Giving Roses: Honoring TLC’s \"CrazySexyCool\"
WBLS Staff
07/08/2021 12:00 AM EDT
Today we give roses, love, and respect to TLC’s 1994 album CrazySexyCool. TLC’s second album “Crazysexycool” propelled Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas into superstardom. This album is featured in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, it has two songs that reached the top 5 on the Billboard charts, and sold more than 23 million copies. The intro to this iconic album features two hip-hop greats in Andre 3000 and Phife Dawg on a track called “Intro-lude.” Andre 3000 also spearheads the outro to Crazysexycool, with a rap verse to start Sumthin Wicked This Way comes. Immediately following Intro-lude comes one of TLC’s most popular and most overlooked songs, "Creep." The second track of this album "Creep" earned TLC a Grammy for “Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.” Weirdly enough, two thirds of TLC disliked this song. Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins disliked the track because it was written about her then boyfriend, Delvin, who was a member of the group Jodeci, whereas Left Eye disliked the subject matter of the song.TLC’s use of boom bap drums dominate on songs like "Case of the Fake People" and "Kick Your Game." A tip of the cap goes to TLC on both of these songs for sampling songs with similar themes. In the case of "Case of the Fake People," the breakdown from the O'Jays "Backstabbers" is sampled - the songs have nearly identical messages. As for "Kick Your Game," the lesser known "Watching You" by Loose Ends helped provide the “watching you, watching me” chorus for TLC. The producers of this album consist of legendary talents such as; Sean “Diddy” Combs, Jermaine Dupri, Babyface, and Organized Noize. This team of producers were doing high level sampling long before computers made sampling easy and accessible.
