“Very talented”: Prince’s curious love of TLC and why he thought they highlighted the death of music
Prince loved a whole range of eclectic artists, from Björk to the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It was part of his dynamism that he could be so varied, but he perhaps had the strongest opinion of the lot on TLC.
Some may laugh at the apparent randomness of that revelation, but really, you should look at yourself and consider why that is. No one found it amusing when Prince said he liked any other manner of artists, but when it comes to girl groups and other bands of the kind, it seems that all hell breaks loose in terms of the supposed right of derision and mockery.
That’s a simple tangent on the much deeper issue of why some types of musicians are valued differently to others, but the point still remains that Prince was free to enjoy whatever kind of sonics he wanted, whether they were somewhat unexpected or not. In this sense, there was no reason why TLC shouldn’t come into fray and, in Prince’s view, even take the throne.
“TLC is a very talented group,” he declared back in a 1996 interview, clearly having enjoyed a bit of ‘No Scrubs’ and ‘Waterfalls’ along the way. Yet despite the band’s 60million records sold and status as one of the biggest American girl groups of all time, there was an essential difference between them and Prince that meant one garnered a far greater legacy than the other.
With the band having filed for bankruptcy the year before, despite their massive stream of success, it truly put into perspective what was at stake for artists in terms of sales not equating to the money going into their back pockets. For someone as deeply revolutionary and powerful as Prince, it was a state of affairs that really resonated with him.
“Talent can’t be bottled up or contained,” he said while standing up on his soapbox. “We gotta wake up to that. Why should somebody else be making $100million when they’re making $75,000? It will continue, too – that’s the sad truth.” Do you know what the even sadder thing is, though? He said those words 30 years ago, and truly, nothing has changed.
The music industry itself has remained as cutthroat as ever, but the lack of financial viability has made it nigh on impossible for even fairly successful artists to make a properly fruitful living that will last them the rest of their lives, never mind just the immediacy of the next few years. TLC famously faced the brunt of that three decades ago, but now, you’ll find examples everywhere.
Of course, it does depressingly signal the death of an industry where genuinely ingenious artists like Prince could once thrive. It’s also testament to his keenness to shine a light in the darkness that he gave a platform to TLC’s plight, as a man who recognised the gift of what they had, compared to many others who would all too easily deride them.
He was a notoriously impenetrable persona, but that example spoke volumes, more than anything else, about the type of human that Prince was, beneath the veneer of the stately artistry. He knew that girl groups like TLC were the true future: it was to the detriment of everyone else that they didn’t see the value in investing in that.
