{blackbabes} 13 years later, Aaliyah is still R&B's 'Princess'

Thirteen years have passed since a tragic plane crash claimed Aaliyah's life at 22, but the whispers and coos of the R&B singer's influence still resound in today's music landscape.

"She really had this mystique about her and more of an aura of mystery than a lot of pop stars did," says Lindsay Zoladz, pop critic at New York magazine. "Especially with a lot of Internet and Tumblr-based artists, there's this sense of mystery and not putting it all out there, and being more about a vibe and an atmosphere than some big, bombastic pop hook."

Although fans may tune into Lifetime's controversial biopic Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B (premiering Saturday, 8 p.m. ET/PT) to get their fix of the much-mythologized singer, all they really need to do is turn on the radio, where the breathy vocals and laid-back beats of up-and-comers Tinashe and Jhené Aiko call to mind the icon.

In the '90s, "there weren't many artists using the kind of soft vocals the ways she was using it, and now you see a lot of artists doing that and finding success," says Billboard.com associate editor Erika Ramirez. Timbaland's and Missy Elliott's writing and production on Aaliyah's second album, 1996's One in a Million, was also "very much ahead of its time, with the bass and electro kind of R&B sounds that they produced. Now you hear a lot of that, like Auto-Tune and electronic elements in R&B and rap, but at the time, it really stood out."

Her simple, tomboyish style has also been mimicked by singers such as Rihanna, Ciara, Kiesza and Lorde, "with the high-waisted baggy pants and black crop-top kind of look with the dark lipstick," Zoladz says, also pointing to newcomer FKA Twigs' homage to Aaliyah's Queen of the Damned film role with her spellbinding Two Weeks video. Musically, with her "more sort of moody and experimental impulses, there's definitely a clear lineage from Aaliyah to Twigs."

But it's not just the ladies who have been influenced by Aaliyah Haughton, who died just one month after the release of her self-titled third album. Rapper Kendrick Lamar paid tribute to her in song with Blow My High (Members Only), while Chris Brown, J. Cole and James Blake have all sampled her. Arguably, her most vocal supporter has been Drake, who announced in August 2012 that he would co-produce a posthumous album featuring 16 unreleased tracks and "fragments," but scrapped the project following backlash from fans and her family, as well as Timbaland and Missy Elliott.

Drake, who has an image of the singer tattooed on his back, explained her significance to him in a 2011 interview with SoulCulture TV, saying, "I felt like that was the first time I could really sing a woman's lyrics and not feel like I was singing a woman's lyrics because she was speaking generally." Ramirez says it's because the "stories she would tell (were) very relatable to both men and women, and we could see that with how many people are influenced by her."

But is there a chance that, like the details of her tumultuous personal life, her legacy and impact have also been exaggerated?

"There's always some mythology that comes around in a case like (hers), but the music really speaks for itself," Zoladz says. "It's been a decade since you've seen the influence of her because no one was doing it like her at the time of her death. You're seeing this kind of belated influence of people that were impacted by that, and it speaks to how singular and unique she was in the moment."