Cliff: Today we're talking about TLC's CrazySexyCool.
Kyle: ATL, ho!
ATL, ho!
Cliff: Honestly, I shouldn't be allowed to pronounce that album
title at all, and neither should anyone else who looks like us.
But I did my best, and I said it with a serious demeanor, so hopefully
that will communicate the idea.
Kyle: It is a bit of where do I put the accent?
Which word do you italicize?
Crazy, sexy, cool, crazy, sexy, cool, crazy, sexy, cool.
How
Cliff: do I pronounce the camel cases?
Crazy, sexy, cool.
Oh, this is so much easier when I can like, hide all of my insecurities
bodily below my shoulders and you can't see them while we're recording.
And now we're back in the same room and you can see all of myself.
Just like the old days where we could just look at each other and
go, is that what you really just did?
Kyle: It's only fitting that for an episode about.
And Atlanta artists, we would be back in each other's physical presence in Atlanta.
we were joking about the outcast episode that started us off right
before we started recording.
We've come a long way since then.
Better set up.
I think we're marginally better at talking about music than we were.
Was that four years ago?
Have we been doing this that long already?
Cliff: More than that, bud.
Kyle: Six years?
Cliff: Something like that.
Kyle: Six years.
Cliff: Yeah, I think so.
Slow march of time in pod cast.
episodes.
Yeah, I am disappointed to discover that we are talking today about the
artist TLC and not spending two hours dissecting turnstile love connection
because I didn't want to touch a level up and I want a connection
and I felt that that was enough.
So we'll get a lot of TLC instead for me and us and everyone.
Kyle: I think everybody in the band turnstile would love
to be in the with the group.
TLC.
Cliff: Yep.
Brand new sentences, Reddit.
What's up?
Kyle: I think, I think a TLC TLC tour would be the sickest shit imaginable,
especially considering the way Turnstile plays Whitney Houston before they go on.
Anyway, we're not, we're not here to talk about the punks.
Cliff: If you say so.
Kyle: I'm to talk about two things today.
I think I'm here to celebrate.
A moment of immense cultural influence by a singular group of artists
that is from where we are from.
and the degree of the influence, I don't even really think I comprehended
until we started sitting down to revisit this and, you know, we had
30 choices for albums to talk about from this month on the calendar.
And for some reason, cosmically, this sort of became the one.
Um, and I think we'll get into some of those patterns.
But anyway, there's a whole Atlanta connection and stuff to unpack
that I think is really interesting.
And then there's just this good, plain old, like, well, duh, that actually
does bear pressing it on a little bit.
The idea that, Cliff, I don't know if you, I don't know if you know this, and
listener, I don't know if you know this either, but women contain multitudes.
People contain multitudes, but women especially.
Cliff: They kept trying to tell me that, but I didn't listen.
Um,
This will definitely be a very classic case.
Very, as we say now, very tuned day coded in the sense of there's a
million new specific unique things to talk about with the record.
And yet there is an unavoidable.
Oh, There are dumb shit men involved in this, like there is on almost
every record, and then you could just draw a graph, just like, are
there women involved in the artistry?
Therefore, the stupidity of the men who get to associate themselves with
them rises accordingly, and they find new heights of stupidity which
really come really come out here on this record and to, to both of your
points, um, One of the fantastic things I did in preparation for this was
watch original TLC interviews from the 90s, not the VH1 reenactment of them.
Where they can all talk together seamlessly, but the ones where
they're like actually fidgeting and making things up as they go along.
And one of the things left I said was, I think Jermaine Dupri is responsible
for a lot more than people think, and that is a very good sentence.
Like, uh huh, I think we'll find, um, some surprises buried in here.
But overall, it's a great exercise once again in like,
What's unique about a record.
What does the uniqueness of a record teach you about other things?
And then whatever about a record or a moment in time, or a story kind of
bothers you or doesn't hit you the right way, fine, there's a million
other sides that you can look at.
Kyle: And specifically on that, like, I don't want to center the men in this
episode in any way, that is not the story.
It is about the cosmic brilliance of these women.
And.
The thing that astounded me that I wasn't really aware of, especially because
of how young they were and certainly how young we were when this record
came out, it's like they had a vision that they were enacting and they were
really vocal about it and they had great clarity around it and they went after it.
And they chose collaborators who they thought could help them get there.
And those collaborators were faulted in, in a multitude of ways.
like I really want to celebrate.
These are songs that if you are over a certain age, you have heard.
There's no way that you haven't, if you are below a certain age, you
have been touched in your life as a music fan by something that like,
not just was influenced by this, but.
I can say with a high degree of confidence would not exist
without this group or this record.
And we'll talk about that later.
But this is a like a pause and meditate moment on like, even if you're
aware of TLC generally in the ether.
This is cause for celebration.
it's recent enough in the cultural memory that if it was like a, a record
or a group on the periphery for you, you might not have stopped down to be like,
wow, this is a really important link in the chain of American music history.
Cliff: And I think it's easy to win.
You're not existing as at least a teenager or adult at the
time where music comes out.
I mean, we talk about this a lot, but it's sort of easy to group breakout
acts like this in with everything else that was interesting at the time.
Like, In Vogue was a group at the time who was huge.
It would be cool to talk about them in relationship to TLC and a whole scene
of, you know, moving R& B forward, moving pop forward, all kinds of things.
And there are interesting conversations to be had there, but like, specifically
though, TLC doesn't just belong in the generic category of R& B got better
and also women led R& B got better.
They, like, blew the doors off of women's R& B and all possible
categories of everything.
Made more money on a tour than anyone had at that point in that collection.
Have sold more records as that type of a collection.
Just unimaginably huge footprint culturally, like you're saying but
that's, I think it's real easy.
We've talked a lot about the 90s.
It's this.
Year in toondig, but especially for us because that was a time
where we were transitioning from being children into being adults.
Like it's, it's so easy to sort of gloss over that and tell stories about.
Bill Clinton playing saxophone and things being normal.
And Oh, remember when the economy was cool.
Whereas what we'll get to do here and what's always the joy
of these episodes is like, nah, there's so much more to appreciate.
That's so much more specific.
And then especially with this one, and maybe it's just the way that
it hit me, but especially with this record in a similar vein to.
Who's the artist that we covered a few episodes ago?
The solo.
male artist.
Jeff Buckley.
Thank you.
similarly, I mean, I like a lot of these songs.
Some of them I don't care about.
But using this record as a kaleidoscope to look at music Flawless
Kyle: totally agree.
Cliff: I can't remember the last time and we'll talk about this some for sure I
cannot remember the last time I had such a fun active Researching session like i'm
listening to the music and i'm googling everything that I can possibly think of
that this makes me think of and we'll talk about some specifics later, but I mean,
I just wanted to come right out with, like, we can talk about how great this is,
disambiguate it from cultural stories we might tell, but also, once again, if this
particular genre, artist, album, whatever, doesn't connect with you, we're going to
talk about countless ways that you can use art and appreciate it to go find something
that connects with you a little bit more.
Kyle: Before we, like, really get into the record itself, I do want to
double down on a couple of points that you just made that were excellent.
You and I have talked about the ripple effect with like, there's a one to one
correlation between, the number of other bands that a band shows you and like how,
how much your favorite they wind up being.
I've always used Queens of the Stone Age as an example there.
But to your point with TLC, the same correlation is true of what a window
into a cultural moment or like a bit of pop culture anthropology,
a group or an album moment can be.
And you're absolutely right that this is that.
the other thing you made a point about is, I wouldn't gloss over
necessarily what a moment in R& B and women led R& B this was.
Because in 94, 95, it was actually a much stronger time than I
remember it being for all that.
So if you look at Billboard's year end top 100 from 95, two of the top three songs
are Waterfalls and Creep and, Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio from the Dangerous
Minds soundtrack was number one there.
Digging in on a little bit of the rest of the top 25 or so kiss from a rose by
seal from batman forever On bended knee by boys to men and there's a couple of
other songs from two on this list fantasy by mariah carey take a bow by madonna
This is how we do it by montel jordan all the way down at number 10 I can love
you like that by all for one Boombastic by shaggy you gotta be by desiree
You are not alone by Michael Jackson.
Here comes the hot stepper.
candy rain by soul for real.
red light special all the way down at number 28 runaway by Janet Jackson,
someone to love by John B and baby face,
Cliff: a bunch
Kyle: of Hootie and the Blowfish songs.
Fucking, I got five on it.
Baby by Brandy.
As I lay me down by Sophie B Hawkins, I'll be there for you.
And you're all I need to get by, by method and Mary J.
Blige a couple of black street songs.
Like it goes on and on rhythm of the night by Corona.
Cliff: Jesus take me back, man.
Kyle: I wish my ski low, like, dude, that's nuts.
Tootsie roll by 69 boys, uh, way down at number 63.
Amazing.
so.
Yes, don't lump it in with the pop R& B of the moment, but also take a moment
to appreciate what a massive thing this had to be to stand out in that crowd
of songs that were immediately popular, but many of which have stood the test
of time and some of which have like really gained an appreciation thanks
to the internet years and years later.
But thinking about the nineties and you bringing up Jeff Buckley, that contrast
hits me in a really interesting way.
You shouldn't, you're right, situate it against this is how we do it.
You should situate it against nevermind because it's like on that level and
it's been that culturally pervasive and influential and spun off that
many other larger and larger acts.
it's a great artifact of the world that it was trying to play in.
And it was a hugely important one of one decade defining.
So you'd like, you kind of got to look at it on multiple levels immediately.
and like we said with grace for Jeff Buckley, anything that kind
of hits on those levels, it's an artist, artist record, and it has
some culturally pervasive shit in it.
Even if you're going to hate it, even if you don't like a single song on it,
which I I would defy a single person to ever come up to me on the street.
I'll have one complaint
Cliff: later in the episode.
It will be only one.
I
Kyle: bet, I bet I know exactly what it is without even looking.
It's not a
Cliff: song.
Yeah.
Kyle: Yeah.
I knew.
Know me well.
I knew.
Cliff: You know which one it is.
Kyle: Well, I don't know.
I know it's a skit.
I don't know which one it is.
It could be any number of them, but I know I was like, Oh, Cliff's
gonna, Cliff's gonna hate these.
anyway it's a transcendent thing.
And if you're listening to a music podcast, Pursuing the discipline
like us of learning to love music in newer and deeper ways all the time.
Even if you don't ever listen to this record again, I like, I'm not a believer
in the thousand and one records that every human being alive should listen
to everybody's journey is their journey.
But like, I would put this in the category with grace that like, if you
want to have a conversation about music at all, this is like required reading.
Cliff: I second that, and I certainly had no complaints having to listen
to this one million times over.
Which is always a fun test of a record, specifically for this podcast.
Alright, I'm going to have to listen to this 20 times a day for a few
weeks leading up, so that my brain can sort out a few interesting things to
make other people interested in it.
And the fact that, uh, So many great records don't feel
like work when you do that.
Kyle: Yeah.
I'm already thinking of a couple for 2025 that it's going to be fun to
picture you snowboarding, getting in the zone with some of them.
Cliff: This is one of the ones that's easy.
It's so easy.
Vibe wise, flexible, that it can just kind of like bend and form around
wherever it is you want to put it.
You want to be active?
Cool.
You want to be sexy?
Cool.
You want to do active listening?
Fine.
Passive listening?
All good.
Other than the weird flush inside of the skit, uh, everything
else is pretty, like, alright.
We're down.
We can put it on this whole record.
Everybody loves it.
Uh, and, uh, if they don't know what it is by the time Waterfalls
comes on, they feel embarrassed to remember it and get excited about it.
So,
Kyle: Well, that's because it's multifaceted by design.
They had the name before they had a single sound for the record.
You know, there's that great quote you put in They, meaning the producers,
writers, whatever, would do a crazy song for me, a sexy song for Chili and a
cool song for T Boz, Left Eye Told Vibe.
We had to explain that the title doesn't just describe us individually, it
describes all the parts of every woman.
They were truly using I'm Every Woman as an inspiration.
So the multifacetedness is built right into the chassis of the thing.
Cliff: And as a bit of a Almost like a mental foil as you hear some of
the stories and background today like I also think it's helpful to
take that quote and just remind ourselves of What was happening?
culturally in music on a larger scale in the 90s where groups of individuals,
were for the most part, money, capital, was trying to turn those collections of
people into like, no, no, I need you to be very specific versions of things, so
that we can talk about you in specific ways, wrap that up in cellophane, and
then sell that back out to the public.
A la Spice Girls or something like that.
It's a terrible example here, but the most kind of stark example of like, no, no, no.
We need each person to be one and only one thing.
Kyle: New kids on the block.
Cliff: Even better.
Yeah.
Singular dimensions that we're gonna add together and go, look at all
these dimensions of individual people.
But they can only respond in very specific ways.
this is the sexy NSYNC member, not the funny one, okay?
And to see them not only on this record have to live out that quote that you
just gave in terms of not just, we didn't just have to Tell our producers that
that is what the title is, but they made it pretty clear that was, Oh, we had to
remind them on a pretty regular basis.
They did not say the
Kyle: kids say, understand the assignment.
No,
Cliff: no.
They kept wanting to do something different.
And the reason that's worth bringing up is not just to shit on.
90s artist rep men who exploited people for money, although we can,
that's just not an interesting thing to talk about in general.
Hi Atlanta friends,
Kyle: please send this episode directly to L.
A.
Reid for me if you don't mind.
Cliff: But once again, speaks to the strength of everything
we're about to talk about.
Every accolade that puts them above anyone else.
Took 10 times as much effort.
Yeah, because of the forces that were against them in that way And so
I think that was a really helpful.
Stop me if you've
Kyle: heard this refrain about black women before
Cliff: Oh so contextually And kind of literally in the moment, a few things
that I think will set the stage and fill in details and interesting color
as we talk about other stories and details about the music is just the
kind of literal facts of the record.
Sometimes these are irrelevant in episodes that we do because the actual album timing
or recording might not matter like that.
I don't know, Ravi Shankar or something like that.
A lot less important how exactly all this came to be from a recording
perspective, but here Crazy Sexy Cool was released November 15th, 1994.
Kyle: If you're listening on release day, it is the 30th anniversary
of the drop of this record.
Cliff: Yes.
Oh, it's almost like Kyle has thought about many of these things before.
My own little personal Easter eggs.
put out by LaFace and Arista Records, which, okay, so
let's talk about a few things.
If I leave out anything you think that I shouldn't, you let me know, but I
think a few things really fill it in.
And I'm going to try to avoid immediately snapping to the outcast
trivia because that is important, but not what this episode is about.
So, this is the second studio album, the first one, which I've looked forward
to for weeks now, saying out loud, was 1992's, ooooh, On the TLC Tip, which was
a really fun and stupid thing to name an album, uh, and the more that I learned
about how that album was named, the more I laughed about it, because they basically
just slammed two impossible, uh, To understand things together and then called
it the album title, which was really fun but uh as an aside, I may not come back to
you too much Unfortunately or fortunately listening to crazy sexy cool Um, actually
made me like the debut record a whole lot more all over again, an immaculate vibe to
Kyle: this day.
And then when you go back to the debut record, it makes you like crazy, sexy,
cool, even more because you appreciate the leap and some of the choices that
they made to hone in a sound and a vibe.
Cliff: It is it is one of our favorite things, me and you Kyle together, when
you can like See the intentionality from record to record, and you can see it here.
Kyle: You could never go backward or forward with TLC and just have
this document and that's plenty.
But if you start in on Crazy Sexy Cool and you like it, I think you
owe it to yourself to go backward and then to go forward to fan mail.
Yeah.
And see where this situates in their art, but especially going backward, like it,
it's like going and you know, there's a tribe connection we'll get to, but
yeah, it's very much like going from, people's instinct to travels to low
end and then being like, Oh, holy shit,
Cliff: and even just tracing culturally.
1992, you look at TLC and you've, I mean, you got parachute pants, you got
boomba, And then by the time you get to fan mail, it's about a OL email.
It's
Kyle: a different word.
Yeah.
They got a robot on this shit.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Um, but even 92, which is like culturally, that record coming
out in 92 is really like 90.
Yeah.
It's the transition from eighties hip hop to nineties hip hop.
Yep.
And then 92 to 94.
in the art form is like an entirely different planet, you know, not
93 was Midnight Marauders and 36 Chambers and then 94 was Illmatic
and Southern Playlistic and whatever.
So like this is part of a huge cultural ascent moment in hip hop and R& B
so between those two records is like 20 years worth of culture to unpack
Cliff: so much great music.
So the actual record though that we're talking about, this will be a fun refrain.
12 times platinum 15 million copies sold worldwide
Kyle: on the way to An eventual 23 million total unit r.
i.
a certified unit sold and an estimated 65 million albums sold worldwide.
So this was huge, but it wasn't the only big thing that they did.
Cliff: And they became the first female group effectively in history.
There are a million ways to Categorized this exact accolade,
but effectively first female group in history to achieve diamonds.
It reminds
Kyle: me of the sports stats where it's like, First left handed
Aries to throw a perfect game when the temperature's below 73.
That kind of shit.
Cliff: He always hits a triple when his leg itches.
Like, uh, okay.
Kyle: If you say the name of his childhood dog three times,
the homer's to left field.
Cliff: That foul ball was caught by a fan from Huntsville, Alabama.
Kyle: only the third time this decade!
Cliff: But we'll also, as best I can, try to eliminate the term Girl
group that love to be populated, when trying to describe groups of women
who are in musical groups together.
I understand that that was a parlance of the time and may not have necessarily
been offensive for everyone then.
Now it feels really stupid and we're just gonna try to avoid it where we can.
So if you hear me saying things like female group or female R& B group,
that's what I'm trying to get at.
Is that category great?
But even like I think one thing that you called out and I
think brings an extra level of
artistic curiosity to this record because we like to, well, We like to talk shit
about Pitchfork in general, first of all, but, when they are also in agreement with
like global success and you come back to like this record and they're like, nah, 9.
3 out of 10 for this one.
And it's like, okay, so we are all on the same page.
This is very good with a capital V and a capital G when things like that happen.
It feels so good to just give yourself over to the whole thing
like, Oh, there's something in here then I don't have to worry about it.
I'll find it.
Kyle: I'm a little hesitant to give the W over to Pitchfork on that.
Just one because it's Pitchfork.
but two, because the review is written by Clover Hope, who is, phenomenal.
I'm Music writer and like, one of the blessings of this season has been,
finding multiple black women with these amazing and really unique music writing
perspectives We found daphne brooks with grace and other jeff buckley connection.
I have I've recommended that book in a non musical context to multiple
people since we covered that episode.
Clover Hope wrote a book called The Motherload about 100
plus women who made hip hop.
So it's like, maybe just a really good authority snuck it in under the wire
as one of her freelance assignments, rather than this being the editorial
board institutional call to give it a 9.
3.
Cliff: I will give Means
Kyle: to an end, right?
Broken clock's right twice a day, whatever.
I will give
Cliff: All right, in this case, we'll give a half W, so we'll give a
capital V, because it can be a half W.
Pitchfork for
Kyle: the then.
Cliff: It can be a small W if you bring someone in who's smarter
than you about a thing and say, you go ahead and tell us instead.
Okay, that's better than doing it another way.
Well done.
Kyle: That's classic institutional bullshit.
Find somebody who's objectively really good to make you look
good and then take credit.
Cliff: For sure.
So then to this end, I think we should start.
At least down this, uh, treacherous path but important one of mentioning
producers and collaborators.
Kyle: Let's talk about and speed walk past the gem.
Cliff: Well, yes because there are important things to say
here that aren't hyper serious.
There are important things to say that are serious, and then there
are unimportant things to say.
So, gotta walk through all of them, I guess.
But main thing being the production and collaboration.
On this record and with TLC is how do I want to say steeped in Atlanta deeply?
Kyle: Yeah,
Cliff: very deeply.
It doesn't mean everyone only
Kyle: tip of the spear you know, pre Olympics before Atlanta was a place
that anybody knew or cared about.
This was like a formative LaFace is a formative cultural
institution of modern Atlanta.
None of anything that anyone knows about Atlanta now would have been possible
without this nascent little, ragtag bunch of people who Wanted to make a difference.
You had, L.A Reid and Babyface coming from LA to make a market outside of a market.
so, like with Adult Swim or like with so many other things, this was a like against
all odds, under the radar type of thing.
not like a Nashville thing where there was a machine brewing.
this was the start of the machine.
Like that, that needs to be absolutely changed.
Crystal clear.
Cliff: I'm glad you just went ahead and said it up front like that is I
think that's a huge bit especially with pop adjacent records Especially
for those folks who might want to gain more appreciation for a particular
record like this to separate out Pop albums that happened as a result of
artistry and people who wanted to be pop adjacent as opposed to The machine
that can be built to generate pop stuff and populate people to it and go you
go be this thing Here's the music.
Here's the vibe.
Here's the aesthetic everything you can there There is no mistake when be made
when you listen to TLC In interviews and talking about how they wanted to
approach how they wrote music and how they express themselves even visually,
like it was very intentional, may not agree with all of it, but it was extremely
intentional and they spoke about the intentionality of it really often.
And it's.
In the same way that I love hearing a guitarist talk about why he chose a really
or she chose a really particular Guitar and amp combo to do this like one really
particular thing on a record and it's all Really really intentional and I needed it
to sound this way and that's how I got it I love to see that same thing here where
they as we'll talk more about too, like their presentation as individuals, as
women, as R&B artists all meant something to them and they took it seriously.
Whether we in retrospect feel like they took it the right amount of serious or
whatever is sort of beside the point.
Kyle: if you set aside all the ethos bit of it, and you are just blind listening
to the music, there's a lot of sonic.
Qualities to it could not have existed would have been polished over or erased
or turned into something else if you'd handed Some of these ideas over like
demos for these songs over to somebody in new york or la or london and it's
really important to note that for anyone who might want to aspire to make the
next crazy sexy cool In 2034 Maybe it goes without saying now because
authenticity and originality is like such an essential currency in so many ways.
but it was hard one here and it was a deliberate choice
and they didn't sacrifice.
It was like, uh, there was actually kind of a punk ethos underneath it all.
The more that I think about it.
You were saying about the dudes.
Cliff: Yeah.
Yeah.
Nah, this, all of our conversations want to create a million little digressions.
Like I said this just made me, this album made me interested
in everything it felt like.
Um, so everything you're bringing up makes me want to chase that rabbit.
But yeah, so you mentioned Babyface, Jermaine Dupri, Dallas Austin,
all producers on this record, collaborators, now included Chucky
Thompson and then a couple of let's see.
We'll hit one important point that will keep coming up as as we go along,
uh, and then one Minor point that just kind of has to be said so one
collaborator was Organized noise.
So Sleepy Brown and Rico Wade, we've already mentioned the Atlanta connection,
but between organized noise, uh, and then being label mates with OutKast, who
was becoming the OutKast that we would come to know at that time, they are not
just at that moment, right, steeped in Atlanta, but in sort of like a mutually
beneficial rising out of the type of music that they're doing into this you know,
TLC is pushing into R and B, but label mates are pushing into Southern hip hop.
And one of the things that's beautiful about, well, beautiful to me, at least
as someone who loves this, having those two things take off at once and then
using collaborators and producers who are going across both of those worlds.
It means that in this record, you can find Yeah.
Like you can find Southern hip hop in it, or you don't have to, if you don't want
to, cause there's other stuff in it too.
It's not just outcast with female vocals very clearly.
Right.
But it's also not just, uh, smooth R and B.
The three individual members of TLC would describe themselves musically
as individually different that worked well together as a cohesive, um, and
so being able to collaborate with the folks who were effectively inventing the
transition from funkadelic into hip hop and being able to use that on this record
meant that to a point you made earlier.
There is detail and depth that would simply would not have existed otherwise.
Um, and I hate conjecture the most, but let me give an, a possible example.
I don't think you end up with the guitar solo on red light district,
unless you've got some odd influences about what makes a great pop song.
The vibe of that with if you were cranking that out of a pop factory, no need right?
You got the hook Everything's there and so everything here has just
this little extra feel That once you see all of those producers
and collaborators You start to go.
Oh That's probably them.
Oh, that's probably them.
Oh, this other thing they were.
Oh, this sounds like that.
Oh, and like it really opens up an interesting bit about the music.
The painful bit that I keep alluding to it.
One of the Producers and collaborators is we'll just refer
to him by his normal ass name.
Sean, John combs was involved in the shit.
He doesn't get any cool nicknames.
as the crow flies, we were recording this in a moment where
Kyle: defendant 204, 19 dash a,
Cliff: Yeah we're in a moment where potentially a small fraction of the
justice that seems to be coming to that individual may be on its way.
However, that's not what this episode is about.
Nor do we really need to talk about that or give a huge shit about that
in this moment But what we're not going to do is be afraid to mention
it Like it's some sort of thing.
We're not allowed to talk about like it happened.
It was part of this album He was a part of it That doesn't mean you have to hate
this record doesn't mean you have to hate tlc You can be as suspicious as you want
to be Just as you should be about what?
Entertainment and wealthy related folks are doing at all times.
That's fine.
Kyle: The diddy stuff is in a category of its own entirely So i'm not trying
to compare it to anything else that we've ever talked about, right?
i'm not standing him up against any figures, but like we started
the season with marvin gay
Cliff: Yep,
Kyle: and part of the core of that episode was like he's a bit of a problematic
messenger for You A like perfect piece of music and the more music or art or
human coexistence that you do you have to hold that uneasy tension and your
heart and that's been a heartbreaking, but also sort of liberating experience.
Part of getting older and more seasoned and jaded Is like you got to navigate
your own policy around Whatever that shit it like if you go around outright
canceling things Because your politics are at odds with them or they represent
horrible trauma or an easy truth you're going to isolate yourself from pretty much
all the human condition at some point.
So it sucks, but it just is what it is.
and the only way out is through.
and in fact, thinking about this sort of stuff through the context of music does
give you a bit of a coping mechanism for.
any of the horrors of the world and how you cope with the trauma of just
waking up and existing on a burning planet, you know, um, it, it is like a
small practice run comfort of learning how to deal with some of those things.
Cliff: one long running thread through this podcast.
Has been not being afraid to mention and address The negative aspects of
things that may have happened during the album about the album as a result
of the album Whatever it is good
Kyle: with the bad.
Cliff: Yeah.
That is why I've come to love music so much as a lens to look at things through
because If you're gonna be a bonehead you could point at us Just like you can
point at a lot of things and go jesus does everything have to come back to racism
Well, yeah, it seems like it Like shit.
Well, I didn't do it, but yeah, it kind of does.
And it mostly has to do with the fact that As long
Kyle: as the same street is called two different things on either
side of an intersection in 2024.
Yeah.
Fuck yeah.
Everything
Cliff: is.
Uh huh.
Kyle: until my list gets longer than 20 examples in a single breath.
Yeah.
Sorry, bro.
It is what it is.
Cliff: But that's why It's part of why we talk about listening to and appreciating
and exploring music as a practice.
Because if you look hard enough at anything, you're gonna find
some bad shit that happened.
Kyle: By the way, the same could be said of yourself, of like looking
Cliff: inward too.
So, that's why, instead of, like you said, instead of ever saying, Nope,
we hate all of that and we can never associate with it, or then on the other
hand, none of that matters, that's not what it's about, we're gonna separate
art from the artist or whatever.
Neither of those two booleans actually work for people who give a
shit about anything or are curious about understanding something.
And so, again, in that vein Not only can you appreciate this deeply while
acknowledging some of the very fucked up stuff that is buried under the stories
here of this record and this group, things like that, but you can, even
if it is distasteful to you in a way that's really hard for you to get over
on any piece of music or art, fine.
Use it as a lens to go find the other things that are related to it.
And go appreciate that so if you need to do it indirectly fine But it's always our
challenge that like like we are bringing you albums that are all very different
one right after the other every episode is I mean if there's a topic a common
topic to the Unprompted messages we get from people who listen to this podcast.
It is mostly holy shit.
Those are all very different Artists.
Uh huh.
They are they are and we do that not only because we like it but also because
It is really it makes you better at loving the thing itself when you have
to confront things that don't fit your genre Specifications or don't feel
great in terms of the history of how they happened or whatever There might
be a problematic person involved cool embrace it figure out how to work with it
Kyle: and at some point the turtle all the way down is, a therapist
would tell you that you're trying to convince yourself that you are good by
what you do or don't associate with.
try to find a little kindness in yourself.
And I'll also say bringing it back to this specific record, that, the
involvement, this name in the liner notes is like the fifth biggest trauma
related to TLC that they had to endure.
So, so I would rather talk about any of those as a point of evidence of their
incredible resilience than I would like to mention what's his face again.
Cliff: Yep.
Kyle: And also point for me, I think on male collaborators, I would similarly
like to celebrate organized noise.
We lost Rico Wade earlier this year.
I would encourage you to go read his New York times obituary to know
like What a Titan that dude was.
Thankfully, we still have Ray Murray and especially Sleepy Brown, who's been
the quiet architect of so much of the sound of the past 25 years and like,
is nowhere near getting his flowers for the importance of what he's done.
You know, you made the point about the guitar solo and red light special.
And that song is not an organized noise song.
It's waterfalls and something wicked this way comes where we
get the organized noise treatment.
A couple of connections there that are interesting, Sleepy's dad
was in the funk group Brick that had the minor hit Daz in the 70s.
So there's already a strain of real thick, specific, syrupy southern funk there.
Curtis Mayfield lived in the neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta or had a house in
the neighborhood and was a mentor and influence on the organized noise guys.
So there's a huge funk and black American music lineage there as well.
That's not overt, but runs really deep.
And then to your point, there's Funkadelic and there's a huge through
line because of TLC and because of their collaborators from Funkadelic to
Prince, and lightning bolt black music.
and I just want to, I want to give everybody their props for taking some
of the most electric strains of, stuff that hadn't really gotten its due
in the lexicon of the past 30 years and stuff that was very much of the
moment and mashing them together in ways that people were only beginning
to understand or think was possible.
Cliff: Prince will come up again.
So if that excited you.
I,
Kyle: you mentioned on a recent episode, there was somebody that we'd been name
checking a decent amount for rel maybe, but like, I feel like I talk about
prance on this podcast and then my real life on at least a weekly basis.
I don't think I have been more captivated and influenced by a
single music artist more than Prince.
And as is made clear by these conversations, that sentiment
is shared by many of the artists whose music we discover and love.
Cliff: It's fun.
Cause I think we probably came to our Prince episode thinking,
I appreciate Prince already.
I was only beginning.
Kyle: That's my literal favorite part of this podcast.
And I think I've said some flavor of it before is the episode that
we record about a thing is the prelude At best to our relationship
with that artist and that album.
Yeah, I don't start understanding what to appreciate or how to love
a thing until we've talked about it and I have sort of a basic framework.
That's true with Prince.
That's true with Thela.
That's true with Alice Coltrane.
That's true with Bjork.
That's true with so much at the Allman Brothers that we've
listened to our whole lives.
That's true for Dolly Parton.
I like Shudder to revisit some of the old conversations, but I would say, what are
we, this is episode 58 or something if you are a person inclined to keep a journal,
do an album a day, an album a month in your own life, and then at the end of
the year, take all the main ideas and revisit it all a year or five years later.
Cliff: So actually that's kind of inspired me to go into these
parts that we like to do on these episodes now where we try to help.
Think through ways to listen to the record on purpose experience it in new ways And
one of the things we always talk about then is especially in this first block
here whether you've somehow not listened to this record in recent memory Whether
you're trying to get a little further into it, whether you're just reminding yourself
of it What are some things that you can do to take it in fresh in a fun way?
And specifically we like to point out like so we do that exercise each time and
then try to call out a few things that are like, Nope, that still surprised me.
I didn't expect it.
Like here's a thing that delighted me when I didn't expect to.
Any of those things pop out for you?
Kyle: For sure.
So you're talking about a record with two of the three biggest songs
of 1995, two of the biggest songs of the 90s, four singles, five
singles that all cracked the top 10.
if you heard that today, And you're thinking about like a Beyonce or a
Taylor Swift or a Sabrina Carpenter or a Chapel Rowne record, you're thinking
about an incredible level of polish.
The first thing that surprised me was like, this is kind of rough around the
edges from a production Perspective and there are a few places where it
borders on goofy Like I don't mean to be disrespectful when I say that but
sonically there are some choices that I would not have made as a producer So
like in kick your game, the scent is like, almost got a splat thing to it.
There's a video online of Mac DeMarco playing demo.
He's sitting at the computer at the pro tools rig he's pulled up some
demos and he plays one and that demo in that viral video sounds
like the kick your game scent.
Mac DeMarco pauses it and he goes, Sounds like shit, but it's fun.
Um, and then in Digging On You, there's like, It sounds like video game music.
It's like the demo button on a Casio synth.
But the big caveat is like you take the song craft underneath that and
it passes what has always been the litmus for songwriter quality to me.
Would this sound good with just a voice and acoustic guitar?
What have you compelled to listen to it?
And I think the answer in almost all of the cases on the record is yes.
Cliff: you should force seal to cover all of your songs acoustically
before you commit them to record.
If he can pull it off, you're good to go.
Kyle: Can I just say, like, we mentioned Kiss from a Rose.
I want When I Die just to be recorded on the internet somewhere.
That like I think that's one of the greatest songs of all time.
I love that song so much.
Honestly, just play that at my funeral and smoke a joint.
have you seen the video where the guy comes home wasted
and he sings it to his cat?
He's on the floor, his cat's trying to get away from him.
And he sings it and it's like pretty good.
I would love everyone to get wasted or it's also in community
where they do the karaoke.
The best thing anyone could do is like get absolutely shit house and sing
kiss from a rose off key in a backyard and get the cops called on them.
That would make me happy.
Fantastic.
Um, but the other thing is.
we half joked at the beginning of the episode about women containing multitudes.
There's dimension to this record.
it's not one thing or even two things mashed together.
There's, there's still really isn't anything that sounds quite like this
Venn diagram of Subtle, thoughtful hip hop elements, good soul voices.
the main thing that struck me about that was like, it gets almost motoric in some
places, like in the can sense there's some like minimal head nod groove, a lot of the
arrangements, not a lot, but some of the arrangements can be like kind of sparse.
Yep.
and not crazy dynamic, but in a really interesting way.
So you take the production and think about like hip hop bars on all of them.
You take away the hardness of what a vocalist would do there.
A Nas, a Fife Dog, a Busta Rhymes, and it gets sort of hypnotic.
So like I was listening to case of the fake people with the OJ's backstabbers
interpolation and thinking about the softness of the vocals with that
sort of rolling groove and was like.
I can't think of anything else that achieves a sort of like Fela, Afrobeat,
Hypnotic thing, but it's also a pop, like make no mistake, it's a pop record.
So to do both those things is, I can't think of a single
other record that does that.
And maybe, maybe it does it to some degree, but it doesn't, you know?
Cliff: As usual, you just got me thinking about something while I need to talk my
shit into a microphone, so apologies.
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
one of the things we might talk about later that we like to do sometimes
to bust things out is like listen to these albums in unexpected contexts.
So, this one, I noticed what you were talking about in terms of the sparse
recording because I played it at a Low volume while I was doing something else
And realized that the beat was harder to keep up with in a lot of situations than
I kind of expected And it was because it didn't come along with the really
dense heavy Beat level production that we usually have now It wasn't like rattling
my headphones every time an 808 hit.
It's just A little bit more like a light kick drum.
Yeah.
And especially if you don't have it actively turned up, EQ'd, something like
that it actually feels pretty light.
And yeah, that I noticed, I wouldn't have described it the same way, but
notice something similar to you.
Kyle: Mean, I think it's another place.
There's definitely a Prince influence because I don't
necessarily listen to Prince for the way those songs were recorded.
Or produce, but the songs are so good that some of the, of the
moment production choices are really like risk, you know, like trying
to forge new territory sonically.
I don't know, I think by like trying to make a, Timeless, objectively
best sounding ever record.
You sacrifice uniqueness, you know, it makes it a little more medical
Cliff: commit too hard to the moment and the way the moment sounds.
Kyle: Yeah.
Cliff: Yeah.
Kyle: Yeah.
Or the opposite trying to make a thing that doesn't sound like it
was made in 85 or whatever, and.
It's hermetically sealed and you can't place it.
This is right smack in between the two, it, forges new territory.
It doesn't cash in on trends.
And as a result, some of it reads a little weird 30 years on, but
it's like, I wouldn't change it.
Cause it would it makes it what it is.
What about you?
What, surprised you?
Cliff: I had surprises that made me smile to myself while I was listening.
And then surprises that were less goofy, uh, and more serious, I guess.
Why not?
I'll just talk about it like I'm a goofy ass white guy.
Oh!
There's Fivetog!
Right at the beginning.
Like, just like, oh, where's that voice?
I Placed got it.
Okay, I mean just being honest, that's probably not a connection.
I immediately Recognized the first time I listened to this record when I was
a child presumably at a sparkles doing some sort of skating Around in a circle.
I don't know But I wouldn't have clocked that necessarily And also just to kind
of like jump and book in this thing.
I mean, you know Maybe I would have done this back in the day, but you know,
immediately you clock three stacks at the end, which, spoiler alert, there he is.
We'll talk some more about that.
Oh, you
Kyle: mean Dre from Outkast,
Cliff: as he's
Kyle: credited?
Cliff: Andre, yes.
Kyle: Oh, yeah.
Cliff: So, you've got immediately your book ending a really important record.
That is, not just ostensibly, but clearly and deliberately about female
empowerment, about the literal, specific three people that are in this record and
yet you've got the current face of the moment and then what would become a new
face of hip hop immediately afterwards, just pleasantly surrounding you inside
of your album, not Showing you up, not taking over, not doing all the
singles, just literally five dog on an intro, three sax on a verse at the end.
And like just, clocking those things in that moment and having
the delight of just like, God, I hope everybody had fun doing this.
I love so much of what came out of just these people that I immediately recognize.
And so it's sort of.
In a goofy sense just occurred to me how enjoyable it is to be able to understand
references so quickly like the payoff is supposed to be if you read all the comics
and then watch marvel shit in the sense of like oh I understood that reference and
it's funny That's cool to be able to do in music and it was cool to do here in a way
that I couldn't have done before I became an adult who spent a lot of time trying
to get better at listening to music.
So as always, I appreciate that particular bit and it just sort
of stood out and delighted me.
But then even in between those, like I would have moments like, Again,
if I was your girlfriend came on and now, nowadays, immediately I clock it.
Oh, print song.
That's why the bass sounds like this.
That's why the group, like, that's why this exact rhythm is working.
That's why the bass is not doing too much.
And yet sounds like it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do
in a way that none of the other songs up until now were doing.
Which didn't mean any of them sounded bad, just immediately recognizable
as something really specific.
And that we usually get with hip hop, the like, here's where the sample comes from.
And you can sort of take yourself down different roads, like, this felt more
like bringing guests out on stage.
Like this was like J Cole showing up at one music fest last year and just like,
Oh, well, everyone knows who that is now.
now I see her now he's gone.
And the obviousness of it made it feel so important all of a sudden.
Yeah.
Like the star studded cast of the thing, um, really stood out
to me, made me appreciate it.
And then that was what really started exciting me in a genuine way about like,
oh, this is gonna be one of those records where I just need to write down everything
I think about as it comes to me.
I need to take notes, I need to make an outline.
I need to.
Ask an AI a question.
I need to Google whatever man, like anything and everything is now
interesting to me about this and it put me in that mood really quickly.
And it's, I mean, it's hard to do that for me these days, at least so immediately.
So that surprised me.
And then.
counterpoints or, uh, I guess, uh, or two things that sort of stand in
opposition of each other, almost like on one hand, the red light special
guitar solo just hit me in a totally fresh way than I'd ever had before.
Yeah.
I mean, I've heard the song.
No, I didn't play it a lot when I lived in my mama's house.
Cause for a lot of reasons but You know now okay.
Yeah, i've heard a ton.
It's recognizable.
A lot of people like it the guitar solo was Tasteful in a way that I really
loved and that I appreciated in a new way Uh and learned a little bit more about
dwight sills the prolific r& b session guitarist who played that solo because
then I got really curious About it.
Because, guitar is a thing I know a little bit about, and I can try to recognize
the sound from what I'm hearing, but that one eluded me, so I got curious.
On the other hand, just, heh heh, straightforward by the time I got
to Sexy Interlude, I remembered why I fucking hated all skits.
Uh, so just sort of being honest about, uh, I was really, really enjoying it and
I went back to really, really enjoying it shortly after that but there's
nothing wrong with just saying, I didn't want to hear a toilet flush just now.
Thank you.
It's a funny joke.
What
Kyle: do you mean you didn't like wear my panties on the left below?
What, once again, you hit a handful of really interesting things for me.
I will say as a counterpoint to your bit about skits.
While the crazy sexy cool interlude is an automatic skip for me and not just
because of the yikes Diddy appeared part.
That interlude is right on the tightrope of swaggy and corny, you know, they do
it with confidence They pull it off, but I still hate it Um, but it's not for me.
So like fine whatever it's of the moment.
It's like it's a confidence swag thing.
Cool.
Great skip
The intro lude and the intermission lude I thought of As almost Sonic
branding because they do the crazy, sexy, cool thing, like underneath.
And you kind of lose it a bit in, with Fife and the star power of Fife in the
intro, but then when they come back to Interlude and it's like a palette
cleanser, is You Interesting to me that they do that, but specifically it reminds
me of the lost art of the like classic album interlude where you just have a
rough idea and you like the vibe and you don't want it to stay a demo and
flush it out into a song years later.
You're like, well, we'll just fade in a minute of it and then have it be.
A thing between two intense songs, like nobody did that better than
Sabbath for my money, right?
So i'd put an in league with that or like the title track from pet sounds Or
radiohead occasionally did stuff like that Uh wild honey pie by the beatles
is an example you mentioned pod earlier in the season like I thought of checkin
levels by pod, you know what I mean?
Like that's a lost art.
That's a thing.
All right.
I'm with you, especially in the streaming era where it's like, let me I put as many
things out as I possibly can on a release.
It is kind of surprising that that's not a thing.
And maybe it is.
And I'm just like, it's a weird anti confirmation bias,
but I do really like that.
And to use an outcast example, another name that I hate saying out
loud, club donkey ass that interlude on, uh, on Southern Playalistic.
there's like an 808 Miami bass thing playing in the background and I've
tried for years to find out what that is and there's conflicting reports
of what is actually playing, inside the club as environmental noise.
so anyway, it has a, it is a point of interest for me, uh, but also the sexy
interlude musically reminds me of the, after the dance instrumental on, I want
you musically, they, they sound similar.
So if you can like strip back the dialogue part in your mind,
another version of Cliff rids the lyrics, there is some value there.
couple of other things.
you know, you mentioned the star power of it all, like I specifically zoomed
mentally in on the hip hop cred.
Their first appearance as a group, their first like big interview
was on yo MTV wraps in 92 with Ed lover and not producer Dr.
Dre.
So like they've always had a foot in that world and respect in that
world and like Left Eye was a really underrated MC in terms of her cadences
and like original voicing and surprising that she's not on more lists and
that's probably just because she doesn't have that much discography.
But.
Right off rip, you got Fife interpolating two of his own songs,
like calling on his own greatest said.
So it really is to your point, like pulling him out on stage
to, Hey, look, it's five.
When the, when Busta Rhymes appears later on the record, my first thought
was like, what the fuck is he doing?
Like, what is he going for here?
What's the point of this?
Cause he's not.
He's like doing like slam poetry.
He's kind of flirting.
I don't, it's a way I've never heard Busta before.
Where I landed on all of that was everybody really
wants to be on this record.
Cliff: Yeah.
Kyle: All these dudes, it's not like, oh, thanks for the co sign, you know,
like given a dap up to the girls.
They knew the same way that Prince knew how special this group
was and they loved their music.
I'm like, yeah, I want to be on that record.
That would be awesome.
So I think that's like mentally where I've settled on it.
The last thing you mentioned, Dwight Sills, I want to point out one other
session musician story that I dug up.
On Waterfalls, the bassist, kind of a la the Prince slap bass on if I was your
girlfriend, the bassist is Mark Jefferson, who goes by went by remarkable The
provenance of this is unknown, but on the talk base forum, there's a thread about
trying to find out who it was before
Cliff: God, I miss random early internet.
Right?
Oh my God.
Kyle: 2004.
This is so 10 years after the records out.
I'll just read the quote in full.
Mark remarkable Jefferson.
He's in my motorcycle club.
He played his quote best ho on that song.
That's what he calls his white Sadowski for because she quote brings in the money.
He's one of the greatest guys you'd ever meet.
He also co wrote the tedious.
Yeah.
Song by Usher.
By the way, waterfalls was improvised.
Good ear.
Cliff: Jesus.
Well, let me give one little rabbit hole that you can chase if you'd like,
because one thing I didn't mention about waterfalls, but now you've
brought it back up to my attention.
Obviously, I walked into this with a bit of outcast framing.
That is our disease and cross to bear together, me and you.
We'll probably always walk into every situation with a little extra of that.
Kyle: I'll never not be happy about that being our Rosetta Stone in music.
That gives us a dimension that.
The other 999 out of 1000 dudes with our demographics at the shows we go to will
have just a fundamentally different lens.
Cliff: The around 3 minutes and 30 seconds in, in waterfalls.
Around the time where they used the lyric, no more lonely cries, the way that the
bass keeps going and the beat drops out reminded me so specifically of players
ball that it drove me absolutely nuts.
I had to listen to the song immediately and all of that.
And for me, that.
This album is peppered with those just the little like oh this oh that oh, oh,
yep Oh that reminds me of this and the way that that gives me an appreciation for now
how that move that I otherwise associated specifically and only with players ball
is, Oh, that's just a move that can exist in other songs that I can appreciate.
Like just those little bits and in understanding, you know, and maybe
it's also just a, a facet of the exact timing of this record and how, Our age
at the time meant that we were probably absorbing a lot of this passively
and then only later would like put our adult brain thoughts onto it.
But yeah, that was, uh, that was brought up specifically just so I could tell
people to go listen to Playersball.
Kyle: In fairness.
Mark Jefferson, one of two bassists credited on Southern Playalistic,
along with Preston Crump.
Even better.
Cliff: Amazing.
Kyle: He probably either played on Players Ball or the title track
Southern Playalistic or Funky Ride.
Cliff: this was not a coy setup to you, by the way.
I did not know that.
That is very cool.
Um,
Kyle: but like it was the organized noise crew that you don't get a sound
that distinctive without a core little group of cats that, it's like our
muscle shoals thing almost in a way.
One of my big takeaways was, you know, organized noise could have
been a factory for this kind of R& B.
They did hip hop, they mostly served themselves in the music that they made.
They only did shit with their friends that they wanted to do.
But they could have made I think a hundred waterfalls.
and it's really fascinating to me that their output is like relatively sparse
for the length of time that they operated.
they could have been like a muscle shawls, but I'm glad for exactly
everything that we have gotten from them.
All of it's a gift.
Cliff: I'm glad they chose.
Not to chase it.
Who's the dad here?
you're rubbing off on me every time we hang out.
It's always been me anyway.
You just have all the responsibility.
I have the weird humor.
there are plenty of segways into this, but why not use waterfalls anyway?
I think it's worth mentioning, at least to some degree this does not
need to be a tabloid level episode, nor do we, for the most part, give.
Too many shits about people's interpersonal connections, but Interesting
things happened during the recording of this record and waterfalls is one
good way to talk about it Because left eye recorded her part of waterfalls
during a two hour break from rehab And it is worth mentioning not just because
yes, it's Something more important than trivia to know that she was going
through a pretty difficult time and was in a not great relationship during
these moments and things like that.
but
it's also just good to know why she doesn't appear as much on this record
as she did on the previous one.
May not have been so much an intentional choice, which is part
of why I can appreciate the beauty of how great this record is.
The whole thing is about the equal collaboration and Combination of these
three people and they had to take that energy and find a way to still channel it
into the art Literally without having one of those three people around as much Uh,
and that's part of why you don't see as much left eye on this record which means
this opens up to me the there was a day where I read an article in like guitar
world or something that was like You He was interviewing Jimmy Page and I probably
talked about this before, but like Jimmy Page for the first time ever was like, Oh
yeah, no, no, there's, there's like five recorded solos to stairway to heaven.
We just picked one.
And the interview was like, stop everything, forget
every question I've ever had.
There are other takes to the greatest solo of all time.
He's just like.
Yeah, of course.
so immediately the interviewer gets kind of sidetracked with like, well,
what was the, what would this mean?
And so similarly, like this gives a fun little thought exercise to the thing
of like, it's this great of a record.
Would it have been better?
Would have been worse.
How different would it be?
Would it be more hip hop?
Would there be more funk and organized noise if left?
I had more literal presence on the record or was this interesting coincidence of
sorts that produce something that may not have ever come out of them otherwise.
And we get this cool snapshot.
Like I love the kind of hypotheticals of What those different decisions meant and
how they played out and how you can trace those to every individual song and there's
so much story here without just having to be like Yeah, her and andre reisen
had a bad relationship and she burned down his house Like okay That is true.
There's a lot of details.
She burned his
Kyle: shoes.
The house just came with it.
Fair point.
Cliff: Well, okay.
That's a, yes.
That's the, that whole premise of, the headline of the detail is
probably not the story that you want to know about so you can go further.
You've got plenty of that here if you are into everyone's interpersonal details.
Kyle: Schrodinger's crazy sexy cool.
Good grief.
Yeah.
But.
My version of that is what would the third.
Skinnered album with Steve Gaines and the band have sounded like
if there had been no plane crash.
I think about like what what?
1982 Leonard Skinner would have been like I think about it all the time I listen to
the solo Steve Gaines stuff and I'm just like man with it They would have been
the greatest country band of all time.
But now I just have to listen to what the live rips of what Sturgill Simpson
is doing right now to get anywhere close.
You don't like the Leonard Skinner Christmas albums
they're putting out these days?
No, the pro racism Leonard Skinner.
No, no, no, no.
Love, love my younger brothers, would not want them to take over the band that is
my legacy, my very specific headspace.
but they also Recorded a lot of this record separately.
It wasn't just left eye.
They talked about how a lot of stuff was kind of done in parallel.
They ma shuggered it.
They ma shuggered it which belies What you know one of my like track by track?
Insights and I think they talked about this too is how they finally like
cracked the code on blending their voices and their dynamics And that
seems like they would have only been able to do that live in a room Hashing
it out together instead of stacking.
We talked about this with Cocteau Twins, but that was like their,
what, seventh or eighth record.
And they'd honed the thing live.
And this is their second record.
They've been a group for three years.
They're very young too.
So there's something really astounding in their ability to To, one, find something
really cohesive, and two, not be taken advantage of and turned into something
they didn't want to be by having all of that daylight between themselves.
Kind of blows my mind.
Cliff: It was helpful to me to think about as kind of supporting thought
or evidence for this idea of women containing multitudes and them being
these three mixes of a Venn diagram of crazy, sexy, cool, and that whole concept.
They had just on the previous record, which I will not say
out loud again, you're welcome.
Um, coming out of that record was like, you know, Ain't Too Proud to
Bag was on there and they had already created An interesting moment out of
the forthrightness of what they were discussing and You know speaking of
surprises It was really enlightening to go back and in listening to the
interviews, especially Here again in real time what the AIDS crisis wrought.
Oh, yeah and how I Again, once again, uh, uh, uh, likely a factor of our literal
time and space in relationship to the cultural moment that this was happening.
We were probably too young to pick up at that time, they were being
very, very direct about like, hey, Put on a condom, it's unsafe.
And like the whole ain't too proud to beg thing was them already experiencing
a bit of criticism about being forthright as females, just literally in a song
about saying, it's nothing wrong with asking for what you want, it's not really
complicated, but it's what a snapshot in time because Reading about how
people responded to that song and then looking at them in the video was like,
so are we talking about the same thing?
You guys are upset about this video?
They're in like Arsenio Hall looking outfits, right?
With like the cool like jester hats and like, they look
quintessentially early 90s.
But.
In my modern brain, um, nothing about this even begins, this could be a children's
program, like this doesn't even begin to touch the level of explicit sexuality that
we would later, you know, be totally fine
Kyle: to absorb.
And I would borderline use it to have the sex talk with
Cliff: my kid.
And now to be fair, you know, that, that lasted one album, red
light district cause on this album.
And so was the music video that came from it.
it's not so much whether one was right or wrong, but more to just say, like, they
already had some momentum in terms of, like, they weren't just trying to prove a
new point, they were trying to prove more of a point that they were already on track
to do and show culturally, especially, with not just generic female empowerment,
but, like, literal female empowerment.
Personal empowerment.
Yeah, you can be whoever you want to be you can exist However, you
want to exist with other people you should protect yourself From
bad things that can happen to you.
You should make this choice, you know another thing.
We'll come back to you I mean that They were helping pioneer and drive some
of that conversation forward in the cultures that they were a part of, but way
Kyle: before it was cool or safer.
Okay,
Cliff: exactly.
But even on this record on that three stacks verse, he calmly drops a safe sex,
little public PSA type just realizing it in the moment that no, we, Nowadays,
we might feel like we've moved past what they were in the middle of in that moment.
And it is still powerful to me to see people using music as a vehicle to
say, You, your body, is important.
You have a choice.
You should, even inside of hip hop, even in the 90s, which would be
the same genre of music in the same time, that would get all people up in
arms about it being violent and, uh, poor influence and everything else.
Here they are, plain as day.
Just speaking directly to you.
Hi.
Yeah, we're we're reinventing the combination of r& b and hip hop and also
Put on a rubber dude, like oh, okay Like I it just it really reinvigorated how much I
appreciate when artists give a fuck about what they're doing Yeah, and commit to it.
Yeah, totally Even beyond just the, I want the music itself to sound cool.
No, I am taking responsibility for my position as a human being.
Who's in front of other people.
I'm going to save some lives while I'm doing it.
Man,
Kyle: They took seriously the responsibility of like, I want you to
see if you look like us we want you to see the best version of yourself in
what we are doing or new possibilities, you know, something you hadn't
considered before I also want to.
inner two quotes into the congressional record that support
what you say like Clover Hope in the Pitchfork Review totally
reinforced exactly what you just said.
She said, The album's songs emphasize not just sex but
pleasure in all its many forms.
It's a liberating, multifaceted view that suggests sexy doesn't have
to be raunchy or explicit alone.
It can manifest itself in the movement of a serpentine saxophone, whispers
simply, Yes, it's me again, at the beginning of a creep like it's foreplay.
So not just Raunchy or Explicit alone, that's not to say it can't be but I do
think that by contrast, you listen to Trina or you listen to Megan Thee Stallion
or Cardi B now, this walk so they could fly, they would never do that, but I think
they would also just say like, Great.
You go girl.
That's not for me.
And in that regard, Chili said we were more than R and B.
We were hip hop and pop as well.
As far as R and B is concerned.
Now, I feel what's missing is the lyrical content.
You have people that are singing, but it's missing the stories.
When I think of Jodeci's albums, like forever, my lady, we don't
have records like that anymore.
I don't know what the date of this was.
And boys to men songs like end of the road or bended knee, like
really songs that people want to hear at their wedding songs.
It could be you and your booze record.
Now you're just talking about beating it up.
What the hell are you supposed to be beating up?
I know you're not talking about my vagina because now you're not going to get it.
Show parentheses chuckles.
There's no more foreplay, no more courting, no dating.
It's straight to the bed.
So like.
Man, I really
Cliff: enjoyed
Kyle: that.
That's a pretty, that's a pretty rich thing to say.
Yeah.
When red light special gets it right up to the line, but Your honor speaks to
precision, and I really like when I'm thinking about bands and artists thinking
about the conversations they had about the do's and don'ts, you know, the core values
or whatever of this artistic project.
And, Few, if any artists I can point to and say, Oh, they had those conversations.
Like they thought about that shit.
I think about like Mastodon having the same logo, uh, the same sort of like
font and aesthetic on every album.
And they had to make that choice early when they were a totally
different band than they are now.
But it's created a world to live inside as a fan of that band.
And you kind of have that with the choices TLC is made here too.
Which is like, that inspires me so much as a creative.
Cliff: That's a lot of inspiration here for sure.
Sorry, I'm just playing back, um, the quote that you just said.
I'm just really enjoying that.
But no, great quote and great to be aligned and see that.
It doesn't matter if an artist hits the bullseye in your, the
non artist's, personal opinion.
But it's helpful when you can go, But I know what you're shooting at.
I can see that target and that makes sense to me.
you can align yourself to the vision of that sort of thing.
Uh, and it can pump you up.
Kyle: One more chilly quote, speaking of knowing what you're shooting at.
Does they
Cliff: contain the word vagina?
Kyle: It doesn't, sorry.
Prettier.
I can like say it at random in the middle of the sentence, but it won't,
please don't, it won't make sense that this is the end of my value.
Yeah.
, this is their sophomore album and there's no sophomore slump anywhere in sight.
And they also knew that was going to happen because they were so, they
had such a sureness about what they had decided, the choices they'd made.
And how it had landed.
Chili said, making the album was a lot of fun.
We didn't feel the pressure of the second album.
Jinx.
We were just excited to be in the studio coming up with new material.
And I remember when we were done, a guy at Arista records said, it's
a great album and you guys will probably sell a couple of million.
We were like a couple of million, bitch.
We're going to sell 5 million.
At least she didn't say bitch.
I inserted that, but I, I hear it.
I hear the certainty underpinning.
But we weren't looking at it like we think we're great.
We just knew it was special.
It was one of those albums where you didn't want to skip to the next
song, you know, skits notwithstanding cliff clip would say, uh, it's
rare to have a project like that.
And they knew like they had the prescience ahead of the album.
there's almost no artist that knows ahead of it.
Like this is going to be, you can say, I hope, I think, These
songs feel like they have a magic.
Cliff: Last person to take a swing at that was Katy fucking Perry.
So let's see how that played out for her in 2024.
Huh?
You guys are gonna love this.
Oh, you don't
Kyle: women aren't you glad to be alive?
Uh, and then she immediately did the Tommy Wiseau.
No, it was parody Thank you all for coming to my comedy movie Katy Perry's the room
Cliff: she deserved all of that.
So now i'm gonna give an Unusually direct prompt to you.
I would love for you to just take me through What is most
interesting about the music here?
I can tell you some things like we've already kind of hinted at about like It
inspired me to think about other things but like I feel like you've really drawn
out a lot of Particular insights, whether it's samples, things to notice, whatever.
And this is always your wheelhouse anyway, and I'd just love for you
to just crank on this for a minute.
Kyle: Yeah.
real quick speed round.
you mentioned samples.
There's not so much of that, maybe with the exception of the slick
Rick bit at the beginning of creep as there is like interpretation.
I got that luxury guy and his podcast interpolation in my head.
shout out to our buddy, John Asante, who works as a producer on that podcast now.
Amazing.
What a guy.
So there's the OJ's interpolation.
There's Mr.
Big stuff interpolated on switch.
Fife, as we mentioned, interpolates himself on the intro.
It's a really cool anthropological document.
I would include the Prince cover in there.
that like it's so well executed and adds so much to the record that it is
a great rabbit hole for younger fans of TLC to then go back to Prince and for
older fans to know where to put TLC in the pantheon of classic album makers.
that song obviously is from sign of the times, which many would argue is
like even more than purple rain, the definitive Prince studio document.
a few other moments worth calling out creep.
Is one of the coolest fucking songs Of all time full stop.
I would argue with anyone in any bar in any city on planet earth
about that They absolutely nail it.
Vibe, structure, sonics, message.
It is iconic from the very first horns And I just want to mention that the
90s gave us two creeps both on the same level So it's like choose your
fighter, which creep is your horoscope?
Absolutely incredible song.
Put it on the golden record and shoot it into space.
Every alien ever should hear it.
Vocals are such an underrated aspect of this.
They talk about their different boy, like, you know, chilly, sultry
voice, T Boz's cigarette smoke vocals, and Lisa's rap plus whatever.
But like you can use waterfalls as really the sort of like
golden, North star or whatever.
Cliff: How nice for us to be able to use like the big song off of it
as the actual kind of Rosetta stone.
If we want to, for the record, it doesn't usually work out that way.
It's nice here.
Kyle: Organized noise, top flight, like heavy message material.
They talk about HIV, but they do the three letters thing.
It's like no advertiser has ever come up with an ad campaign that smart with like
the implication Dennis Reynolds voice Yeah, I mean that, that's a brilliant
pop song, a smart people's pop song.
They told the BBC it's the first time they felt like they cracked
the code of how their voices mesh.
Um, but you can also, in Red Light Special the chorus is really syrupy.
It's a very doo wop y style blending.
and I like try to put the video out of my mind a little bit.
And if you heard it out of that context, you can see them four tops
or Manhattan style snapping and, and spinning at their mics and then coming
together to harmonize on the one mic.
For the chorus,
Cliff: um,
Kyle: I'm
Cliff: thinking about how that would have been an awesome
Kyle: alternate music video, right?
They get at it a little and like creep they recorded three different videos
four So there was an iterativeness to their process and they knew
when they hadn't nailed it yet.
They talk about that I think in the VH1 video that you sent me.
It was a direct interview with them.
Like, Oh, that's interesting.
That speaks to their headspace.
I would never recommend that you waste 20 gallons of water to get, do
an AI version of red light special in the style of the Manhattans.
Um, but you could easily picture like it would just, it would crush
as of an OG Philly soul song.
And then my personal favorite example vocally is in Take Our
Time, there's a chorus harmony.
That's really tight and delightful.
And then there's Chili's runs around it.
So at around a minute 25, there's a low one and then a high one.
And the tempo of that song mixed with the serpeness of the harmonies, like stretches
the space time continuum musically so much that it borders on psychedelic, It's kind
of a masterclass and it's it's very like everything on the record is not Trying
too hard the rough edges and the whatever.
So there's a handful of moments like the vocals are so Underrated not under
delivered like they almost strike me as occasionally a little out of tune but
they're really good, it's just really real and authentic and good then the, the last
thing that I'll say is let's do it again.
Would also, I mentioned, I want you earlier with the, after the dance
instrumental on the interlude.
Let's do it again.
I think if you stripped back the hip hopiness of the beat programming, let's
do it again with sound like it fits on.
I want you.
And, and really to me, the whole B side of the record where it is
like more overtly sexy feels like.
I want you.
100%.
For the 90s.
And I've never seen anybody make that connection before, but it's so It's so
there and similarly, they're both getting at dimensionality of like adult desire
and how it's real and good and meaningful.
And we shouldn't be ashamed of the dimensions of it.
And they're like role modeling, but it's okay to feel the feelings that you do.
And actually like, that's a beautiful way to connect and express yourself.
so yes, it's a, yeah.
It's a decade defining and genre busting record, but it's also like
an all time soul document too.
That's really like buried in the details.
But I think you can make some of those other connections.
the last little thing is music videos actually really help, and we hit a dearth.
Kind of after this period and end of the millennium and we're only just now
coming back to investment in the art form.
now, thanks to 10 or 15 years of research.
YouTube.
But like, part of the reason these singles were as successful as they
were was they had really iconic music videos on this record and on Fan Mail.
Waterfalls, The where they turn into Terminator liquid looks cheesy now,
but it was like, truly revolutionary.
And it also tells the story that they're trying to tell which is very,
to me, the, like, the way that people fade out in that video is akin to last
episode we were talking about the fade out of the voice of the character in
Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst.
So they're kind of doing the same thing, but picture of
Sing I'm Dying of Thirst was.
the biggest song of the year with that heaviness of subject matter, and
that, is a feather in the cap of TLC's artistic brilliance and transcendence.
Cliff: Amazing.
Kyle: And the album cover!
There was a Vibe magazine cover where they dressed as firemen L O L.
Right.
Some A& R fuck thought they were being clever and, and they just rolled with
it because they thought the outfits looked dope and they were right.
I mean, yeah.
and then the story overly centered on the trauma and whatever, but
wound up making some good points.
But also the album cover.
Art directed by Chris Stern, who was kind of, he, he wound up doing a lot of iconic
stuff for for Arista Artist and for I pull at my collar nervously, bad boy, um,
the cover where their faces are read is like, I don't think it's hyperbolic to
say it's like Abbey Road level, iconic, nevermind level, iconic, replicated
for Halloweens and Instagram homages and whatever, uh, at scale 30 years on.
So like, every bit of it.
And, and their fashion too.
They use fashion, to emphasize their.
Like it was an art form in and of itself in their videos and their live
performances, but also to your point about the condoms It was like it was their
way of being woke in a cheeky way Like
Cliff: yeah, they
Kyle: make me think of Viagra boys in the way that they're subversive with
making really good deeply earnest points About the ills of the human
condition and I can't believe that I'm getting to compare those two.
No totally but every detail adds to the richness of the TLC experience.
Cliff: I'll just add to that point because it was also one that came up for me.
if you, listener, if you feel like there hasn't been a weird tonal shift in the
concept of pointing at someone and calling them woke in a negative way, just consider
what the equivalent of that would have been In response to what's being said
on this record and in these moments of let's protect ourselves from disease.
Let's have a good time and enjoy ourselves.
Here's the thing you need to do.
Imagine pointing at these people and being like, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm not going to wear one.
Because that's a stupid idea.
And I'm going to dox your home address.
Like, okay.
Anyway, sorry.
Now I'm picturing
Kyle: like the vent staples mom reading the lyric, but it's like a trad
wife on Tik TOK being like, they're saying to use condoms, so we can't
do our God given thing to make babies
Cliff: to
I don't know.
It was pretty good.
You should get on Tik TOK.
I liked it.
Thanks for that quick digression.
It's always worth pointing that out.
And if we can pull any of you out of the weird ether and back
into normal lines of thinking and appreciating other people, Send this
Kyle: episode to your dad.
Cliff: We'll get him with all the That'll teach
Kyle: him.
Cliff: Dad, listen to this record about, uh, Black women.
So as we toss that haphazardly to the side quickly, I'd love to just
mention, I have really peppered the episode with this so far.
But just a couple of quick aspects of the kind of active listening session
that I went on which for anyone that's not connecting with this in
the moment, just like if you're the type of person who ever gets, like,
very, very interested in a thing for periods of time, this is immediately
gonna kind of make sense to you.
If you're not, just try to imagine that, you know, you're watching a TV
show, a movie, or something like that, and instead of giving a shit about the
movie, Everything the movie makes you think about just gonna look up on your
phone as a way to think about the thing without having to like put all of your
attention directly on the piece of art.
There's a lot of
Kyle: Martin Scorsese here you say about.
Cliff: So like one of them would be, uh, and if there's another big meta
pulling people out of the, uh, stupid group collective into something good.
Amongst a lot of other options this is a really good way to give you a
nice heya antidote to what you might think of outcast as And yeah, I'm
like, I am talking about thinking about Outkast through listening
to a TLC record and appreciating both of them at the same time.
Kyle: If that's your window on Outkast, I'm so sorry.
What?
If that's your window on Outkast, if that's your frame of reference for
what they mean and what they did, may God have mercy on your soul.
Cliff: I feel the same, but I also don't know.
Kyle: Can't make a value judgment.
Well,
Cliff: I recognize that like, Hey, y'all was like a, of a level of recognizability
that is difficult to describe.
Yeah.
Kyle: Order of magnitude larger.
Cliff: And if that is In actual sincerity.
We are looking directly into the camera in this moment.
Okay, if that is sincerely your entrance to outcasts, we welcome you.
Okay, that's better than not caring at all.
Kyle: Keep going.
Cliff: Yeah, but but with so much of what's embedded in outcasts, organized
noise, goody mob, dungeon family, everything else that we love so much of.
I mean, I can literally reach out and touch a little figurine of, you know,
Outcast that's sitting right here on my desk where they're sitting and
literally two dope boys in a Cadillac.
Yeah.
Kyle: Thanks Elena Braves.
Cliff: I had to hunt that guy down on eBay.
you know, outcast was the first hip hop act on the face.
So label mates here, as we mentioned earlier And they're, you know,
the group Outkast was making their first appearance on a remix of
TLC's What About Your Friends.
And then we mentioned, uh, you know, a three sax verse at the end of this
record which also, you know, we, we mentioned one of the funny moments
in time uh, another that caught me that I had never caught before.
It's like, Oh, he just made fun of Michael Jackson.
Oh, shit.
Oh, okay.
Called shot real early in your career.
Fun stuff.
Calling Michael Jackson a sellout is definitely a move.
But whether it is listening for the funk in the music, whether it is getting
interested in three sacks and tracing what Andre 3000 did from that moment on, uh,
and hopefully winding your way all the way over to the thing he's doing nowadays, the
Kyle: red light special, the new blue sun,
Cliff: we contain multitudes, baby.
Yeah.
That is just one of many little like, okay, this is going
to be my focus right now.
I want to learn more and more and more about this.
What does this make me think of?
Let me put on players ball because the base.
You know, riff and another song made me think of this one.
Now I'm going to listen to players ball and what album was that on and who else
was, Oh, and what's happening here.
And Oh, there's a player's ball reprise.
And like, okay, now I'm listening to Southern playlistic, you are going in
directions that are just making you a smarter, more interesting person with
a more full understanding of not just hip hop, but like the very particular
form of hip hop that came from part of this weird country that we love so much.
And that's just one of the weird little
Kyle: asides that you could go on.
Please let Terminal Velocity for That Rabbit Hole be spodeodydocalicious.
Cliff: As it should be.
Speaking of horns, which you had already mentioned, because
you're a sucker for those.
But then another, another example that could go in a totally different direction.
Again, these are just like singular moments that I had listening.
But the, on intermission lude, the guitar there, and we're
going to insert this sample.
And then if you haven't listened to it soon, we'll, we will
listen to it together soon.
but the guitar on intermission lude immediately reminded me.
Of Crown on the Ground by Sleighbells, which took me in
the like, Oh, wait a minute.
Is there Hyperpop buried in here?
In And first of all, no, no, generally speaking, those two
things are kind of too far apart.
However as is the kind of meta theme of this podcast, like
Kyle: the two colors of the same reversible shirt,
Cliff: I'm with you, I'm with you because what I kind of abstracted from there is
like, okay, we're not going to be able to draw a direct line, but I'm curious now.
So.
What about just bending and blending different things when new little sub
genres are being created and spawned off?
Because Hyperpop becomes sort of like a intentionally dense concentration
of things that were, you know, developed over time and blended into
one another and mixed with each other.
And so similarly on CrazySexyCool they're mixing and blending,
sounds like we talked about.
They're mixing genres together and Without having to say too much about it,
they're blending traditional gender roles.
They're, shifting things around and reorienting them in a bunch of different
ways to make interesting sounding music that we hadn't heard before this moment.
And so similarly, you know, one thing we like to talk about anyway is, and we've
talked about here, like kind of going, Backwards or forwards in time, if you
want to go backwards, uh, even though it wouldn't be necessarily backwards too
much in terms of time, like we talked about Cocteau Twins recently who in
their own way were bending and blending a whole lot of different things all
together to make an entirely different sound and in their case, yeah, it's
sort of more a dense expression of the genres that they were mashing together.
But then, uh, in another hand, I tried to think about, okay, well, If I went
forward and tried to take what I'm thinking about here in terms of this,
literally just this guitar reminded me of Sleigh Bells, what else am I
hearing that reminds me of Hyperpop?
And all of a sudden I could hear anything from, and this will be a very fun
collection of four artists that I'm going to name, I could hear anything from Charli
XCX to 100 gecs to The Armed To Frontierer
Kyle: Oh totally.
Cliff: not to send you too far down another side, but like, you
know, Frontier is a band that effectively tried to introduce
weird glitch into super heavy music.
And almost 98 percent of you who are going to go stream that
now will not like me for it.
And that's okay.
But the point is like The density wasn't the angle that, that made me
think about Hyperpop, but instead the, it's not even subversion.
It's like, no, we can intentionally take a bunch of different genres together.
And then like TLC did here, which we keep talking about, like they worked with
just a whole bunch of different people.
It wasn't an intentionally singular, singular, cohesive,
sound approach, anything.
It was, we can do all of these things because we're TLC.
Why the hell wouldn't, shouldn't we?
We're three people, we're different, we can do whatever we want together, and
we'll pursue whatever feels good about it.
And that definitely feels spiritually aligned to me, to the type of artist
that would come later and would do things like hyperpop, or other just really
weird forms of music, where basically the reasoning for it is because we did it.
And doesn't it sound pretty cool?
Kyle: Yeah.
Cliff: Oh,
yeah, it does, actually.
Kyle: Fife on the intro that sounds like the predecessor to the like almost
industrial ness of No Scrubs reminds me of the feeling of Charlie XCX's 365,
where it's like She's doing Yeezus.
She's doing death grips on this.
Yep.
That's Insane, and I love it so much because it's a sensation.
I didn't expect and I've never felt before
Cliff: Yeah,
Kyle: and it it's like capital a art in that sense like My wife
showed me the painter Titus who is like reimagining Renaissance art,
and centering black people in it.
And there's so much modern art.
Like we, we went to the Brooklyn museum this summer and there's all these
modern expressions where you're like, I'm seeing a combination of elements
I have never seen before and never in a billion years and infinite chances
could I have arrived at this combination of and what it's trying to say to me.
So, I would use Hyperpop as the wrapper word, container word,
around recontextualization of novel elements in a really, really,
really modern, right now way.
Done with the quality to give it the ability to sustain over years and decades.
Yep.
Cliff: Yeah.
I'm so glad you said that, but like, that's the kind of defining bit of it
that stood out to me, like in the vein of hyper pop that we're talking about, those
songs will always be able to be played.
They're not timeless specifically.
They're not timeless songs.
They are a very specific product of that moment.
Because that aligns with the aesthetic in general
Kyle: pop is for consumption.
Hyper pop is for expression using the consumption mode
or subverting it or whatever.
Yeah.
yeah, you, you stumbled onto something like inadvertently
kind of profound for me there.
Thank you.
Cliff: Yeah.
You and your
Kyle: dumb, stupid fucking brain got a, got a good one.
Count the bucket.
I'm doing my best.
Cliff: I also.
On a much simpler note, even though, that also reminded me that artists in
that vein of genre, if I can string that sentence together, have been
historically known as huge advocates of The LGBTQ plus communities,
all the way through those times.
And that again reminded me there are so many different forms of
artistic expression that when people put good intention into, pay
attention to the quality of, and they attempt to do like a coherent thing
aesthetically, that can actually,
it can give a more sincere Ironically to a straightforward message of support
about a thing About taking care of people protecting them taking care of one another
just in the way that like one of the easiest vibes to catch is like You go
to almost any actual punk show You're mostly going to immediately catch the vibe
of like all right if anyone fucks with anybody in here Some shit's gonna happen.
It's gonna be do you understand and everyone kind of agrees, right?
And similarly here it, thinking about those artists that would come afterwards,
but then TLC, again, like, the aesthetic wasn't just, I want to be known for
fashion, and I care about a thing.
It was a whole package, on purpose.
I am this person, I, this person, am telling you this thing now, and
hopefully you're hearing me, and seeing me, and feeling supported.
And encourage because I know that I'm speaking to you and I know that you're
looking at me and like I'm dressing this way on purpose to be cool because I want
you to think that I'm cool, not because I need it, but because you'll listen to me.
Yeah.
And like, they're maybe we
Kyle: contain the same multitudes.
Yeah.
If that dimension is of interest, I would recommend somebody go on the
journey that I have been on for a while now of finding other Domains other
worlds where they were doing that like creating the safety specifically house
music and before that Like disco where they, where they represented culture and
community and they TLC use the freight, like we want to be for the culture.
We want people to see themselves in what we're doing.
So you can also learn quite a bit of American history by tracing
your way back through, through that thread up to the early seventies.
Cliff: We say it's all in there.
That's cause it's all in there.
Just keep looking.
So let's, let's bring this thing home because this will
probably be the easiest part.
Honestly, let's talk about all the stuff that would not exist if it
wasn't for pretty much this record or at the very least this artist.
Kyle: Starting at the top.
Cliff: Yep.
Like literally the top
Kyle: there, there would be no Beyonce, Outkast, or Usher.
Period.
three of the only diamond selling artists of the 21st century.
Period.
So like, Three of the four stars in the big dipper, so to speak.
very rarely does an artist spawn almost single handedly one artist
of that level where you can point directly in the lineage.
And I don't want anybody coming on our mentions talking about the
Beatles or any shit like that.
Blocked.
Immediate, immediate, straight to jail.
I, but just like wrap your head around the magnitude of that and they directly say
like Beyonce is quoted on the record as saying there would be no Destiny's Child.
In fact, there would be no girl groups like this without.
and then like the Spice Girls who, if you're not from America, they
are huge on this level still to this day and are individually iconic.
would not exist without some mutual inspiration and competition from TLC.
But then, the longer tail of influence is like name a cool R and B artist
or indie artist or somebody that you feel like is mutating the culture
or pushing it forward in some way.
Kehlani, Cardi B.
Frank Ocean, Kiki Palmer, Solange, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, the beehive,
the Swifties, the Rihanna Navy's, whatever a Chapel Rone fan is
called, uh, , a Rod, Rodrigo Hive.
None of that exists without the like.
culture permeating world building that they were able to do with their fans.
I also just want to shout out Cardi B on her debut album using the line smash your
TV from Best Buy you gonna turn me into left eye and I wanted to read that out
loud because when I read it out loud to myself in preparation I knew I sounded
exactly like the white lady on the episode
shout out Colin Kaepernick
Cliff: that's okay you can get me on record just repeating they call me left
eye because I write Oh, that's okay.
So that's a bar.
God, that's a bar.
Oh, it is.
It is really a thing to watch a video and watch someone
say a thing that sounds cool.
And then you're like, if my mouth said that, that's a hard no thousand
Kyle: thousand percent.
Cliff: So I'm glad that I recorded that.
Oh,
Kyle: also, the Literal Recording Academy has an article on their website, 10 Ways
TLC, shaped the future of R& B and they could have just cut it off at future.
One of the 10 ways is quote, they've continued to pervade pop culture.
Although their recording output has been relatively slim over the
last 20 years, they've remained a part of the pop culture landscape.
One of the 21st century's most streamed hits, If you've ever been in a public
place, it's assaulted your ears.
Ed Sheeran's shape of you was deemed so similar to no scrubs that the
Brit was forced to acknowledge its influence in the songwriting credits.
Furthermore, Drake, Zendaya and Catronata are just a few of the contemporary names
who've either sampled or covered the trio while rapper J Cole managed to persuade
T Boz and Chili themselves to join him in the studio on 2013's Crooked Smile.
Hard pressed to find somebody.
That is still that relevant, updating in the cosmic consciousness today.
Cliff: And those are just a handful of things.
Barely scratching the surface.
You picked from a literal listicle that they wrote about how important they are.
That's
Kyle: just the biggest, again, the biggest names you can think of.
There's a Freddie Gibbs song that samples TLC that I love.
I mean, it's infinitesimal.
It goes so much further, but just again, name all the biggest artists right now,
the past five or 10 years, and there's a TLC connection for all of them.
You can't say that about very much, you know, like only Michael Jordan influenced
LeBron James to play basketball.
Like it's sort of that level of thing.
Cliff: I think we've done the best we can to mention this with
appropriate seriousness throughout.
But yeah, on top of the musical impact that they've had, I think this, the
topic of this record, as we've talked about, the concept of allowing people
to contain multitudes, not attempting to put them in boxes that are pre labeled,
just so that you can make a few extra bucks a little easier, and letting
people exist how they need to exist.
There was definitely some silliness here, okay but there was also a lot of bravery
that I think we should carry forward and acknowledge because it helps us remember
that especially society, societally, we still have a tendency to find people who
are not In this order, male, white, rich.
And we like to find all the people who aren't those three things necessarily.
And we like to put them in boxes as soon as we feel that
we have an excuse to do so.
And Left Eye was one example of this, who I think, even in retrospect
reading a lot of the interviews, handled it, honestly, pretty well.
With a relative amount of lightness and ease with the sense that some
shit happened that she was a part of some things happened to her, but what
we actually remember about that, if we're lazy about it, as she would go
on to talk about, actually, in a 95 interview, was that she felt like she
had earned this label as a, jealous, crazy bitch, while her ex came off clean.
there were two people involved in this thing, but she was the crazy one, and I
think it gives us a nice little moment to remember that not only are we responsible
for the boxes that we try to put people in, and that we try to label them as,
and especially the way that we speak about them after they have passed on
from Earth and society in general, um, but These people are not only containing
multitudes, but fighting a multitude of battles against being put in these boxes,
and records like this come from moments where people I mean, someone was feeling
like the world was labeling them crazy, while they were having to be in rehab,
while they were helping record an album that would go on to have the impact that
you just talked about, and that's not to minimize at all the struggle that must
have come from her bandmates having to deal with somebody being in rehab it's
so much that we add to people sometimes, and it's, you know, We should not make
the mistake, especially when we have moments like this Of forgetting that we
can also use music as a lens to go back and look at human beings and go As far
as we know they did the best that they could We can look at things and we can
say that was probably not good and we can say, uh, you know I wouldn't do that.
That wasn't a good idea.
Maybe they're a bad person for a thing or else Especially decades
down the road, look back at artists, especially as multifaceted as TLC,
with so much intention, and just Put them in buckets or talk about it.
Like it was just another nineties hip hop record or something like that.
Always, always, always minimizes the magic of the thing.
so fun to try to unpack this by never saying it directly every time we have
an episode, but just do not let yourself become a dumb person who experiences
music as boneheaded entertainment that's coming in through Streaming
towards you that you're consuming.
That's just kind of filling your background or Sort of accompanying you
as you go on in life like some music doesn't mean anything sure But a lot of
it means a fucking lot Yeah, a lot a lot and there's so much to it and there's so
much to love about it You really don't ever have to get too caught up in well,
so and so was a part of this So I don't really need to care about that Okay you
can do that with Chris Brown records.
That'll be the one exception that I give you Everything else is like you must go a
few steps into it to see the thing again to rediscover the beauty of who they were
trying to Support and encourage in how seriously they took their own fame and how
seriously they took their collaboration with other artists and like so much beauty
came out of Something that was meant to be this singular moment to show how people
contain multitudes and like Definitely the meta theme of our conversations always,
it's like, no, look further don't turn away, don't squint your eyes so that
something becomes easier to look at, like go into it, look at every detail, look
at the kaleidoscope of stuff, because you're going to find the connection points
that inspire you to love things, and to appreciate things, and so like, once
again, what is otherwise, a nice, classic, popular, R& B and hip hop record from
the 90s has Touch my fucking heart again in like a really specific way where it's
like man I really appreciate what these people did And I appreciate that they made
this music and that they cared about what it would actually mean Because that care
meant something that care is what created Like you mentioned Beyonce, it's not just
TLC's happenstance of existence, it's what they did on purpose every day that
led to people saying, TLC made me happen.
So dig the fuck in, man.
You know, like, when you care about shit and you really feel aligned with
the thing that you care about, dig in.
Commit yourself to it, try to keep yourself honest keep a fire extinguisher
handy in case things get out of hand.
But otherwise, like Man, lean into the whole thing, because you never
know when it turns out like this.
They never could have pointed at this in 1994.
Kyle: You know, you use the word brave, and I actually think that's going to be
the thing that I take away from this.
I wouldn't have gotten there on my own, so I thank you, but Thinking about
we all contain so many multitudes.
I hope that is the flavor of multitude that you take away.
Because not only was it brave to overcome a problematic domestic situation and rehab
and Oh, by the way, the insane bankruptcy story and taking Clive Davis hostage
story that we didn't even get into.
That's its own gobsmacking rabbit hole at the core of it, though.
the choices that they made just sonically as musicians on this record is brave
and hopefully their bravery is an inspiration for you to be braver as
a listener and as a person who makes your way expressing who you are and
finding your oneliness in the world.
so thank you for that.
I, hope I can be more brave like these three.
Or sexy
Cliff: or cool.