60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

Aaliyah has a smokey, sinuous voice and a truly staggering charisma-to-force ratio: maximum charisma, minimum force. Her falsetto can float off into the stratosphere, and her lower register can drill down into the core of the earth without disturbing the ground beneath her feet. “One in a Million”—written by Missy Elliott and Timbaland—features one of the best ’90s song openings in which nothing much happens, a subdued and self-contained Timbaland beat suffused in chirping crickets and in fact conjuring up a whole swamp, a whole ecosystem, a whole planet. The squiggles, the airplane whooshes, the narcotized rhythm that staggers like a drum-and-bass track stuck in quicksand: A lesser singer would be overwhelmed, would be engulfed by all of this. A lesser singer would try to do too much with it and end up doing virtually nothing.