TLC
Now & Forever: The Hits

THE REVIEW

TLC. An acronym that indicates one of the cornerstones of the carefree mid-Nineties pop of U.S. make, the girl group symbol of the multiple facets and varied colors, costumes, and styles of a decade devoid both of a solution and a break in continuity with the previous Eighties. Well, the last spark of the second millennium has witnessed - musically speaking - contradictions, mutations, splits, and stark oppositions, introducing into the profitable mainstream world the best (and not only) of the underground. This is the decade where alternative rock soars forcefully in the charts, where the highly commercial dynamics of the music market increasingly look to creative undercurrents, and, above all, where teen bands grow like parsley. It is precisely this last phenomenon that will indelibly mark the Nineties, especially the last five years, with sassy girls, streetwise boys, and disheveled lads setting fashion trends among school desks and bedroom posters of those under twenty. However, these would represent the poppiest fringe of the music collectives, the redeemers of "plasticity" and frivolity temporarily supplanted by the various Cobains of the early '90s.

The TLC trio, composed of Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas, instead represents the Yankee prototype of Spice and Backstreet not yet infected by the hyper-adolescent fever, but at the same time radically bound to one of the cornerstone genres of the decade in question, namely hip-hop. In the era of the East-West Coast conflict, of countless 2pac and Notorious B.I.G. slain in the rogue quest for the master of ceremonies par excellence and the very first modern soul legacies, a dense array of young women began to sweeten a genre typically seen as a narrator of shootings and struggles for emancipation from the lower quarters of cities. Even though Jackson, colleagues and friends had already supported the commercial rise of so-called "black music", contaminating it with various sound sauces on the staff, the pseudo-gangsta female collectives would be even more committed to proposing the discomfort of the ghettos, making it easily accessible, radio marketable, and internationally classifiable. The recipe was simple: tossing in a cauldron hip-hop motifs, R&B hints, club improvisations, soul ballads, and tight latex dresses, proto Beyoncés and pre-Destiny's Child, terribly funky and mischievous, were created, though far from the great fashion houses like the heiress and colleagues.

But let's get back to TLC. Their rise to the mini Olympus of girl bands began in 1992 with the fairly cacophonous debut of Ooooooohhh... On The TLC Tip, produced by some of the architects of the rise of the contemporary R&B-Hip Hop trend, namely Dallas Austin, Babyface, L.A. Reid, and Jermaine Dupri (moreover, famous collaborators of people like Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson), which climbed the charts overseas and gave the first hits. With the consecration achieved with the subsequent CrazySexyCool and FanMail and with the tracks Scrubs and Unpretty that landed even in the more "electronic" European continent, the formation lost Lisa Lopes in a car accident, the most restless and troubled member, even before completing the recordings of the last 3D. The twilight album, hastily completed even without the tangible presence of the group's passionate and emotional soul, did not repeat the glories of the past - despite exceptional signatures like Pharrell Williams or Timbaland, heirs of the first true commercial arrival of the "black" wave - and put an "end" to the TLC project, lasting exactly a decade.

With the curtain lowered on the unreleased activity of the girl group, a celebratory collection was inevitable, and so it was. Now & Forever: The Hits - a rather sugary and reductive title for the trio - encapsulates in a substantial curriculum of twenty tracks the best of the sassy TLC. From the hip-hop-freestyle debut of Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg to the end-of-millennium pop-R&B anthem Scrubs, passing through the overflowing and enigmatic sensuality of Silly Ho and the relaxing Macy Gray-like funky-soul of Waterfalls, there is only the agony of choice to introduce oneself to a delightful pop chapter currently little remembered and considered. Further surveying the collection, noteworthy are soft-dance tracks like Creep and Kick Your Game, the summery and melancholic mood of Unpretty, the gangster-pop of Hat 2 Da Back, the gentle abandonment to sentimentality in Diggin' On You, and the last posthumous performances of Lisa Lopes, among which Girl Talk and Damaged stand out.

A greatest hits less negligible than one might think, an alternative to the usual pop monotony, a small dive/leap into the decade of contradictions on stage and on tabloids. In the midst of sugary-nauseating Latin hits, it takes little, even opening the doors of our virtual playlists to TLC, to detach oneself from the crowded masses under palm trees and gazebos and savor a tasty cocktail of memories, nostalgia, and immortality.