“This is a book by an Aaliyah fan, for the Aaliyah fans,” writes music journalist Kathy Iandoli in Baby Girl: Better Known As Aaliyah (Atria). Even 20 years after the singer’s death in a plane crash, Aaliyah has continued to impact music, fashion, and culture. But in a time of reexamination, Iandoli saw an opportunity to “really hold a magnifying glass to the narrative and show who she was: an incredible talent, an incredible singer and songwriter, and a survivor,” says the writer, referring to Aaliyah’s secret marriage, at 15, to R. Kelly, who is now facing trials for, among other charges, widespread sex-related crimes. “She was always so gentle and delicate and angelic,” Iandoli says, “but that woman was made of steel.”
Vanity Fair: What made you decide to tell her story?
Kathy Iandoli: As a journalist, I’ve been writing for over 20 years now, and the thing that I always keep at the front of my mind is, I remember being that young girl who would watch MTV and BET and VH1, and just the fandom that brought me to journalism. It wasn’t J school; it was being a fan of the artists and the music. The first book I did was with Prodigy of Mobb Deep. The next one I did was God Save the Queens, about women in hip-hop. When I finished God Save the Queens, [I was] thinking, What was another moment, or who was another artist, that shaped me—because all the women in hip-hop shaped me, hip-hop shaped me, but Aaliyah was one of the artists who made me who I am today.
Over the last two decades, the conversation that’s surrounded Aaliyah has been so disjointed. We’re now getting the most negative parts of the highlight reel, and I wanted to not only flip the narrative but really hold a magnifying glass to the narrative and show who she was.
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Were you able to talk with the family? I know that they’re very protective, understandably.
I did reach out to the family for permission. It’s a strange legal situation involving the estate of Aaliyah, and I learned the complexities of this after Prodigy passed away, because you have the human and then you have the personality, the artist, the image. There’s a lot that I dig through in the book that explains why those are two very separate entities and why it’s not always a priority to get a blessing when you’re trying to highlight the essence of the celebrity, the story. But I have my suspicions about why they can’t speak on certain things or what their concerns are about certain things, and I do delve into that in the book, and a lot of it involves some legal issues. So I did the due diligence of asking because that was the first line, like I wanted that for myself as a person who respected her family, but it didn’t work out. But I didn’t want that to stop yet another part of glorifying Aaliyah, so I kept going. I did speak to people she worked with. I did what I had to do while still holding her up in the highest regard, and sometimes that involves having to tell certain parts of the story that have been kind of covered for so long. I think in order to get the panoramic view of just how dynamic she was, you have to show the peaks and valleys.
Do you remember the first moment you had heard Aaliyah and fell in love with her and her music?
Oh, my gosh. It’s a very, very specific moment. MTV was premiering the “Back & Forth” video; it was 1994. I will never forget when she does this dance where she covers her face and then raises her one arm up, and now it’s like, “Throw your hands in the air and wave them around like you just don’t care.” I remember watching that part, and I was 15. I was like, Oh, my goodness! When she kept just saying, ‘It’s the ’L-I-Y-A-H,’ and I was just like, She is so cool. I ended up begging my mother to take me to the record store. From there the intensity only grew. I had her Tommy Hilfiger ad in my locker in high school. I mean, the One in a Million project, just, my goodness. Then by the time Dr. Dolittle and Romeo Must Die, much like Aaliyah’s career, the intensity just kept building.
Was there anything about her story that you wanted to dispel that you learned?
Oh, 100%. I think the way that Aaliyah was written into that part of the narrative was kind of this teenager with raging hormones. There was never any talk of how she was groomed or tricked. There was never any talk of how she was a victim of the circ*mstance that so many young girls have fallen victim to, but also how the music industry and the media creates this environment where you had boy band members who are 27 years old singing love songs to 13-year-olds in the audience. There’s an overall lack of protection of young Black girls. It’s how all the articles and the media presented the whole situation like it was Aaliyah’s dirty little secret and not R. Kelly’s. When you take all that information into account and then you read all the legal documents, and you really get a full picture of what happened, including how Aaliyah was blackballed after it and R. Kelly wasn’t, it just changes the entire narrative from [how you understood it as] a young fan reading in Vibe magazine about this marriage certificate between the Pied Piper of R&B and the Princess of R&B. We had no idea.
Were there any other aspects of her story that you learned that stood out to you?
