— Tony Cross
Back in the mid-sixties, The Who would describe their music as "Maximum R&B", a slogan that became so widespread that it was used as the title of a best-selling box set of the band's career and as something to have on t-shirts worn by women in Asia who've never heard of The Who. By the early nineties, however, the term 'R&B' was starting to be applied to slick vocal groups like Boyz II Men and Color Me Badd. There's quite the missing link in the seventies and eighties, isn't there?
R&B was intended to be taken seriously. Whitney Houston's run of eighties' hits ("How Will I Know?", "I Wanna Dance with Somebody") took her to the top of the pop world but it notoriously resulted in her being booed at the 1988 Soul Train Awards. The singer was said to have taken the blowback hard and went back to the drawing board to record the more street-smart I'm Your Baby Tonight album. Being a pop diva, it was completely unconvincing. It also further solidified the noble but misguided notion that going R&B meant having extra credibility.
Luckily, there were some younger acts who were able to pull it off. Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas dressed as if they associated with the likes of The Jungle Brothers and Monie Love but their sound was such a hybrid of nineties' Afro-American music as to seem wholly original. Their form of R&B didn't over-do-it with the emotion, a trait which always seemed to affect male vocalists in the genre much more than their female counterparts.
The TLC that would be one of the biggest acts in the world in the mid to late nineties wasn't as refined at this early stage. Still, given how much worse the sleeker, (supposedly) sexier Betty Boo was as she matured, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The video for "Baby, Baby, Baby" is set in a girls' dorm at a university where the trio prance around in baggy pyjamas and their finest casual wear all the while mugging for the camera at every opportunity. T-Boz does most of the actual singing with an assist here and there from Chilli with Left-Eye, well, left out a bit. A rap in the middle-eight from her wouldn't have been unwelcome but it isn't missed.
Nonchalantly gliding along for its four minutes, you scarcely notice "Baby, Baby, Baby" at first but eventually takes hold by which time there's no getting rid of it. (Much like TLC itself, a group I never needed until they were taken from us when I suddenly missed them; is it any wonder the public took Left-Eye's untimely death so hard?) Sometimes the most original thing to do is to take a variety of genres and subgenres (R&B, hip hop, sunshine pop) and roll them into one ultra-subgenre of which there is really only one relevant act.
A magnificent follow-up to breakthrough hit "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg", "Baby Baby Baby" badly underperformed in the UK, not even managing to crack the Top 50. Tony Cross' words of praise could only take them so far. What surely sank its chances was Americans and their reluctance to do promo work abroad. Had TLC done the rounds of the pop and chat shows there's no reason to think they couldn't have had a smash on their hands. To think the British move to the States even when their prospects are bleak but the Americans can barely be up for a five day visit every so often. (Luckily, The Backstreet Boys would give this approach a re-think in the next few years as they must've figured the British were ready for them while they waited out their belated US breakthrough)
When people really began talking about "alternative" music in around 1992, they were naturally focused on white indie rock as being this so-called alternative. But what if playful R&B pop of En Vogue, SWV and TLC was just as much of a rebellion against the slick types who ran afoul of black pop? Sure, hip hop was an alternative itself but much of it had become a caricature by this point. Singers like Shanice and Ce Ce Peniston either knowingly or unknowingly tapped into being R&B stars who indie kids could feel welcome listening to. (Again, male acts were not welcome into this realm to anywhere near the same degree) Forget riot grrrl and girl power, this was the real feminist musical revolution wrapped up in glossy pop form.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Sting with Eric Clapton: "It's Probably Me"
It's a brave thing to do a soft open for what will ultimately be your finest solo album with such a lame single. Is brave the word I'm looking for? Misguided? Ignorant? Pea-brained? I'm definitely getting warm. It might seem strange putting Sting, Clapton, soundtrack guy Michael Kamen and the third in the Lethal Weapon series together but the singer and movie do share at least one thing in common: they're both convinced that they're much funnier than they actually are. (Let's not even get into the problematic opinions of Clapton and star Mel Gibson which would no doubt have given them plenty of poisonous shit to talk about) The Stinger was wise to rid himself of much of this baggage going forward ensuring that while "It's Probably Me" was not exactly a highlight of Ten Summoner's Tales, neither was it quite as lousy as this version suggests it would be. Good thing the brilliant "Fields of Gold" and "Shape of My Heart" were in the works to remind everyone that it's probably Sting who can occasionally deliver the goods.
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