Hello nasty

TLC delivers their Fan Mail

by Micahel Freedberg

TLC are not only good at being bad, they're great at it. They're as evil as a heart attack. They own the bad attitude that riot grrrls would like to claim but can't.

The baddest moment on TLC's chart-topping new CD, Fan Mail (LaFace), comes at the end of "I'm Good at Being Bad" when T-Boz shrieks "What'cha gonna do with a bitch like me, nigga, what? a bitch like MOI!!" with such venom you can practically feel the spit hitting your face. And you like being spat upon by her. How can you not, knowing that TLC actually live the kind of evil they spit at you?

Before Fan Mail, TLC personified homegirlism, the ghetto fab look, the schoolyard slang, the new-jill beat, and the nasty sex talk that made hits of "Ain't Too Proud To Beg," "Creep," and "What About Your Friends." They were young, they sounded young, and their lip-glossy body talk gave rise to a ton of imitators. But that phase of TLC is over, terminated by the furor about Left Eye's torching the house she and lover Andre Rison shared and by the financial mess that put the trio into bankruptcy. Now, four years after CrazySexyCool, the trio have grown up. And all the better. "We want to be universal with this record," Left Eye has said about Fan Mail.

Universal it is. The CD's arrangements run the global gamut, from Donna Summer disco ("I'm Good at Being Bad") and Jewel sweetness ("Dear Lie") to dancing harpsichord ("No Scrubs") and Dionne Warwick ("I Miss You So Much"). If "No Scrubs" looks inward to the ghetto-fab advice world of CrazySexyCool, the Diane Warren-penned "Come On Down" looks outward, to an idealized songcraft that's not about place at all. As for "Silly Ho," the CD's trickiest track, its advice to flaunting homegirls is framed not by new jill but by Japanese pop -- TLC meet Shonen Knife, sort of. Dionne Warwick's polish, Donna Summer's glow, and Shonen Knife's cuteness are hardly what a TLC fan expects of the act that back-flipped rock's tough-gal stance, so it's a bit of a shock when Chilli, Left Eye, and T-Boz move from badness to the sweet and dreamy.

Fan Mail is dedicated, as the title declares, to reclaiming the trio's huge following. It's a basic career move, yet the disc also has in mind FM listeners who don't program the kind of ghetto fab TLC epitomize. The CD establishes an entirely new, wide-ranging TLC who don't need to flaunt schoolyard slang and who scoff at fashion statements. The second cut, "The Vic-E Interpretation -- Interlude," places you in an over-21 venue, "the club, where people use material things to increase their chance of a pick-up," then segues into "Silly Ho," in which T-Boz makes it clear to guys that she's no "silly bitch, waiting to get rich . . . hangin' on someone else" and that if it's a "silly ho" that guys want, they can damn well look elsewhere. Then comes "No Scrubs," in which the trio dismiss the kind of guy who "hangs out of the passenger side of his best friend's ride trying to holler at me": guys without cars or lives of their own need not apply to the new, practical-minded TLC, who know how to earn and save a paycheck.

The message of "Silly Ho" and "No Scrubs" is familiar TLC, but not the singing. Tight harmony, sturdy and miked up close, unembellished by rhythmic wigouts, deepens the reach of Fan Mail's pop ballads. When T-Boz solos in "I'm Good at Being Bad," her husky voice, though every bit as bitchy as in earlier TLC, feels bigger and older, more mother than sister -- a confident case of attitude. But you expect a TLC song to exhibit attitude. What isn't simply a piece of fan mail is Left Eye's gently intimate lead on "I Miss You So Much," in which she states her case with a gentle directness that exemplifies the trio's new maturity. Then comes "Unpretty" -- the CD's most complex song -- in which a folk-jazzy swing melody supports Left Eye and T-Boz as they talk about prettiness and its opposite, advising their loverguys that they feel pretty not because of "all the make-up that man can make" or new hair and noses, but because of who they love, even though he, as they sing it (accompanied by some guitar rock), "can put me in a position to feel so damn unpretty." So much for make-up girl Courtney Love!

Finally, having staked out TLC's expanded musical universe, the CD relaxes, settles into a smoove groove, and coasts on the trio's delicate riff singing and soft harmonies, the lyrics' dreamy visions, and an occasionally empty feeling. From "Communicate -- Interlude," a cloud-nine cellphone talk, to the "saw myself on Ricky Lake" takedown in "Lovesick" to the cheating-lover determinism in "Automatic," TLC roll on, changing the story as one song -- and one predicament -- becomes another almost without your realizing it. The ultimate surprise in Fan Mail is that there's no surprise at all, the story of life is always the same story. Behind the razzmatazz of homegirlism, TLC seem to prove, lies inevitably the fatalism endemic to all music grounded in being from one place.