Friday, 19 January 2018
750 Hello TLC - Ain't Too Proud To Beg
Chart entered : 20 June 1992
Chart peak : 13
Number of hits : 11
These girls were never quite as big a deal here as in America but were still pretty influential for better or worse.
They originated in Atlanta Georgia where record producer Ian Burke and his teenage protege Crystal Jones started looking for girls to join a female version of the new jack swing trio Bell Biv DeVoe. They eventually chose Tionne Watkins ( born 1970 ) from Des Moines and Lisa Lopes ( born 1971 ), a rapper from Philadelphia. They were originally called 2nd Nature. They got an audition for Perri "Pebbles " Reid who liked them and re-christened them as TLC-Skee. She then got them a further audition for producers Babyface and LA Reid ( her husband ). The latter wasn't impressed by Jones and the other girls agreed to fire her. They signed a management deal with Perri's company and looked for a replacement. They did some backing vocals for R &B duo Damian Dame and found the girl they were looking for among their backup dancers. Rozonda Thomas ( born 1971 ) was a native of Atlanta. The name of the band was shortened to TLC with the band adopting the nicknames "T-Boz", "Left-Eye" and "Chilli" so that Rozonda became a "C". Why they didn't just become TLR when no one had yet heard of them is a mystery.
The group signed for LaFace Records and made their recording debut on the track "Rebel ( With A Cause ) " on Jermaine Jackson's album for the label, You Said in 1991. This single was their first release in November 1991 in the U.S.
"Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" was a co-write between Lisa and one of LaFace's staff producers, Dallas Austin. It uses a generous number of samples , the most prominent from The Average White Band's School Boy Crush . The song reverses the usual order in hip hop by having melodic verses and a rapped chorus. Unsurprisingly , Lisa gave herself the lion's share of the song with an extended rap section as well as each chorus. Tionne growls the first part of the verse while Rozonda sings the bridge into the chorus.
The song is unambiguously about young women wanting sex and went further than Salt-n-Pepa in testing what would get airplay. "2 inches or a yard, rock hard or if it's sagging" and "yeah I like it when you kiss both sets of lips" are enough to give Mike Read a coronary. In case people didn't get the message from the lyrics, Lisa wore a condom over her celebrated left eye and all three of them indulged in some Michael Jackson-esque crotch-grabbing in the video.
I'd never buy this sort of thing but it was now an entrenched strand of what constituted pop music and TLC did it as well as anyone.
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It may well be brand familiarity talking, but TLC sounds better than TLR. The harsh "R" at the end, in comparison to the smoother "C" may be a factor?
ReplyDeleteThat sounds reasonable.
ReplyDelete