On the evening of March 9, 1997, Aaliyah was out partying with Biggie in Los Angeles, right before he was murdered. Following his passing, Lil’ Kim released the music video for her Hard Core single “Crush on You” in June 1997. Aaliyah can be seen dancing in the video. On that same album, Aaliyah was featured on the radio edit of Kim’s “Queen B@#$H.” Prior to that, Kim can be found a year earlier starring in the video for Aaliyah’s single “If Your Girl Only Knew” and appearing in 1997 in the “Hot like Fire” video alongside fellow Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Lil’ Cease. Since both Junior M.A.F.I.A. and Aaliyah were distributed by Atlantic Records, they were frequently placed together and grew quite close. “I always looked at her like my sister,” says Lil’ Kim. “Because we were so opposite, we attracted to each other. I was the sexy, hardcore gangstress, and she was the sexy empress with a little edge. We fit together like a hand in a glove.”
Another Puffy affiliate made her way into Aaliyah’s world and changed the course of Aaliyah’s career, with the help of some “super” friends.
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In 1989, a local artist in Portsmouth, Virginia, named Melissa Elliott formed a girl group with some friends from her high school. The group was called Fayze, and Melissa also recruited another friend to help with production. His name was Timothy Mosley, a Norfolk, Virginia, native, deejaying under the name DJ Timmy Tim. In 1991, Fayze recorded a track called “First Move,” and the group was determined to make it big. They understood that it was all about who you know, so with a song in tow it was time to network. Fayze showed up to a local Jodeci concert that same year, and after making their way backstage they sang an impromptu a capella performance for Jodeci member DeVanté Swing. He, in turn, signed the group to his imprint over at Elektra Records called Swing Mob. He also changed Fayze’s group name to Sista. The group moved to New York City, and Melissa brought Timothy with her. DeVanté renamed him Timbaland, like the Timberland boot (a hip-hop fashion staple), and Melissa started going by “Missy.” They also brought along their friend Melvin Barcliff, also known as Magoo.
While Sista found some success with their 1993 single, “Brand New,” Missy saw a bigger picture for herself and her friends. Coincidentally, so did DeVanté. His Swing Mob went from imprint to community, as he made a compound out of a two-story building upstate in Rochester, New York, where about twenty creatives all holed up to make music. They started calling themselves Da Bassment Crew. In that crew: Missy, Timbaland, Magoo, singer Tweet (as part of the group Sugah), Ginuwine, veteran recording engineer Jimmy Douglass, and R&B group Playa (which included the late Static Major), among others. It started as something fun and organic, where artists could come together and really become a creative force. For two years, Da Bassment spent hours on end every day writing and producing songs. Their collaborative mission was Jodeci’s third album, 1995’s The Show, the After Party, the Hotel. DeVanté took most of the writing credits on the project, despite it being a team effort, though both Missy and Timbaland received co-writing credits on just a few songs (Missy on “S-More” and Timbaland on “Bring On Da’ Funk” and “Time & Place”). The process to even have their uncredited work appear on the album was strict. It was orchestrated like a battle royale, where DeVanté would instruct people to write either alone or in groups, competition-style, and he would select whichever songs he liked best. It was intense, highly competitive, and also traumatic.
Timbaland’s 2016 memoir, The Emperor of Sound, tells a whole different side of Da Bassment, filled with behavior that was borderline torture, where DeVanté created an aggressively competitive world for all of the artists. “We would go for days without eating,” Timbaland says in his memoir. “We would be woken up in the middle of the night to run crazy errands. We were knocked around, kicked around, and beat down.” Their access to the outside world was limited, almost like a prison. It was nothing short of abusive, where the end result was not even getting to grow as a credited musician. Artists like Ginuwine and Magoo have spoken differently of the experience over the years. They speak of the hard work and the sport of it all, where writing a song in the fastest time was more of a lesson in speed than inducing anxiety—though Ginuwine has compared it to the boot-camp style of Death Row Records, which operated under the venomous Suge Knight. Still, there was struggle, and if the struggle didn’t result in gaining adequate songwriting credits (when DeVanté took the bulk of them, it led to an inevitable lack of publishing royalties for everyone else) then it was done in vain, at least from Timbaland and Missy’s standpoint.
Missy Elliott was the first to ultimately leave that camp (followed by Timbaland and later Ginuwine and the rest of the musicians), and with good reason. As a child, she endured her fair share of abuse. VH1’s Behind the Music highlighted that bumpy early road in 2011, where Missy details being molested for close to a year by her sixteen-year-old cousin when she was just eight years old. Add to that, growing up in poverty with no running water and watching her father pull a gun on her mother. There would be no way that she would allow another abusive pattern to seep into her life any longer.
And so she left the Swing Mob for good, yet used her ties to the treacherous camp as networking leverage once she was back out in the world. She began linking with industry bigwigs, particularly Puffy, who was enjoying the success of The Notorious B.I.G., following the release of his aforementioned Bad Boy Records debut album, Ready to Die. They also shared a mutual friend in Mary J. Blige (Puffy’s former artist at Uptown Records), as Missy was present during Mary’s studio sessions for her sophomore album, 1994’s My Life (Mary was in a relationship with K-Ci Hailey, DeVanté’s groupmate from Jodeci).
Through her reputation for stellar songwriting and artistry, Missy was able to grab a handful of opportunities—like singing backup and on the hook to MC Lyte’s “Cold Rock the Party,” off her fifth studio album, 1996’s Bad As I Wanna B, and grabbing a guest feature on the aforementioned Bad Boy Remix to R&B singer Gina Thompson’s single “The Things That You Do.” Meanwhile, Da Bassment Crew fell apart shortly after Missy Elliott departed. That wouldn’t be the last time the lineup would work together, though. Missy, Timbaland, Magoo, and Playa reassembled as the crew later known as Tha Supafriendz, releasing music for Ginuwine still and even Tweet.
Though once leaving the trauma of Swing Mob, their collective (and individual careers) hung in the balance. They managed to cut some tracks for Ginuwine upstate, using the song “Pony” as the centerpiece for their soon-to-be definitive sound. As he drove away from the Rochester ruins of Swing Mob with Ginuwine’s masters in tow and no deal in sight, engineer Jimmy Douglass was struck with hope once he heard Missy on the radio, on that Gina Thompson song. One of their own escaped the madness and still made it. Douglass managed to secure a deal for Ginuwine with Sony, and so the team regrouped in Ithaca, New York, to start creating what would become Ginuwine’s 1996 debut album, Ginuwine… the Bachelor.
In the midst of recording that project, the team caught wind that Aaliyah was searching for new producers to work with. The songs previously recorded for the album were great, but she needed her own sound, one where if you closed your eyes and heard it you’d be able to instantly recognize that it was her. That would be the thing to truly push her into icon territory. Craig Kallman was on the hunt.
“I really just started meeting with tons and tons of new songwriters and producers, just looking for someone creative that had their own spin on things,” Kallman recalled to Vibe. “And one day, this young kid came in.” It was Timbaland. He played beats for Kallman, and he was blown away. He phoned Aaliyah and told her about this new producer on the scene. There was even a songwriter to match: Missy Elliott.
Timbaland and Missy sent over a demo track that she and Timbaland had worked on called “Sugar & Spice,” a song written and produced by Missy and Timbaland, with the reference track recorded by Tweet and her group Sugah. The song also appeared on Da Bassment’s first mixtape, recorded during their tenure at the Swing Mob compound. Whe
n the track landed in Jomo and Barry Hankerson’s hands, they weren’t too keen on the song for Aaliyah’s next project. They felt like the song sounded too “kiddie” and unfit for what was going to be Aaliyah’s first post–R. Kelly debut.
“Kiddie” might not have been the best word to describe “Sugar & Spice,” though it was a step in reverse for an artist who sang that “age ain’t nothing but a number” at the age of fifteen. While the track boasted some innocence in the lyrics, as Sugah cooed that they were sweet like “sugar and spice, and everything nice,” one aspect that managed to stick out was the intricate beat. It was an amalgam of what was happening in R&B around 1995: fragments of the soon-to-be bygone New Jack Swing Era, though it was mixed with soul, a little funk, and then this unorthodox triple-beat pattern. It was the beginning of Timbaland’s soon-to-be notorious style of beat making, though in its rough early stages. When Jomo passed the track off to Aaliyah, he had no real thought of where that track would go or any real intentions of using it. Again, it was too “kiddie” for his liking.
Aaliyah, however, loved it.
Up until this point, she lacked any real control over her own musical destiny. She started under the tutelage of her uncle and then quickly moved over to R. Kelly. Decisions were made for her, and while she showed no reluctance in acquiescing, this sophomore album was going to be the proof that she was fine without the watchful eye of her former mentor. Yes, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number gave Aaliyah her start, but this time around had to be different. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain by turning her situation around and showing who she was as a solo star. So Aaliyah made her first real artistic call and advised her uncle and cousin that she wanted to work with Timbaland and Missy. They listened to her.
Everyone got on a phone call, where Aaliyah told Missy and Tim her artistic vision: she was known for this “street” appeal, but she wanted to add a sexier vibe to her art now. She was no longer fourteen years old, having songs written for her about overly mature indiscretions. There was ample room where she could spread her wings a bit and tread into grown territory, now that she was nearing a more appropriate age for it. She requested that Timbaland and Missy travel to Detroit to meet with her. Craig Kallman also urged that the two head out to Detroit for this fateful meeting. So Missy and Timbaland agreed and were on their way but kept it all under wraps until they actually landed the gig. They were knee-deep in recording the debut project for Ginuwine, but they hit the pause button once the Aaliyah opportunity arose.
“Here we all are in this isolated studio up in Ithaca, and then Missy is out doing whatever, and then Tim had to go away to do something that Missy had for him,” Jimmy Douglass recalls, “and apparently they went to Detroit and cut a record.”
He was correct, but there was a bigger goal at the heart of that trip: to head out to Detroit and figure out if they were going to be the production team that Aaliyah needed in her corner for her next album.
“They was testing us out to see if we could make a hit record for Aaliyah,” Missy told The FADER in 2011, “because she was coming off the project with R. Kelly and I guess they wanted to try some new producers.” For all intents and purposes, Aaliyah was a big star and Missy and Tim were still so new. “We was kinda nervous because we hadn’t done records for any artists of that caliber,” Missy continued, “but when we first met her, she treated us like she knew us for years, like we grew up with her. She was always very sweet, always smiling, and she made us feel like we was big producers when we didn’t have no record out. Even coming off a big album, she never once treated us like we were beneath her.”
The reality was that Aaliyah, Timbaland, and Missy were all expats from their previous worlds. Those worlds were very similar: they worked under superstars who later turned out to be abusers, and when they disengaged there was a question of whether or not they could ever get their careers to continue without those very people who originally helped guide them. It was a fair enough question, though the mutual bravery of escaping their pasts and still taking that risk to leap into the unknown future made this new union a community of commonality, but also one where Aaliyah was finally in the driver’s seat. She had been down this road before, knew the ropes already, and could navigate from a position of confidence and experience over her previous constant journey of learning. She was also growing up, now sixteen, and learning the value of her own choices. And so she chose this team to guide her into the next iteration of her career.
Everyone knew that there was a lot riding on this partnership. Whatever Aaliyah did next had to be big and whatever Timbaland and Missy created, following Da Bassment, had to reflect their genius to the point where you could re-listen to that Jodeci album and recognize their unidentified fingerprints all over it. This kinship was mutually beneficial, but it was also authentic from the start. They all became so close that Tim and Missy affectionately started calling Aaliyah Baby Girl. It stuck.
There was also something else brewing. At twenty-three, Timbaland may have been young by music industry standards, but he felt too old to be taken by a sixteen-year-old. However, he was. In his 2011 E! True Hollywood Story, he admitted to having feelings for Aaliyah the moment he met her. “When I first met Aaliyah—it’s time for the world to hear this; I’m gonna give a little secret—I was in love with her,” he says in the episode, reconciling that she was just a “baby” and that he was “old.” Well, at least too old for her. “I said to myself, ‘I’m just gonna be her brother,’ ” he continues. “Oh man, I was fightin’, I was fightin’ a lot—a big war. But I loved Aaliyah.” Timbaland kept his cool and made good on that promise to be her big brother and not cross a line that her previous mentor had crossed on the last project. He also later admitted, though, that he married his wife, Monique Idlett, for a very specific reason. “When I first met my wife, I knew I was going to marry her because she looked like Aaliyah,” he explained. As for that “Sugar & Spice” song, it didn’t make the cut on Aaliyah’s project. It eventually became a song called “Candy” by R&B trio Tha Truth! Aaliyah, Timbaland, and Missy all recognized the inevitable chemistry that was brewing and were ready to jump into the studio and make magic together.
Once Tim and Missy returned to Ithaca, they had to tell the rest of the crew that plans had changed.
“In the middle of this Ginuwine album, Missy comes up to Ithaca and says, ‘We ain’t doing Ginuwine’s [album].’ I’m thinking, uh, yeah, we are,” Douglass says with a laugh. “And she’s like, ‘Nah, we have this girl Aaliyah to do.’ ” Ginuwine already had his record deal with Sony (and his studio time was being paid for), yet Aaliyah was moved up on the priority scale. They struck a deal with Ginuwine that for every session given to Aaliyah that was supposed to be his he would later be compensated for those lost days. Ginuwine was cool with that deal. “I had to hide from Sony because they’re waiting for their record,” Douglass continues. “So I was like the guy in the middle. Sony was calling every day: ‘How’s it going? It’s going fine.’ Even though we’re doing something else.”
That “something else” was about to change R&B music forever.
CHAPTER FIVE: ONE IN A MILLION
Aaliyah’s gonna show you how to turn this mother out.
—Aaliyah, “Ladies in da House”
Every superhero needs her theme music….
The album was called One in a Million, but the title track was Missy and Timbaland’s audition to work with Aaliyah. Together, they spent a week at Vanguard Studios. It was a culture shock to Missy and Timbaland, who weren’t accustomed to using the old-school technology of the soulful Motown studio setups, where everything from the mics to the mixing boards was reminiscent of musical days past. Still, they holed up and got to work. A musical bond was forming, and the title track, “One in a Million,” was proof of that.
“Tim and Missy had already done that song with her,” Jimmy Douglass recalls of the track, “I guess to test for Barry Hankerson if they could do the album or they could do
some songs.” The song was still raw, and the beat ended up being re-polished once they all headed out to Ithaca, but it showed incredible promise and signified this new direction for Aaliyah. Aaliyah already knew that it was going to go places. “She immediately thought it was a hit,” Missy recalled to The FADER. “We didn’t have to convince her; she was like, ‘I’m telling you, this is hot.’ I knew then there was a chemistry. She wasn’t close minded. She was an artist that got it.”
Once it was firmly established that they would all be working together, Aaliyah flew out to Ithaca with Missy to meet everyone at Pyramid Sound Recording Studios. Barry was still riding high on securing the deal with Atlantic Records and joined them there to lay some ground rules. It was the summer of 1995, and Aaliyah was ready to kick-start her career for the second time. For almost a year—from August 1995 to July 1996—Aaliyah cut close to sixty songs for her follow-up album.
“I’m seventeen now, so I’ve grown in a lot of ways, artistically and vocally,” she said in an interview with MTV during the album’s press run. “Before I went into the studio to do this album, I knew I wanted to showcase that… and really show my colors on this album. I was very confident in my convictions and what I wanted this time around.”
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