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Survivors
TLC and Missy Elliott
BY CARLY CARIOLI

It so happened that Missy Elliott’s new album, Under Construction (Elektra), was released the same week as the new TLC album, 3D (Arista), and when they went head to head on the charts, the album with the more touching tribute to TLC’s late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes won out. It’s tough to say which is more surprising: that the song in question ended up on Missy’s album, or that the biggest-selling girl group of all time debuted outside the Top Five. This may or may not be a sign that the R&B girl-group boom is headed for the same bust that greeted the last round of whitebread boy bands. But it’s definitely a sign that when Missy and TLC decided to trade tracks — she produced a song called "Dirty Dirty" on 3D while T-Boz and Chilli make an appearance at the end of Under Construction, on a requiem for dead friends entitled "Can You Hear Me" — TLC got the short end of the stick.

TLC’s 3D is a showcase for contemporary black-pop hitmaking at its finest, but the album was designed, by the group’s own pre-release accounts, to be "less futuristic" than their 1999 blockbuster, Fanmail (Arista), and it is. This is something of a disappointment, though it’s the kind of disappointment that goes down smooth: you feel what Fritz Lang aficionados must have felt when they heard, after Metropolis, that he would next make a spy picture. Fritz got wise and soon after returned to futurism for Man on the Moon; but with Left Eye gone, the prospects for TLC’s puncturing the stratosphere seem bleaker. There was never any question who the crazy one was, just as there was no question as to whether T-Boz and Chilli would continue the franchise. What they have without her is a surfeit of sexy, an avalanche of cool. These qualities are essential to the kind of music TLC make, to their multi-tracked, steel-belted, wall-of-sound harmonies and their outlandishly raunchy harangues of guyville. Their latest album suffers not from a lack of hooks or singles or pleasurable tongue lashings; its only problem is that it refuses to suffer at all, even from its own lack of imagination.

Public anguish is simply not in TLC’s repertoire, and on 3D the surviving pair exhibit a Teflon constitution to match their music’s sleek, frictionless glide. Trouble, even garden-variety heartbreak, is almost absent. (On the Babyface-produced "Hands Up," a woman wanders into a disco and finds her man three-deep in hoochies; but as Destiny’s Child argued on "Jumpin’, Jumpin’," that’s just the politics of dancing.) On the album’s prettiest ballad, "Turntable," T-Boz and Chilli admit to recognizing "that the world is troubled," but they decline to elaborate, and in their singing, which is as airtight and weightless as the colors of a rainbow, you can hear the troubles of the world begin to slide away, like bills peeled off a bankroll for the doorman of the next club you’re hitting.

Producer Dallas Austin has been TLC’s sonic architect from the beginning, and he’s always kept them one step ahead of the R&B pack — in the case of Fanmail, which has sold nearly 10 million copies, several steps ahead. He was responsible for that disc’s most futuristic track — "Silly Ho," which turned IDM’s avant-garde click-track symphonies into playground-taunting cybernetic bounce, a full year before Madonna introduced slipped-disc glitch pop to the world with "Don’t Tell Me" — as well as for its more conventional but equally monstrous ballad, "Unpretty." On 3D, he is limited to a handful of tracks — including, once again, a stupendous crossover ballad ("Damaged") and the disc’s most pulverizing dance number ("3D") — and you get the sense that the only way to ensure TLC made something less futuristic was to keep him on a short leash. In lieu of futurism he offers up heightened tactile gratification, a deepening of valleys and sharpening of peaks that makes the present feel more compelling. On the opening title track, which he wrote outright, the ladies come barging in with a tense melody over a jackknifing drum ’n’ bass wallop and a slippery synth lick: think banana peels over Baghdad. And even if the lyrical inspiration for "Quickie" — "He came/And then he went/Right to sleep on me" — comes directly from Missy’s "One Minute Man," its crinkled stabs of sampled acoustic guitar and lurching stumble step of a rhythm are all about providing tangible satisfaction.

Sexual incompetence is also the subject of 3D’s first single, "Girl Talk": "If you gonna come, you better come wit it/If you ain’t swingin’, just put your tongue in it." As a disdainful rebuke to manhood, it’s a dirtier but less clever sequel to Fainmail’s calling-card single, "No Scrubs." (It was written by "No Scrubs" co-author and former Xscape member Kandi Burruss, in tandem with the brother-and-sister team of Eddie "Hustle" Clement and Anita McCloud, the producer and songwriter responsible for Usher’s Grammy-winning "U Remind Me.")

But what seemed to make "No Scrubs" work, and what’s lacking from "Girl Talk," is the tension between the formal, conservatory-proper structure of the melody and the lyrics’ devastatingly colloquial rebuff. "Girl Talk," with its lascivious gutter-funk licks and trunk-buckling bass, is merely state-of-the-art trash talk. It’s an attitude in search of an identity. Black-pop superproducer Rodney Jerkins’s "Over Me" amounts to a sly rewrite of DC’s "Bootylicious" with a slimmer electro makeover and a glossier vocal hook. Elsewhere, the Jerkins-penned "Hey Hey Hey Hey" mimics the queasy neuroses of the Neptunes’ N.E.R.D. alter ego, and the Neptunes’ own contribution, "In Your Arms Tonight," amounts to their most explicit Prince homage yet, with a disorienting seesawing Purple Rain–era synth line over Pharrell Williams’s latest signature beat, the shotgun-blast staccato from Clipse’s "Grindin’." Leftovers, anyone?

Not to fear: Austin and Jerkins have a couple of aces in the hole. After Fanmail, Austin went on to refine the pop-to-rock crossover concept of "Unpretty" on Pink’s Missundaztood — he wrote that disc’s most rocking single, "Don’t Let Me Get Me," as well as the Alanis-esque "Just like a Pill" and "18 Wheeler." And the successor to "Unpretty" on 3D, an Austin-penned ballad called "Damaged," is even better. It’s backed by what sounds like a live band with electric guitars, ragged power chords, and a cascading rock chorus — with only minor cosmetic changes, it could’ve been the next Avril Lavigne single. And Jerkins, a classically trained pianist and minister’s son, was born to write tunes like "Turntable," which flexes Madonna-style glitch-folk guitars into a harpsichord-like sonata. Pegged as the disc’s tribute to Left Eye, it’s worded amorphously enough to pass at soft-rock stations as a middle-of-the-road inspirational homily, and its jarring CD-skip dropouts are just edgy enough to endear it to lovelorn club rats.

Left Eye, who died in a car crash in Honduras well before the disc’s completion, gets a songwriting credit on four of the album’s 13 tracks. She was TLC’s hip-hop heart, and her raps — one of the elements that distinguished the group from their less substantial R&B competitors — appear snagged on hooks throughout the album, like snatches of a missing girl’s sweater left behind on branches in a dark and brambled wood. Her most conspicuous appearance on 3D, on "Quickie," appears to have been cribbed from the sessions for her Euro-only solo album Supernova. "I’m that imperial bitch," she bellows, with an authority that the rest of the album could use more of. Unlike Destiny’s Child, the TLC women never made it to the movies, and what they need now more than ever is a little personality.

With her impish fashion agendas and Alan Iverson–like bad-girl intensity, Lopes was the group’s most charismatic member. (She is probably best known for torching boyfriend Andre Rison’s mansion after a lover’s quarrel.) She left no instructions on how TLC should continue without her, but she left something almost as good: how to do something called the "Left Pimp Dance." The flipside to Left Eye’s authority was her willingness to undercut it for a laugh, and on "Quickie," in a squeaky, nasal parody of her own voice, she reminds us how it’s done: "You’re gonna put your left foot in front," she drawls, "lean way to the left . . . " — and that’s as far as she gets, maybe because the laws of gravity dictate that at this point anyone trying to do the Left Pimp Dance would be lying on the floor in a heap.

"WHAT HAPPENED to those good old days/When hip-hop was so much fun?" sings Missy Elliott on "Back in the Day," a duet with Jay-Z on Under Construction. The album is her attempt at an answer: hip-hop in 2003 will be as old as rock and roll was in 1978, and in danger of losing its spontaneity. Missy, as the microphone fiends of an earlier generation might have put it, is fresh, wild, fly, and bold, and in her singles — from "The Rain," on her Supa Dupa Fly debut (Elektra), through last year’s "Get Ur Freak On," by common estimation the best and most surprising song of the year in any genre — you hear a manic, irrepressible goofball with a freestyle soul and a circus-trick mind. Under Construction is studded with references to the old school: LL’s bells, Rock Master Scott’s "Request Line," an entire song devoted to replicating the cadences of Roxanne Shanté’s "Roxanne’s Revenge." The disc begins and concludes as a elegy — for Left Eye, for Aaliyah (with whom Missy once wrote a song called "Best Friends"), for Big Pun and Biggie and Tupac and by extension to hip-hop’s lost innocence. But in between, her heavy heart gives way to her lighter body — she’s trimmed her waistline and her bass lines and is of a mind to show off her new-found sexual confidence. "Work It," the disc’s successor to "Get Ur Freak On," may be the first time a woman has talked about shaving her vagina on the radio. Her long-time creative partner, Timbaland, fastens the 1982 robo-electro adapter onto his trademark subliminal twitch — his beats, like the Neptunes’, make a virtue of not beating — while Missy disregards the most basic rule of the rap game: that one word must follow the next. Thanks to a bit of tape trickery, the song’s vocal hook consists of her rhyming backward. Words, in her songs, are not so important as the sounds they make; she delights in the raw, corporeal flesh and bones of language: "Love the way my ass go baw-bawm-ba-bum-bump/Keep ya eyes on my baw-bawm-ba-bawm-bump/You think you can handle this ga-dunk-a-donk-donk/Take my thong off and my ass go whoom/Cut the lights on so you see what I could do." It’s Missy at her best, a lyrical escape artist backing herself into a corner and then vanishing down some hidden trapdoor, a figure of speech enjoining her peers to stop making sense.

Issue Date: November 28 - December 5, 2002
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