When Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas and Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins announced the Kickstarter campaign to fund their final album two years ago, many fans questioned their decision to make a new TLC record without the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who perished in a car crash in 2002. After all, the trio was one of the best-selling girl groups of all time, thriving on the chemistry of its members’ distinct personalities. Would they be as original or as interesting without Left Eye’s outspokenness, charisma or eccentricity?
Upon hearing TLC’s new, self-titled album, the answer seems to be no. What made them so cool in the ‘90s and early ‘00s was that they were saying things no other girl group — and few mainstream pop acts, really — had before. While their contemporaries were singing about broken hearts, they warned women not to waste their time on dudes who can’t take care of themselves, let alone a partner, on “Scrubs.” This was long before the terms “fuckboy” and “manchild” had entered the popular lexicon. And when tabloids viciously came after celebrities who didn’t meet the era’s stringent standards of thinness, TLC used “Unpretty” to encourage us to love ourselves in the face of this toxic mass-media messaging.
At the time, the ideas behind TLC’s songs went against the grain. But with their new album, T-Boz and Chilli fall short of the sort of spot-on, progressive observations they made twenty years ago. Instead, TLC settles for platitudes, rehashing the concepts of the group’s biggest songs in less interesting ways. “Perfect Girls” and “Haters,” for instance, focus on body image much like “Unpretty.” But sentiments like “perfect girls ain’t real” and “haters gonna hate” have been repeated ad nauseum since “Unpretty’s” release. It’s a shame TLC didn’t have much to add to the conversation 18 years later.