ARTIST

TLC

Somewhere between Public Service Announcements and your lovable, bratty, kid sister lies TLC, as pre-fab as New Kids On The Block and as sassy as a Riot Grrl band. Throughout the '90s, (Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas) successfully engineered a public transformation from hyperactive teens to smooth starlets.

TLC first hit the pop radar in 1991. Buoyed by an energetic video and rap-along hit ("Ain't Too Proud To Beg"), the album was a bonafide hit, selling 2 million records. At this point, the group might have reasonably faded away like so many other one-hit wonders of the era, having worked its image/gimmick to death. But no: The follow-up was a long time in the making three years) and the girls underwent a complete image makeover into the "Crazysexycool" young women that the second album proclaimed them to be. A massive, top-notch marketing campaign, expensive videos(including one by glossmeister Matthew Rolston), and a genuinely good, Babyface-produced record paid off, to the tune of over 5 million records sold.

As opposed to the debut album, Crazysexycool had barely any rapping on it, which could be interpreted partially as a change in tone (to a more mature R&B sound). It also may have been due to the fact that a high-profile court case was taking up the time(and leaving uncertain the future) of TLC's cartoon-voiced rapper, Lisa Lopes. In a spat with her boyfriend, former Atlanta Falcons receiver Andre Rison, the perkily cute Lopes set fire to his $861,000 mansion and reportedly smashed a couple of cars parked nearby. Although the couple reconciled almost immediately, the courts were a little more unforgiving: Lopes was sentenced to five years' probation and a stint in rehab for drinking and was also fined $10,000.

This aside, the three talented (and still very young) women continued their R&B-oriented success with Fanmail, which was just as huge as its predecessor, racking up multiple Grammys and yielding hit singles like the man-bashing anthem "No Scrubs" and the surprisingly touching "Unpretty." The trio seemed likely to have many more years of success ahead of them, but then tragedy struck when Lopes died on April 25, 2002, after sustaining severe head trauma in an SUV accident while on vacation in the Honduras. To the surprise of many, Lopes's surviving bandmates chose to continue on as a duo, releasing 3D in November 2002.

Written by Joy Ray