Mýa singing “Back & Forth,” Aaliyah’s first single, is now on YouTube more than three months after she performed it at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. The festival’s organizers uploaded the 2-minute-37-second clip to their official channel on Monday, October 19, under the title “Aaliyah Tribute: Mya – Back & Forth,” and it had passed 14,500 views by Tuesday.
The performance comes from the closing night of the Essence Festival of Culture on Sunday, July 5, when Missy Elliott curated a set honoring Aaliyah. Elliott wrote and co-produced several of the late singer’s best-known records, among them “One in a Million,” “Hot Like Fire” and “Best Friends.” Aaliyah’s family approved it, with her mother Diane Haughton and brother Rashad Haughton giving their blessing, and the set was billed around two anniversaries: 30 years since One in a Million and 25 years since Aaliyah, her final studio album. Mýa shared the night with Normani, Chloe Bailey, Ryan Destiny and Sevyn Streeter.
Why this song, and why her
Picking “Back & Forth” points the tribute back to the very start. Released on April 8, 1994, as the lead single from Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, it spent three weeks at No. 1 on the US R&B singles chart, peaked at No. 5 on the Hot 100 that July, went gold in June and sold more than 700,000 US copies by the end of the year. Its video was shot partly at Aaliyah’s Detroit high school, the High School for the Fine and Performing Arts.
Mýa makes unusual sense as the singer for it. The two were born in the same year: the “Back & Forth” video shoot on January 16, 1994, fell on Aaliyah’s 15th birthday, which puts her birth date at January 16, 1979, and Mýa was born on October 10, 1979, in Washington, D.C. Counting from January 16 to October 10 gives 267 days, a gap of less than nine months. They came up in the same late-1990s R&B wave, and Mýa went on to a Grammy of her own for “Lady Marmalade” with Christina Aguilera, Pink and Lil’ Kim, which topped the Hot 100 in 2001. Her 2016 album Smoove Jones was nominated for best R&B album.
The rest of the weekend leaned hard on R&B history too. Saturday’s lineup included Patti LaBelle, Josh Levi and Leon Thomas, and Brandy and Monica reunited on stage, bringing “The Boy Is Mine” back to the Superdome. The 2026 edition was also the first shaped by Teyana Taylor as the festival’s chief curator. Before it began, she said she was not out to reinvent the event and wanted it to “feel like home again.”
The clip: what it does well, and where it falls short
The upload is official, comes straight from the event’s own channel and gives Mýa her own title card rather than burying her inside a two-hour stream. That matters for an artist whose name rarely tops festival bills now; a single-song video is far easier to share than a full set.
The format has costs, though. At 2:37 the clip runs well short of the original single’s 3:51, so this is a cut of a moment, not the full arrangement. Viewers also lose the shape of Elliott’s tribute: as separate song uploads, Mýa’s turn and Normani’s “Rock the Boat,” posted the same day, play as stand-alone covers rather than chapters of one curated story. And the three-and-a-half-month wait from July 5 to October 19 meant the clip arrived long after the live reaction had faded.
For a tribute built on two anniversaries, a single full-length upload of the whole set, with Elliott’s framing intact, would serve Aaliyah’s catalog better than a run of excerpts. Until then, the tribute exists online one song at a time.
The anniversary math is the other reason the timing works: “Back & Forth” turned 32 in April, and the festival framed the whole night around the 25 years since Aaliyah, the album she released in 2001, the year she died.
Further reading
Image: Schwars1, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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