![]() ![]() I figured maybe they were looking for the right person for the job and in my head I’m saying that I hope is great. I went to the office and there were portfolios on the table and the artistic director, Florian Bachleda, asked to see my book. So, Emil called me that week and said, “We would like you to do a drawing of Aaliyah.” I fell to the floor because Aaliyah was so angelic and beautiful. He said that to me and I got excited because if Emil was telling me this, then there had to be something special. I had already known Emil and he was always thinking that we were going to do something one day, so he walks up to me and said that he had a project for me and he was going to give me a call on Monday. I also met him at a party and that’s how it all came together with him being the person responsible for illustrating the first art illustration cover of VIBE magazine.Īlvaro: Emil Wilbekin reached out to me. It just seemed kind of perfect because I liked the way he made women look and that was a big thing because it’s Aaliyah and I didn’t want her to look cartoonish. You have to remember this is the time in Aaliyah’s life where she really transformed into a woman so she was wearing more sexy revealing clothes and she really just had come into herself as a young woman.ĭid you have someone in mind to illustrate the cover?ĮW: I was a fan of Alvaro’s work, and had loved some of the illustrations from his work. We had this illustrated cover of Aaliyah and it was tricky because obviously she’s so beautiful that you would want to photograph her so it was a tricky selling point for Aaliyah and her camp because they wanted her to be photographed. The idea was that everything would be illustrated or art influenced. VIBE: Why did you take the illustration route as opposed to doing the traditional photoshoot?Įmil Wilbekin: At that time, we were really branding VIBE as the authority of urban music and culture and part of our editorial calendar was that August would be this art issue so that was the first time that we had done an illustration for a cover. ![]() It’s been 15 years since she passed-in seven years she’ll be deceased as long as she was alive-and Wilbekin, Kim and Alvaro bittersweetly reminisce on working with baby girl the last time, not knowing it would be the last time. And when “Rock The Boat,” “More Than A Woman,” “Try Again” or any of her music unexpectedly sneaks its way into your playlist, you’ll forget those songs were crafted more than a decade ago because they still feel so present.Īaliyah is still present. They’ll forget that Aaliyah was just 15 when she successfully pulled off her 1994 hit, “At Your Best” and assume the tender love ballad is an original, unbeknownst that the songbird breathed new life into a Isley Brothers’ classic. They’ll negate her palpable presence on artists like Sevyn Streeter, Kehlani, Drake and Frank Ocean. They’ll associate the softness of her voice to lack of vocal range, and the mystique she owned as something manufactured by the record label, unaware that it’s a lot easier to discredit Aaliyah then it is to miss her. Small minded people will compare Aaliyah to present day entertainers and allege childhood nostalgia bolstered her star power more than the talent she possessed. I believe that Aaliyah opened the door for Beyonce and Rihanna to be who they are. “I believed that love and passion for Aaliyah would allow him to write the story and he would have a great perspective on her as a fan, but also as a journalist, too,” Wilbekin said. To work at VIBE you had to be a music head-even if you weren’t the official music editor-and your pen game had to be better than most, both of which Kim had, but Wilbekin recalls the young scribe possessing something that reminded him of himself. Tapping Bronx-based visual artist Alvaro, and entrusting then 24-year-old lifestyle/tech editor Hyun Kim to pen the story, Wilbekin had his team in place. With a third album landing at number two on the Billboard 200 charts, the task for Wilbekin and the staff wasn’t how to sell the issue, but more so how to place Aaliyah even more ahead of the curve that was already behind her, which is why the publication chose to do its first ever illustration issue. She had been in Romeo Must Die, she had success on the Billboard charts, she was for a Grammy for ‘Try Again,’ she was in the process of filming Queen of the Damned, and she was beautiful and had been rumored to be dating different celebrities, so she was a perfect cover subject, and everyone loved Aaliyah,” Wilbekin recalls. “At that point she had grown so much as an artist. ![]()
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