My friend Aaron Cooper, a fellow writer and ace photographer (check his stuff!) once said that the latter half of the 90s was like a series of minidecades. I’ll steal his idea, and propose we call this lustrum Grunge Mortis (or Post Alternalia?), as the genre that dominated the first half pretty much was a long lost memory, replaced by Britpop, Rap, Electronica, and NuMetal.

As much as I missed the Grunge and Alternative years, it was time to leave Geffen, Interscope, and Sub Pop behind, I guess. I went through all the genres available, and I think the ease of file sharing and MP3 FTP sites made it possible for people with little to no money to listen to bands that were hyped but didn’t have the reach that streaming and youtube gives us now.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like rap, but the prices of CDs were prohibitive in Mexico, so I had to be extremely careful picking where to spend my hard earned dosh. Got stung a few times, and there’s no quick save points in this life.

Summer of 2000 was bizarre. By some stupid clerical mistake, I had finished university but I owed “community service hours”, which was basically social service time. The school demanded we worked 480 hours, half volunteering, half doing “unpaid professional work”. The first one was where my hours got “lost” and I had the summer to work again, for free. So the university had this deal with a company where they would bring trash and we had to separate it, under the scorching Mexican sun, with only the protection we brought from home as a means of safety. I tell, I couldn’t drink milk for over a year over the smell of semi empty tetrapaks of Alpura milk well macerated on rubbish bin lining bags.

My dad felt bad about the situation and he sneakily gave me some money so I could watch movies every night. The multiplex had 15 theatres and I watched everything that summer. As a latchkey kid with a martial arts obsession, Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Romeo Must Die was one of my faves. Worth a couple of rewatches, even if it felt weird watching Jet Li doing wire fu as he was perfectly capable of doing marvelous stuff. Blame studios wanting another Matrix cash machine under their belts.

The multiplex had excellent audio, and Romeo Must Die’s hip hop/rap soundtrack felt tremendous. From DMX’s meditative I’m gonna crawl to Confidential’s fierce It really don’t matter to me and coming down to Aaliyah’s jaunty Come back in one piece, that particular OST was a perfect match for a perfectly enjoyable popcorn flick. God, I miss midbudget movies. Have some fun, things go boom, kill the baddie, get the girl! (apologies to Pop Will Eat Itself fans).

That soundtrack was swiftly acquired. My dad expressed his usual hate for rap, but once he heard Aaliyah, he changed his old “they can’t sing” tirade. He then said: she should do musicals, she’d be perfect for a Sondheim ballad.

Aaliyah should’ve have a career as meteoric as an artist of her calibre deserved, but she died on an airplane crash in 2001, as she’d finished recording a video for Rock the Boat in the Bahamas. She was 22 and had a third album and another film, the queen of the damned, queued up. Two posthumous releases felt a bit predatory from the record label, but so it goes with artists who die younger.

So hope you enjoy Aaliyah’s music. Three albums of great beats and a sweet, powerful voice.