Oh, how Aaliyah was failed. She wasn’t protected in life, and her death was straight-up negligence on the part of the company in charge of that plane. It’s impossible to know where her career could be now. However, it’s definitely possible to know that she should’ve been alive. She was younger than I am. She would’ve been 43 now, barely into middle age. As of next year, it will be as long since she died as she had lived to that point. Blackhawk International Airways frankly should’ve been shut down long before she ever stepped on that plane.

It is, yes, true that Aaliyah Dana Haughton was another example of nepotism in the music industry. Her uncle, Barry Hankerson, was married to Gladys Knight for four years in the ‘70s. Granted, this was before his niece was born, but it still left him with connections in the music industry. He started a recording company to release Aaliyah’s debut album, and it was his managing a certain person we’ll get to in a minute that gave him the connections to get the album distributed by a major company. However, her popularity after that point was earned by her own talent. No one seems to dispute that aspect of things.

Now, Queen of the Damned is not a good movie. However, it’s not a good movie for reasons that have little to nothing to do with Aaliyah’s performance, and it seems that she was getting further acting offers in the days before her death. Whether she would’ve been one of the people from the music world also solidly known for acting or not, it’s impossible at this time to say. She made two movies. It would be very difficult to judge much of anyone’s talent based on two movies, especially if there are deeper problems involved. Still, if her acting wouldn’t have been notable, her music no doubt would have been.

So let’s talk about how she was failed, starting with that airplane. She was flying from the Abaco Islands to Florida after filming a video. She didn’t want to fly on the small plane, which the pilot informed her entourage was overloaded—by nearly a thousand pounds—and was rated for one fewer passenger than was in the group. Apparently someone in her entourage slipped her a sedative and she was carried onboard unconscious. The pilot wasn’t qualified to fly the plane and had drugs in his system. The airline had repeatedly been fined repeatedly for, among other things, not testing their pilots for illegal substances.

It’s not exactly surprising when the producer of Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, a then-27-year-old man who also wrote sexually explicit songs for then-15-year-old Aaliyah, tuned out to be sleazy. Yes. They were illegally married, a marriage later annulled by her parents because she was underage. She even had it fully expunged from her legal history. I’m sure she’d be glad to know that he’s going to be in prison for a long time; heartbreakingly, at the time, she took as much grief for their relationship as he did. You know, when she was a teenager, roughly half his age, with a power differential between them. That was definitely fair.

Yeah, can’t be funny after that; just support me for having to write things like that by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi?