android569

ai-yo

Aaliyah was blamed, for those of us who were kids in the 90’s and grew up on the rnb teen trinity of Aaliyah, Brandy and Monica we didn’t know or understand what was happening back then I was 4 or 5

So when I learned 2 years back that people blamed Aaliyah for the marriage and called her fast and said all these things about her and how she was almost blacklisted by the industry back then but career was saved when she teamed up with Missy Elliott

it was surprising because it seemed that she was always loved but then again not that surprising.

saturnineaqua

Yup

elfyourmother

I was a teenager during those years and I can 100% corroborate that because I saw it in real time. she was very much treated as the “bad girl” in comparison with Monica and Brandy and she totally bore the brunt of the blowback when that “marriage” became widely known. there was a dark cloud over her. nobody wanted to work with her on that second album.

and real talk one of the reasons younger ppl don’t know about it is that a lot of that shit was swept under the rug when she died. some of the very same people who were canonizing her at her death were shitting on her calling and treating her like all kinds of lying ho when she was alive. ppl got collective amnesia.

ai-yo

That is really fucked I can imagine people pitting them against each other because Brandy was on Moesha and seen as wholesome maybe and Aaliyah was “acting grown”

I can kind of understand why her mum tried to say the woman in the documentary was lying and doesn’t want her daughter’s name tarnished since she had to witness her daughter being treated like that

elfyourmother

Brandy was definitely seen as more wholesome, yeah. Remember she also had the Cinderella tv movie. She was very much a “sweetheart” whereas Aaliyah was marketed to be rawer and more ~urban~ (the whole around the way, Tommy Girl image). Brandy was much more acceptable. I remember at least one girl in HS who said her parents didn’t allow her to listen to Aaliyah until Anastasia came out and she had that song on the soundtrack.

Aaliyah didn’t start to come back from that shit until after it was clear she had severed her ties w R Kelly (again nobody put these demands on him even tho he was the grown ass adult in the equation and the damn predator, his career didn’t suffer at all). It was like she had a scarlet letter in a lot of ways. No one believed that she was a victim in all this. And it took a while. My memory is fuzzy but Anastasia was the big turning point for her imo when things began to turn around.

But even when she died things were not entirely hunky dory for her. Her transition into film was very shaky—Romeo Must Die was considered a critical flop and a lot of people don’t know or realize that Queen of the Damned only got a theatrical release because she died. That whole movie was basically Warner Bros just frantically trying to shit out a movie real quick before the rights reverted back to Anne Rice (I wanna say principal photography started like a month before they would have). And WB fully intended on quietly shuffling it off to Direct to Video hell until she died so suddenly and they realized they could capitalize on the tragedy of a young starlet gone before her time and her fans grief.

The world really did baby girl wrong and all the hypocritical wailing and rending of garments that happened after she died was just fucked up and ugly to anyone paying attention at the time. All this history was covered up imo bc ppl knew they did her wrong and they were guilty af.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.