "be no fool" for a guy who's trying to cheat with her, to " Are You That Somebody?" an earworm where she insists on keeping a hookup on the low until he can prove he's serious. She seemed fully formed, utterly confident and secure in her body. Her various looks in the video were sleek, sexy, and mysterious, as she donned low-rise pants, crop tops and bras, and, in one scene, a silver eye-patch that seemed to come straight from a sci-fi dystopia playbook. In Timbaland's skittering production, Missy Elliott's staccato phrasing of the lyrics, and Aaliyah's mellifluous interpretation you can hear the descendants that have followed in their wake – Drake, Jhené Aiko, Syd, Normani. It's been said many times before, but really it can't be overstated: " One In A Million" sounds as if it was predicting the future indeed, it sounds like now.
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