Chris Richards
It's still hard to decide whether muchness is the great triumph or dilemma of this era in music.
Spotify says it currently hosts more than 70 million tracks.
Apple Music boasts 5 million more than that. Very wowee, very sobering. We carry more hours of music in our pockets than we do life in our bodies.
And yet, every music streaming platform felt glaringly incomplete before Friday morning.
That's when Aaliyah's 1996 album "One in a Million" finally materialized on the major streaming services, completing a deeply fraught, long overdue migration from compact disc to the digital realm.
Somehow, the album's title feels as apt as it did a quarter of a century ago, and its title track still sounds like it came from a future that hasn't yet arrived.
There's no overpraising this stuff. Even if you're feeling routinely burnt by a social-mediascape that abuses hyperbole and mythology to elevate select music out of today's muchness, it's still easy to call "One in a Million" one of the most exquisite songs ever made.
Aaliyah was a futurist, but after her shocking death at 22 - in a plane crash in the Bahamas on Aug. 25, 2001 - most of her catalogue would spend the next 20 years trapped on CDs and cassettes because of a prolonged family dispute between her label (run by her uncle Barry Hankerson) and her estate (currently overseen by her mother, Diane Haughton, and her brother, Rashad Haughton).
According to a recent profile of Hankerson in Billboard, both parties have blamed the other for keeping Aaliyah's music in cold storage, but now Hankerson is proceeding with the digital rollout - and without the estate's nod.
That means more Aaliyah albums are scheduled to begin streaming in the weeks ahead.
Hankerson has promised a posthumous album of unheard music down the road, too.
It's impossible to guess what Aaliyah would have wanted here, mainly because the singer was so difficult to know in her short public life.
She described herself as "a very mysterious person" in a 1999 interview, and while mystique was a huge part of the image she was selling, it was an even more essential element of her sound.
She liked to sing over busy rhythms, but always kept her voice understated, delicate and sotto voce, as if she were sharing secrets amid the noise of the world.
In Kathy Iandoli's new book, "Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah," producer Jermaine Dupri describes the dynamic in plainer terms: "Just the softness of how she sang over those hard-ass beats, it was something different."
That different something resonated profoundly with any child of the information age who kept a CD player around.
In a world where everything is online, Aaliyah was not. You had to find her music. Then you had to imagine what you couldn't know about it.
Listen to her songs today and you'll hear her tones and tactics coursing through the past 20 years of popular music - her profound interiority, her melodic nonchalance, her sci-fi tomboy aura.
Without Aaliyah, Frank Ocean wouldn't be as enigmatic and Rihanna wouldn't be as cool.
You can trace it all back to "One in a Million," an album Aaliyah began recording at 16 with the help of Missy Elliott and Timbaland, two then-rookie producers who made the final years of the 20th century feel like a perpetual Saturday night in the 22nd.
The title track is their collective masterpiece. It starts with a bulging kick, a crisp snare and crickets - an orchestra of insects chattering in perfect time with the drums, which quickly begin to sound insectoid, too.
It's as if the trio is bending the sounds of the natural world around them into the shape of a slow jam, until the song itself becomes its own deeply enchanted, real-fake, imaginary no-place.
Aaliyah sounds completely at home.
Remember, this is a love song, and its two-line refrain is fine art. "Your love is one in a million, it goes on, and on, and on," Aaliyah sings in her steadiest, warmest, coolest voice, gently melting time as she stretches her syllables.
That first "on" holds the highest note in the phrase, but just barely - so she's conjuring infinity here, but with almost zero effort. It's paralysing.
Then the second line of the couplet turns it all upside down: "You give me a really good feeling all day long."
A really good feeling? Is that all this song is about? Or is she downplaying a cosmic passion by phrasing it in casual teenage love-letter language?
Either way, experiencing this song at midlife obviously feels much different than slow dancing to it on prom night.
A pop hit about adolescent desire now sounds like a spiritual ode to whoever can make you feel good every day for life.
The music's meaning has changed - not because you can suddenly stream it, or because your favourite rapper likes it - but because life goes on, and on, and on, until it doesn't.
Listening to "One in a Million" feels like staring directly into infinity, wondering how much of it we'll get to see, hoping we'll feel loved all the way.