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. But I didn’t want that to stop yet another part of glorifying Aaliyah, so I kept going. 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 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. 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. 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. I did reach out to the family for permission. When I finished God Save the Queens, 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. The next one I did was God Save the Queens, about women in hip-hop. The first book I did was with Prodigy of Mobb Deep. It wasn’t J school it was being a fan of the artists and the music. 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. Vanity Fair: What made you decide to tell her story? “She was always so gentle and delicate and angelic,” Iandoli says, “but that woman was made of steel.” Kelly, who is now facing trials for, among other charges, widespread sex-related crimes. 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. Even 20 years after the singer’s death in a plane crash, Aaliyah has continued to impact music, fashion, and culture. “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).
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