Black girls’s affect on metallic and hooked up sub-genres continues to be usally missed. As a part of my analysis into Black girls in popular culture, I’ve regarded on the dating between race, gender, onscreen portrayals of immortality and nu-metal.
Nu-metal, popularised within the early 2000s, is understood for combining the temper of metallic with riffs and colors of rap and hip-hop. The style drew at the creativity of Black artists, singers and musicians throughout other genres and generations.
My analysis in this has concerned reflecting at the nu-metal-themed movie Queen of the Damned (2002), in response to Anne Rice’s enduring Vampire Chronicles books. It starred the singer Aaliyah because the tough vampire Akasha. It used to be to be her ultimate appearing position prior to her demise elderly simply 22. In a while prior to, she had additionally signed to look within the sequel to The Matrix, any other nu-metal franchise.
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Aaliyah doesn’t sing in Queen of the Damned, however her hip-hop stardom continues to be central to the movie, as is usually recommended via the emphasis on her symbol in its advertising and marketing. Aaliyah being foregrounded in a nu-metal movie, paired with the restricted discussion and plot construction of her personality, displays how Black girls in alt and rock track and accompanying media are once in a while handled as merely there to be noticed, no longer heard.
With a 17% “tomatometer” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.8 superstar rating on Letterboxed, Queen of the Damned is in most cases noticed as a flop. However regardless of this, the movie stays influential, specifically because of Aaliyah’s poised presence as a hip-hop superstar in a fictional and vampiric nu-metal global.
The nature of Akasha can also be criticised for representing stereotypical concepts of Black girls as being dangerously seductive. Nonetheless, Aaliyah’s portrayal made an influence.
Aaliyah in a scene from Queen of the Damned.
In recent times the movie has won renewed consideration, sparked via the resurgence of nu-metal and the introduction of the AMC TV display Interview with the Vampire (2022-present). Its a lot expected 3rd season is because of come with Akasha. This has led to a couple enthusiasts calling for her to be performed via hip-hop artist Megan Thee Stallion. The rapper made a Paris Type Week look in 2025 in an outfit that harked again to Aaliyah’s efficiency as Akasha.
This demonstrates that a part of Aaliyah’s ongoing have an effect on is the best way she established the nature of Akasha as canonically hooked up to hip-hop.
Greater than ‘seen, not heard’
Understandably eclipsed via her wider paintings, Queen of the Damned isn’t enthusiastic about in some ways Aaliyah is memorialised. However, for me, her involvement within the movie symbolises how Black girls’s creativity and coolness is leveraged via track genres and their media advertising and marketing.
Aaliyah in 2000.
Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA
When remembering Aaliyah’s cultural affect, her multifaceted position within the new millennium and nu-metal panorama will have to be meaningfully stated. Greater than that, how all Black girls in track are publicly memorialised will have to contain extra care and popularity in their necessary paintings throughout, between and past genres.
However as layla-roxanne hill and I talk about in our new e book, Glance, Don’t Contact: Reflections at the Freedom to Really feel, memorialising other folks as “icons” once in a while reduces or reframes who they had been to little greater than symbols and soundbites. There must be area to call Black girls’s have an effect on on track and society, however in ways in which verify the multitudes in their lives.
Any other documentary, 20 Toes from Stardom (2013), additionally illuminated the inequalities confronted via Black girls singers. Their signature sounds propel the good fortune of many genres, however they seldom get pleasure from this in considerable and sustained tactics.
The trailer for TLC Ceaselessly.
The way in which the tragic demise of Aaliyah used to be handled is a working example. The R&B and hip-hop singer died in a aircraft crash in August 2001. Media headlines fastened, together with protection that referred to “her movie debut last year”, however which didn’t talk about that position or her broader appearing paintings.
It can be unattainable for any memorial message to completely specific and respect anyone’s essence. Then again, the ways in which Black girls are remembered (and forgotten) in society are formed via the specifics of misogynoir – the interconnected results of racism, sexism and misogyny.
Black girls are so a lot more than the binary narratives projected onto them – sturdy as opposed to cushy, younger as opposed to previous, singer as opposed to actor, survivor as opposed to sufferer and dwelling as opposed to lifeless. Because the identify of considered one of Aaliyah’s personal songs conveys, she used to be Extra Than a Girl.
