Aaliyah Mix

is now up over at the FADER.

Thanks very, very much to the whole FADER team, Shep esp., for the opportunity to pay tribute to one of my forever favorites. Making this meant a hell of a lot to me; like I wrote in the issue, I've been listening to Aaliyah for many years now.

Note: I made a very deliberate choice to kind of put myself in the background here, aka no C-C-C-CAPS!!!!! drops, no Aaliyah vox over the new Lil Wayne beat, no super scratchiti defacing the Are U That Somebody instrumental. (Indeed, the only airhorns on the tape are for Down With The Clique, and that's just cause they felt appropriate. That song is a long-lost jam. Apparently it did pretty well in the UK, which I didn't know.) That's also why most of the songs run at least three if not four verses deep: I wanted it to feel like all my favorite Aaliyah cuts on one LP, mixed tastefully, a real retrospective, kinda like an album. Also, these are my favorite Aaliyah songs, plus all the must-plays, but it was still real tough to have to leave some equally classic songs off. That's why the whole tape is 79 minutes 58 seconds long; I tried to get it all in, give everything all the space it needed.

And yeah, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't kinda hard at times: listening/watching hours of interviews with Aaliyah was incredibly intense - like the last interview she ever did with Angie Martinez on Hot 97, two days before she died, where Angie and her are laughing and laughing, giggling about Dame Dash and Roc-a-fella, then Angie asks her where she'll be in 10 years, and she says that she'll be settled down with kids and happy. Oh man. Fucked me up.

But she is not forgot, for damn sure.