Once upon a time, right after I started my freshman year in high school, the halls were blazing with TLC. Everybody had a glimpse of them from Oooh…On The TLC Tip, since they were the pro-condom chicks wearing condom glasses and dressed like hip-hop boys out there like Salt-N-Pepa with a sexually conscious anti-disease message. I knew Hat To The Back and Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg, mostly because of seeing the videos on The Box. From the first horns on Creep everybody at my school was trying to see what this new hip-hop hybrid sound from TLC was all about.
This was my first introduction into CrazySexyCool. That and that fire music video.
TLC was always a group ahead of its time. Contrary to popular opinion they are indeed a hip-hop group, albeit on the hip-hop fusion side of things. No one, not even the Fugees, had a trio that featured two vocalists that didn’t rap and a rapper who didn’t sing prevalently. Lauryn Hill, while a beast of a lyricist, was nothing more than the hook master in Fugees, never singing full verses sans the irritable Killing Them Softly. In that regard, TLC brought something unique and fresh to the hip-hop world, the idea that we could grow outside of the underground sound into something commercial without losing the core spirit of the music.
Of course, their hip-hop fusion power had some unintended consequences.
CrazySexyCool some thirty years later is not a great hip-hop album. It’s barely lukewarm at best. Are there great hip-hop songs on it? Yes! Are they enough to carry you through the longest twenty seconds of loneliness after you’ve played Creep ten times? No! The album is riddled with problems, most notably falling short in its sexual grittiness as most of the album content goes back and forth like a ping pong ball between sex being carelessly dangerous to sex being sinfully good. Creep was a strong start, I’ll give CrazySexyCool that, but the release of Waterfalls as the second single and its subsequent nauseating commercial music video success totally destroyed the genius that the album presented.
If you’re old enough to remember when Waterfalls came out it was a massive commercial hit, solely for the music video. The song sucked but Hype Williams used CGI in a way that hadn’t been used before at the time so everybody was deer in the headlights about that part of the song and not the actual song itself. The constant airing of the music video provoked the constant overplaying of the song on the radio, making it commercially annoying to the tenth power. By the time the third single Red Light Special hit the music video junket it was washed away and drowned under the Waterfalls to a land where dead music videos goes to die, never to be remembered again.
The unfortunate thing about the album, with all its production power from Puffy Combs, Jermaine Dupree, Babyface, Organized Noise, and Dallas Austin, the really good songs that should have gotten music video rotation got lost in the shuffle. Kick Your Game and Take Our Time should have been featured after Red Light Special but instead became deep album cuts that were hardly on anybody’s radar, since the anti-Waterfalls crowd would not dare to listen to anything else on the album and the pro-Waterfalls crowd couldn’t stop playing that one single. In a very unique twist, albeit not intentional, for every strong song CrazySexyCool gives, we’re treated with a filler song.
Now let’s be real here. Hip-hop always has skits and interludes. I’m not knocking that – Busta Rhymes has some of the best. In this case TLC does them almost like they are a very bad after school special. There are five – that’s right, the number after four – interludes on CrazySexyCool that go on way too long and serve no purpose but to eat up run time. Add that to Diggin’ On You, Let’s Do It Again, and the questionable re-make of Prince’s If I Was Your Girlfriend and we have eight out of sixteen unnecessary tracks that could have been better used to more hip-hop fusion that could have highlighted Left Eye’s lyrical versatility that was sorely needed.
Unlike their first album, CrazySexyCool only features three sample heavy beats. Case Of The Fake People, Switch, and Sumthin’ Wicked This Way Comes (which features a spirited sixteen bars by Andre3000 at the beginning) are a glimpse of what could have been with better hip-hop laden production that still could have been commercial but not as poppy as Waterfalls. The album was sixteen tracks; it was enough room to stretch a little bit and really embrace the hip-hop fusion while keeping the producer’s signature sound. In this case I just think it was too many producers in the kitchen all coming with drastically different musical styles that clashed on impact.
I hope one day hip-hop lovers discover this album and remix the hell out of it proper like, and give it the treatment it didn’t get the first go around. Until then, it’s a flawed masterpiece you should check out, if for no other reason, to see where hip-hop fusion was, and where it could have went.
