Mariah Carey recently dropped the glossy music video to her latest single “A No No“, lifted from her latest album, the critically acclaimed ‘Caution‘, and followed up the release with a brand new remix!
After months of a rumoured remix with hip-hop rappers Cardi B & Lil’ Kim (whose 1996 hit “Crush On You” is heavily sampled on the single), Mariah decided to roll with the super talented British rapper Stefflon Don!
Stefflon Don rhymes effortlessly over the classic beat in her British-Jamaican accent, even dropping a shout out to the legendary Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes!
“I ain’t with the “he say, she say” / get the strap out / Bloodclart dem a try / Burn down your house like Lisa “Left Eye” / Ain’t no nigga left, aye / It’s plain and simple, they addicted to me”, Stefflon Don raps on the track.
Producer Jermaine Dupri claims he sent Lil’ Kim the track after she reached out to him to be included on the remix. However, the final decision lay in the hands of Epic Records.
Let us know what you think of this Stefflon Don-laced version of this Mariah hit!
Oakland’s finest singer-songwriter Kehlani decided to break her musical silence last week, Feb 22, dropping her mixtape, ‘While We Wait‘, to tide us over whilst she puts the finishing touches to her second LP!
One of the stand-out cuts on the project is the 90’s-styled ‘Morning Glory‘, which wouldn’t sound out of place on a TLC album. In fact, Kehlani even included a rap and sounds very similar to an early Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes!
Out reviewed the track as “Kehlani’s most relatable song to date, about a man needing to be prepared to see his woman stripped bare at bedtime if he wants to see her looking all fresh in the morning.”
“I wanna take my wig off / I wanna lay it on the nightstand / I wanna take my makeup off / I wanna rip these nails off my hands.” Ladies, who among us cannot say the same? “Don’t need acrylics on the clock to hit the nail on the head / Don’t need my inches down my back to throw it back in the bed.”
Fans were quick to point out the Left Eye similarities on social media:
My mom swears that's a sample of Left Eye on Kehlani's song Morning Glory. She was really channeling TLC on that track. #WhileWeWait
However, Kehlani received the biggest compliment from Left Eye’s very own sister, Reigndrop Lopes!
“Left Eye’s sister just told me “Lisa would’ve loved you as an artist”, she tweeted to her 865k followers on Twitter. “yeah i’m finna go cry to Morning Glory, toodles”.
If ‘While We Wait’ truly acts as a teaser of what to expect on her second full studio album, due for release later this year, we cannot wait to hear it!
Head over to Kehlani’s official site WhileWeWait.com for more info on the project.
In 1998, songwriter Kandi Burruss — on hiatus from her R&B group, Xscape — took a drive around Atlanta with a girlfriend, looking for inspiration. In the car, Burruss was playing tracks she’d gotten from a fellow songwriter, Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs, a few days earlier.
“No lyrics, no melody, just the music,” Burruss says. “I always like to listen to tracks in my car because I come up with my best ideas when I’m driving.”
As Burruss tells it, she and her friend were also trash-talking the guys they were dating at the time. “So I started freestylin’ over the track,” she says. “And I was just like, ‘A scrub is a guy who thinks he’s fly, and is also known as a busta / Always talking about what he wants, and just sits on his fat ass.’ “
She knew she had something there. For a title, she remembered something she’d scribbled in her songwriting notebook. The phrase “No Scrubs” came from a term popular in Atlanta at the time, slang for a guy with no purpose, no prospects, no couth.
Burruss took her idea to fellow Xscape member Tameka “Tiny” Cottle, who loved the freestyle. Together, they quickly fleshed out the entire song and recorded a demo, thinking they’d keep it for their own upcoming joint project. But once the demo was passed to a few other industry figures, the two were persuaded to sell the song to a bigger group — who would end up running with it.
TLC, also from Atlanta, already had its own formula for success. Early hits like “Creep,” “Waterfalls” and “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” cultivated an image of being socially aware, and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes were known as bold, confident, independent young women. So when “No Scrubs” landed in their court, a few words were changed to suit that image and make the song their own. (Among them, “fat ass” became “broke ass,” making clear the group’s problem was with men who lacked not just coin, but ambition.)
“No Scrubs” was released Feb. 2, 1999, as the lead single of TLC’s third studio album, FanMail. The track locked up the No. 1 position on Billboard’s Hot 100 for four weeks and stayed on the chart for months. Chilli Thomas says she knew it would be a hit the first time she heard it, because even though the term was regional, the idea was universal. “A scrub is just a bum guy, you know?” she says. “You don’t want to bring him home.”
At the time TLC hadn’t dropped an album in over four years, but two things helped “No Scrubs” take off commercially. For one, it was bolstered by a dope, futuristic video helmed by director Hype Williams. The visual found the trio in a cruising spaceship and each lady, decked out in a swishy space suit, got the chance to show her individual personality. Chilli remembers the challenges of that now-iconic shoot, in which she performed her verses on a giant swinging platform.
“I was looking at it and it’s ginormous — I’m like, ‘Who’s supposed to get on the swing?’ ” Chilli says. “I was so intimidated, but eventually, I did it. I mean, I got on there and I got comfortable, and then I got realcomfortable.” The video would earn TLC a MTV Video Music Award for best group video, beating out the all-male competition in a category that included both ‘NSync and the Backstreet Boys at their height.
Second, LaFace Records was smart about marketing the single. “No Scrubs” was released in two versions, one with Left Eye’s rap verse and one without. This strategy ensured the song would get airplay on a variety of radio stations, regardless of format.
While some of the most popular late ’90s hip-hop and R&B tracks were saturated with misogyny and damsel-in-distress plotlines, Burruss says, “No Scrubs” helped flip the script. “This song almost made it to where guys felt they couldn’t ride to an event together anymore,” she remembers.
And men weren’t just stopping short of carpooling to the club. “No Scrubs” was a wake-up call for guys like Sean Armstrong, aka DJ Face of the radio station Majic 102.3. He remembers hearing the song for the first time at a Baltimore record store and spinning it at D.C.-area clubs when it first came out.
“Guys started checking themselves, like, ‘Am I a scrub?,’ ” Face remembers. “You had to really think: ‘I don’t really lean out the window, you know, hollerin’ at women. I have my own car. I got a job. I’m not a scrub.’ Like, you had to take yourself off the list.”
Chilli says it’s not guys like DJ Face who have to worry. “I always say, the guys getting upset are the scrubs. If you’re not a scrub, then … a hit dog will holler, right?” she laughs. “So, if that’s not who you are, then you shouldn’t be getting upset.”
The feathers of Yonkers, N.Y. rap group Sporty Thievz were so ruffled, the trio released its own response track, “No Pigeons,” in May 1999, a month after “No Scrubs” hit No. 1. But even if some perceived “No Pigeons” as a diss to the song’s originators, it used the same melody as “No Scrubs” — so Burruss, Briggs and Cottle still got paid.
“That was a check,” Burruss says. “I thought it was clever. I love the fact that they flipped the song and gave the male point of view. And plus, we ended up getting all the royalties from it.”
In the two decades since the song was released, it’s never really gone away. In 2017, Ed Sheeran added the songwriters of “No Scrubs” to the credits of his own No. 1 hit, “Shape of You,” after some drew comparisonsbetween the two songs’ melodies. And it’s inspired covers across all genres. British R&B singer Jorja Smith keeps her version stripped down, while country star Kacey Musgraves adds a bit of twang. In January, the four men of Weezer released a rock cover, with all gender pronouns left intact.
But at the end of the day, the original is still popular. On Spotify, “No Scrubs” has over 300 million streams to date. NPR intern Sophie Fouladi was born in the early 2000s and says the song was a hit at her junior prom in Northern Virginia just last spring.
“I thought it was really interesting that a throwback song was something that got everyone really excited,” Fouladi says. “There was just screams of recognition from a bunch of girls, and they were pulling each other to the dance floor. These are people who were born after the song was released.”
Chilli says she recognized the power of “No Scrubs” back when TLC first recorded it, and she’s proud of its legacy. “I feel really happy because I know that — even though you can jam to it, you dance to it — lyrically, I know that the girls are listening, you know? And the guys are, too,” she says.
Kandi Burruss agrees. “As women, we go through things every day, all day,” she says. “No matter where we go, somebody is gonna try to push up or try to holler at you, and they’re not always a gentleman about it. So I feel like this song put it out there … and it just made women be a little bit more outspoken.”
On Thursday, Weezer followed up the surprising success of their 2018 cover of Toto’s persistent hit “Africa” with The Teal Album, a collection of 10 faithful covers by the rock band ranging from Black Sabbath (“Paranoid”) to Michael Jackson (“Billie Jean”). The most surprising — and immediate fan favorite — has been the group’s take on TLC’s 1999 megahit “No Scrubs.” Speaking to Rolling Stone, TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas co-signed the ebullient cover.
“When I heard it, I loved it! They did a great job,” Chilli tells Rolling Stone. She hadn’t heard about Weezer’s plans to cover the track until the album dropped and has witnessed a “flood” of opinions from her trio’s fans. “I hope we can perform it together.”
Prior to hearing the fuzzy, alt-rock take on the Fanmail single, Chilli has not exactly followed Weezer. She was as surprised as anyone by the group’s choice to tackle the R&B track amidst mostly classic rock reinterpretations.
“I’m definitely familiar with the group,” she adds, though she laughs off the possibility of TLC ever swapping positions with Weezer and covering one of their songs. “I totally get why any girl would do it, but when guys do it I go, ‘Clearly, they’re not scrubs.’ If they were scrubs, they wouldn’t sing the song with this type of confidence,” she adds. It reflects a similar sentiment to singer Rivers Cuomo’s own explanation for how the band chose to approach the song in the album breakdown on Apple Music.
“I just thought it was one of those songs that’s freakishly popular,” he said. “I was trying to decide which gender perspective to sing it from, then I saw this tweet that said, ‘If you’re a guy covering a song by a girl, you gotta keep the pronouns. For those three minutes, you’re gay.’ So I was like, ‘Cool, let’s try this.’”
She also expressed admiration for the group’s tenacity when it came to singing a Jackson hit like “Billie Jean” for the album. “You gotta be pretty brave to do any of his songs, no matter who you are,” she says, jokingly referring to the late pop star as “the only husband I’ve ever had.”
Prior to Weezer’s cover, Chilli has appreciated Bette Midler’s “Waterfalls” as well as any time Hanson has tackled the girl group’s discography. She’s honored that new life continues to be breathed into all of their music.
“It feels really good because when you’re in the studio working, you hope and pray that you make songs that have longevity. And we have, so that’s a blessing. I’m telling you, I wanna reach out to [Weezer] and try to make this performance happen!”
Leon@TLCArmy
