Refresh: The Lonely Futurism of TLC's FanMail (article)
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Refresh: The Lonely Futurism of TLC's FanMail
On the hauntingly prescient sounds of TLC's 1999 album FanMail, and how they mirror the disconnection felt in pop music-- as well as everyday life-- today.
By Lindsay Zoladz , May 4, 2012
A quiz: Is the following a quote from Drake's blog or something an android said in 1999?
"Communication is the key to life. Communication is the key to love. Communication is the key to us. There's over a thousand ways to communicate in our world today. And it's a shame that we don't connect. So if you also feel the need for us to come together, will you communicate with me?"
OK, it's sort of a trick question-- only a small part of it is uttered by an android. The rest is spoken by the very human members of TLC, on an interlude toward the end of their third proper album, 1999's FanMail.
TLC have been on the tips of a lot of tongues lately. Part of this has to do with last week's 10th anniversary of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes' death at age 30, not to mention the jarring announcement that the surviving members were planning to tour with a Left Eye projection. But even before last week, the sounds of TLC have been hovering in the ether: Grimes cited the group as a major influence on her album Visions; Nite Jewel called them one of her favorite bands; and all across the indiesphere, a rapidly proliferating group of DIY pop acts like How to Dress Well, Purity Ring, Maria Minerva, and U.S. Girls have paid homage to the 90s R&B sound of which TLC-- still the best-selling American female group in history-- were the undisputed queens. "You can't really help it," says Aluna Francis, 90s child and the singer of UK pop upstarts AlunaGeorge, "[This music] was so ingrained in me that our music ended up sounding quite R&B without meaning to."
When most people think TLC, their brains immediately go to the sounds and images of their 1994 R&B classic CrazySexyCool: "Waterfalls", silk pajamas, "Red Light Special". But, perhaps because I still have a very vivid memory of buying it in a New Jersey mall, my thumb obscuring the Parental Advisory sticker so my mom wouldn't see it, the TLC album I've found myself returning to the most in recent years is FanMail.
It was not the group's greatest success (coming off CrazySexyCool, the first-ever diamond-selling album by a female group, six million units in the U.S. is good-not-great), though FanMail did spawn the mega-hit "No Scrubs", the #1 single "Unpretty", and earned two Grammys. But this record doesn't seem as ingrained in the collective cultural memory of TLC. Maybe because it's something of an inconsistent hodgepodge, or because certain elements of its futuristic aesthetic have not aged particularly well. But when we talk about TLC's current influence on a whole crop of web-minded, Tumblr-savvy, android-obsessed artists, we don't seem to realize how much we're talking about FanMail-- a record that, almost a decade and a half after its release, still sounds hauntingly prescient, like a transmission from the future.
FanMail was one of the first pop records to aestheticize the internet.
In the years between CrazySexyCool and FanMail, the TLC story got tumultuous. Lopes burned down her boyfriend Andre Rison's house and went to rehab, the group declared bankruptcy at the height of their success thanks to a profoundly ? recording contract, and internal tensions became almost unbearable. Plenty of other things were going on between 1994 and 1999, behind bedroom doors and in front of flickering screens. Over that five-year span, I added a computer, email address, and an AIM screen name to my life, and by 1999 these things had begun to feel intricately interlaced with my personal identity.
Considering CrazySexyCool and FanMail back-to-back, you can hear these cultural changes take place. A skittish, glitchy album full of distractions, interruptions, and ruptures in consciousness, FanMail was one of the very first pop records to aestheticize the internet. And, like most first times, it was not without awkwardness. Its cover is swathed in not-so-subtle binary code accents and features virtual reality avatar portraits of the ladies. Its beats are gilded with the aged chirps of dial-up connections, and then there's the whole conceit of Vic-E (pronounced "Vicki"), the record's recurring android character who narrates interludes and-- in her shining moment-- raps an entire verse on the track "Silly ? ": "You know you can't get with this…/ Stuck on silly ? / Boy you know you need to quit." On its surface, FanMail screams "Y2K."
But if you can get past that, the album grapples with something much deeper that reverberates throughout a lot of pop music today. Although the way the group's delight in singing about email, cyberspace, and "the future of music" captures a sense of emergent-technology wonder that's always a little embarrassing in hindsight, FanMail is not nearly as interested in what's gained by technology as it is elegiac about what's lost in this new way we connect.
And no song on the album captures that as masterfully as the title track. "Welcome, we have dedicated our entire album to any person who ever sent us fanmail," Vic-E drones over the song's intro, "TLC would like to thank you for your support. But just like you..."-- and here the human voices join in-- "... they get lonely too." If you unfold the booklet accompanying the FanMail CD, you'll see a poster listing the names of thousands of people who had sent the group fan letters, and in the foreground there's a large image of T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli made up to look like computer-generated androids themselves, steely and stoic.
As if to say, "this is your brain on the internet," the atmosphere of "FanMail" teems with disembodied voices and interruptions (shouts of "fanmail!" and "the letters!" nag like a backlog of unanswered messages), while T-Boz's gravely alto lays out the verses: "I got an email today/ I kinda thought that you forgot about me/ So I wanna hit you back to say/ Just like you, I get lonely too."
When the song came out, plenty of listeners probably thought it was about cybersex (another one of those quaint Y2K words), but it doesn't sound that simple today. At first, it seems odd to combine the whole theme of fan letters with a lyrical address that feels so privately seductive-- but isn't that also the crux of Drake's similarly unconsummated "Marvin's Room", when the rapper confesses into a receiver that he's "having a hard time adjusting to fame"? "FanMail" is all about the bizarre feeling of being inundated with messages and superficial attempts at connection-- and somehow feeling even more isolated because of it. Libidinous yet unremittingly anxious, the track articulates a whole new kind of longing: the loneliness of constant connectedness, and how the more time we spend in the digital world, the more we fetishize the real. "Every day I think I'm gonna meet ya," T-Boz confesses as the track escalates towards an abrupt anti-? , "Can't wait til the day I see ya." It's no shock that when Drake covered a TLC song in 2010, he chose "FanMail."
We are now used to art that poeticizes these sorts of feelings, whether it's Drake's Take Care, or the pathetically relatable final scene in David Fincher's The Social Network in which the protagonist is left alone, waiting for his ex to accept his friend request, or the particularly great moment at the end of the third episode of "Girls", where we watch Lena Dunham's character Hannah brighten her mood by deleting a solipsistic tweet and replacing it with a slyly optimistic one, inspired by Robyn's "Dancing on My Own".
On the hauntingly prescient sounds of TLC's 1999 album FanMail, and how they mirror the disconnection felt in pop music-- as well as everyday life-- today.
By Lindsay Zoladz , May 4, 2012
A quiz: Is the following a quote from Drake's blog or something an android said in 1999?
"Communication is the key to life. Communication is the key to love. Communication is the key to us. There's over a thousand ways to communicate in our world today. And it's a shame that we don't connect. So if you also feel the need for us to come together, will you communicate with me?"
OK, it's sort of a trick question-- only a small part of it is uttered by an android. The rest is spoken by the very human members of TLC, on an interlude toward the end of their third proper album, 1999's FanMail.
TLC have been on the tips of a lot of tongues lately. Part of this has to do with last week's 10th anniversary of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes' death at age 30, not to mention the jarring announcement that the surviving members were planning to tour with a Left Eye projection. But even before last week, the sounds of TLC have been hovering in the ether: Grimes cited the group as a major influence on her album Visions; Nite Jewel called them one of her favorite bands; and all across the indiesphere, a rapidly proliferating group of DIY pop acts like How to Dress Well, Purity Ring, Maria Minerva, and U.S. Girls have paid homage to the 90s R&B sound of which TLC-- still the best-selling American female group in history-- were the undisputed queens. "You can't really help it," says Aluna Francis, 90s child and the singer of UK pop upstarts AlunaGeorge, "[This music] was so ingrained in me that our music ended up sounding quite R&B without meaning to."
When most people think TLC, their brains immediately go to the sounds and images of their 1994 R&B classic CrazySexyCool: "Waterfalls", silk pajamas, "Red Light Special". But, perhaps because I still have a very vivid memory of buying it in a New Jersey mall, my thumb obscuring the Parental Advisory sticker so my mom wouldn't see it, the TLC album I've found myself returning to the most in recent years is FanMail.
It was not the group's greatest success (coming off CrazySexyCool, the first-ever diamond-selling album by a female group, six million units in the U.S. is good-not-great), though FanMail did spawn the mega-hit "No Scrubs", the #1 single "Unpretty", and earned two Grammys. But this record doesn't seem as ingrained in the collective cultural memory of TLC. Maybe because it's something of an inconsistent hodgepodge, or because certain elements of its futuristic aesthetic have not aged particularly well. But when we talk about TLC's current influence on a whole crop of web-minded, Tumblr-savvy, android-obsessed artists, we don't seem to realize how much we're talking about FanMail-- a record that, almost a decade and a half after its release, still sounds hauntingly prescient, like a transmission from the future.
FanMail was one of the first pop records to aestheticize the internet.
In the years between CrazySexyCool and FanMail, the TLC story got tumultuous. Lopes burned down her boyfriend Andre Rison's house and went to rehab, the group declared bankruptcy at the height of their success thanks to a profoundly ? recording contract, and internal tensions became almost unbearable. Plenty of other things were going on between 1994 and 1999, behind bedroom doors and in front of flickering screens. Over that five-year span, I added a computer, email address, and an AIM screen name to my life, and by 1999 these things had begun to feel intricately interlaced with my personal identity.
Considering CrazySexyCool and FanMail back-to-back, you can hear these cultural changes take place. A skittish, glitchy album full of distractions, interruptions, and ruptures in consciousness, FanMail was one of the very first pop records to aestheticize the internet. And, like most first times, it was not without awkwardness. Its cover is swathed in not-so-subtle binary code accents and features virtual reality avatar portraits of the ladies. Its beats are gilded with the aged chirps of dial-up connections, and then there's the whole conceit of Vic-E (pronounced "Vicki"), the record's recurring android character who narrates interludes and-- in her shining moment-- raps an entire verse on the track "Silly ? ": "You know you can't get with this…/ Stuck on silly ? / Boy you know you need to quit." On its surface, FanMail screams "Y2K."
But if you can get past that, the album grapples with something much deeper that reverberates throughout a lot of pop music today. Although the way the group's delight in singing about email, cyberspace, and "the future of music" captures a sense of emergent-technology wonder that's always a little embarrassing in hindsight, FanMail is not nearly as interested in what's gained by technology as it is elegiac about what's lost in this new way we connect.
And no song on the album captures that as masterfully as the title track. "Welcome, we have dedicated our entire album to any person who ever sent us fanmail," Vic-E drones over the song's intro, "TLC would like to thank you for your support. But just like you..."-- and here the human voices join in-- "... they get lonely too." If you unfold the booklet accompanying the FanMail CD, you'll see a poster listing the names of thousands of people who had sent the group fan letters, and in the foreground there's a large image of T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli made up to look like computer-generated androids themselves, steely and stoic.
As if to say, "this is your brain on the internet," the atmosphere of "FanMail" teems with disembodied voices and interruptions (shouts of "fanmail!" and "the letters!" nag like a backlog of unanswered messages), while T-Boz's gravely alto lays out the verses: "I got an email today/ I kinda thought that you forgot about me/ So I wanna hit you back to say/ Just like you, I get lonely too."
When the song came out, plenty of listeners probably thought it was about cybersex (another one of those quaint Y2K words), but it doesn't sound that simple today. At first, it seems odd to combine the whole theme of fan letters with a lyrical address that feels so privately seductive-- but isn't that also the crux of Drake's similarly unconsummated "Marvin's Room", when the rapper confesses into a receiver that he's "having a hard time adjusting to fame"? "FanMail" is all about the bizarre feeling of being inundated with messages and superficial attempts at connection-- and somehow feeling even more isolated because of it. Libidinous yet unremittingly anxious, the track articulates a whole new kind of longing: the loneliness of constant connectedness, and how the more time we spend in the digital world, the more we fetishize the real. "Every day I think I'm gonna meet ya," T-Boz confesses as the track escalates towards an abrupt anti-? , "Can't wait til the day I see ya." It's no shock that when Drake covered a TLC song in 2010, he chose "FanMail."
We are now used to art that poeticizes these sorts of feelings, whether it's Drake's Take Care, or the pathetically relatable final scene in David Fincher's The Social Network in which the protagonist is left alone, waiting for his ex to accept his friend request, or the particularly great moment at the end of the third episode of "Girls", where we watch Lena Dunham's character Hannah brighten her mood by deleting a solipsistic tweet and replacing it with a slyly optimistic one, inspired by Robyn's "Dancing on My Own".
Comments
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"FanMail" instantly became my favorite TLC song when I heard it-- and it still is today-- because it honored the things I was feeling. It was the first song to make me think that digital existence wasn't trivial and dumb, but something out of which tragedy and poetry could spring-- that it was valid to make art out of these feelings, and that maybe other people were feeling them too.
In 1999, I spent some time in front of a computer teaching myself HTML and Photoshop, and I would visit strangers' personal websites to get ideas for new designs. These were the days when most websites had hit counters to measure their traffic, and I have a distinct memory from around this time of stumbling upon a site that promised to post the name of their 100,000th visitor. The counter was only about 50 hits shy, and somehow there was something exciting to me about acquiring this bit of micro-fame. So I refreshed. And refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. And then the counter said 100,000 and I took a screenshot of it and emailed it with my name to the person who ran the site. I had achieved what I'd set out to achieve. So why didn't it feel that way?
Fame now feels that much more attainable, but the catch is that
we finally get to know all about that alone-in-a-crowded-room feeling that famous people have been singing about for years.
In the 10 years since Left Eye's death, we all got to be a little famous. The idea of "FanMail"-- even the very word-- feels quaint and outdated. The channels have opened up so that we all send it and-- more importantly-- receive it on a daily basis in some form, be it retweets or reblogs or likes. The fact that I took a screenshot of a hit counter just so I could see my name on someone's website is now deeply embarrassing to me, because how can you even imagine a time when it was a thrilling novelty to see your name on the internet? One thing that even the all-knowing Vic-E could not predict is the democratization of celebrity. Which means fame now feels that much more attainable, but the catch is that we finally get to know all about that alone-in-a-crowded-room feeling that famous people have been singing about for years.
I have a Word document where I keep snippets of new technology-related phenomena that are unsettling in one way or another (which sounds like an idea I got from Tumblr but is actually based on the section of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook that's composed entirely of newspaper clippings the protagonist has collected about communism and nuclear war). Recent additions include quotes from an article about Twitter death hoaxes, a few lines from a year-and-a-half old New York Times Magazine story about what happens to your social media profiles after you die, a screenshot of a friend's status chastising a guy (a 21st century scrub?) for avoiding relationship drama by faking his own death on Facebook, a link to a tribute honoring the music of Left Eye with an embedded video of the handheld footage leading up to the seconds her car crashed, an image of Hologram Tupac (and a link to a comments section in which a man who professes to be a scientist explains that it's not technically a hologram when you get right down to it), a joke about "Ghost Coachella 2013", and every news item I can find about the Left Eye Hologram Reunion Tour. The point of which is to say that, in 1999, I did not yet know how I felt about rapping androids or the future of music or a lot of the other ideas that FanMail kicked up, but I knew I felt something.
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8827-tlc/ -
Very interesting read. Thanks!
