Photo illustration by Coda
My rules for posthumous projects are fairly complicated and ever changing. Resurrecting the dead for “hologram” tours or reanimating old footage of them to shill liquor or perfume in a commercial will never not feel ghoulish. And I’ve seen enough of digital necromancy to know I don’t need or want it. The return of Tupac at Coachella was one of those mind-blowing had-to-be-there moments, yes, but I was also completely stoned and hundreds of feet away from the stage and it wasn’t until I saw “Tupac” up close for a piece about hologram tours that I got to see just how ridiculous the whole thing looked.
Unearthing the work artists left behind, however, is tougher for me to wade through. As fans we have the chance to hear our favorite voice on material we hadn’t heard yet—but we’ve also stripped them from their artistic autonomy by indulging. Would Prince or Michael Jackson have wanted us to hear their unfinished records? Is Whitney Houston rolling her eyes that a demo she made at 17 went for nearly $1 million at an NFT auction? Would Pop Smoke have actually made a record with Dua Lipa if he were alive? Those questions make whatever part of my fandom that wants something "new" feel uneasy in actuality.
I struggle with my feelings around these complicated ethical dilemmas and how my own curiosity and grief around the artists I love are in conflict with the reality that they don't actually have a say in the matter—and maybe they never wanted me to hear this record or hear their work interpreted by well meaning producers and artists just looking to pay respect. So I’m still processing what, and how, I feel about “Poison,” the first posthumous single from Aaliyah in nearly a decade that was released Friday to tease a forthcoming project.
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Loving Baby Girl means wrestling with the tension between her surviving relatives and how that blocked the release of posthumous material or reissues of the groundbreaking work she made in her too-brief life. Loving Baby Girl means waiting for the ability to see her music join our modern times by being accessible commercially as her estate and the record label run by her uncle remained at an impasse. And loving Baby Girl meant watching the day finally come that her music was widely available after two decades while grappling with the reality that her estate wasn't entirely supportive of the move.
The freeing of Aaliyah’s catalog was overdue. The absence of her music hurt her legacy from a business perspective and in the way it denied younger generations to freely engage with Baby Girl's catalog and see her more than a fragment of a generation's memory of her. The arrival of her music to streaming, and the recirculation of physical product, came at a time when Aaliyah's rise was being reconsidered in the public eye as the producer who groomed and sexually abused her stood trial for other crimes against underage women. It also came with the announcement that a long awaited posthumous album titled Unstoppable was in the works and would feature the small bit of material Aaliyah left behind and boast collaborations with Snoop Dogg, Drake, Future, Chris Brown and Ne-Yo (a peculiar choice of roster considering how she continues to inspire female artists across genres).
“Poison” is the first taste from the posthumous project and it’s not going over well with fans. At all.
The record, written by the late Static Major (he wrote the majority of her brilliant final album) and the Weeknd, who is featured on the track, and produced by DannyBoyStyles and Nick Lamb sounds promising. But the mix needed work before this was released to the public. Baby Girl’s vocals sound muddled and out of pitch, as if the producers struggled with the old files which is confusing on its own given the formidable Mike Dean is credited with mixing the record. Adding to the strangeness of the whole thing is seeing this high profile “collaboration” rolled out by her label without any participation from the Weeknd—as if, maybe, he’s not entirely pleased with the final result (he can’t possibly be unaware of the backlash as her fans are pretty loudly united in their disappointment). It all gets in the way of what I imagine her uncle Barry's Blackground 2.0 believed to be a landmark moment. Granted, I don’t hate “Poison" as an idea. It’s nice to hear the sweetness of Baby Girl’s voice on something new, even if I don't know what to do with the fact that none of this is what her mother or brother would want. To hear the sweet flutter of Aaliyah's voice truly warmed my spirit as a fan that's grieved her loss for two decades now. But it’s too damn bad the unevenness of the song’s quality makes “Poison” sound a dreadful reminder of how difficult it is to pull off digital necromancy without disturbing the dead or those who love them.
