Mademoiselle Magazine (2000)

OFF INTERVIEW Facts - This was TLC's last photo shoot together as a trio, after 'The Challenge', and Lisa not thanking Tionne and Chilli at the 2000 Soul Train Awards when Lisa was accepting their trophies. According to Kyle Young in the press, he stated though Lisa and Tionne were passed it at that point, Chilli wasn't. Chilli admitted in 'Life in 3D' in 2002 she was still mad at Lisa during this shoot, so mad at her that she didn't want Lisa touching her.

Mademoiselle Magazine, July 2000 Issue Photographed by Mark Liddell

Everybody Wants TLC

The #1-selling girl group of all time talk about their future - together and apart

Jeanie Pyun

CHILLI IS WRINGGLING WITH DELIGHT. WE'RE IN AN ATLANTA

studio with strangely Martha Stewart-esque touches (wicker and

worn painted wood everywhere), and Chilli (born Rozanda Thomas)

has been pleading to play Sisqo's "Thong Song" on the stereo. The

first member out of the hair-and-makeup chute (she despises cosmetics

and her long, straight tresses require little styling), Chilli's the sexy one of

the trio (T-Boz is cool and Left Eye is crazy, if you believe their second album,

CrazySexyCool). At the moment, Chilli's assigned quality is abundantly in evidence:

She's clapping and dancing as sinuously as a furious silver-lamed-and-white-denimed

snake. "This is the song," she crows with a slight southern lilt.

Two TLC diets: Left Eye won't ingest "dairy, chicken, sugar, alcohol or caffeine." Chilli: "I could eat soul food all day. And I bake from scratch, like sweet potato pie."

You could say that about any number of TLC's mega-successful hits, from the aggressive girl power of debut Ooooooohhh... on the TLC Tip's "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" to the wary sexuality of CrazySexyCool's "Creep to the Grammy-winning, anti-loser anthem "No Scrubs" off the current album, FanMail. The power of TLC's pristine hip-pop is that each song hits a girl-issue nail on the head yet never fails to elicit a sing-along or get your body moving. Right now, Chilli is grooving with a joy so riveting (and to a sound so loud - she keeps darting away to raise the volume that you barely notice when T-Boz and Left Eye make their entrance.

All three of them are 29 or 30 and teeny-weeny - so petite and perfectly proportioned, they're like dolls. But while blonde T-Boz, also known as Tionne Watkins, is smiling warmly, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes has on a face that's about as welcoming as her barbed tattoos, which stays exposed throughout all three wardrobe changes. Uh-oh. Wil there be a repeat performance of the Entertainment Weekly shoot a few months ago, when a pissy Left Eye walked off the set, leaving an embarrassed Chilli and T-Boz to air their grievances in print? (Left Eye responded by writing a letter to EW and challenging her bandmates to a solo-album competition: May the one who gets the most sales be proven to be... the one with the most sales.)

Fortunately, a glum Left Eye is taking her place on set with Chilli and T-Boz, who have just finished hugging each another. It seems the biggest-selling female group of all time isn't going to implode. At least not today.

The photographer, a breezy Englishman named Mark Liddell, is doing all he can to make Left Eye lighten up, but she resists his charms - in front of his camera. She saves her grins for when he's loading film. Is she not giving him satisfaction out of spite, is is this the mark of a music businesswoman who knows her edgy persona must not be sullied by a smile?

Hard to say. Earlier, Left Eye had recounted (in a calm, girlish voice) how it was she who dreamed up TLC's fabulously effective condom-decorated, baggy-clothed image (message: to dress as you please and enjoy safe sex on demand - your demand) from Ooooooohhh... on the TLC Tip!. "I was staying with Chilli, and on this particular day, as we were leaving the house, I ran back in. As I was looking for whatever it was that I'd forgotten, I saw a condom on the dresser. I pinned it on and thought, got something new," says Left Eye. "I gave Chilli one and said, 'If anybody asks you what it's for, tell' em safe sex.' When we saw Pebbles [TLC's manager at the time], we told her what we were doing. She was kind of apprehensive at first."

Left Eye, whose presence is the most predominant on the first record and the least on the first third, FanMail (her title), does have a marketing whiz's mind for figures: She's the one always called upon in interviews to break down how it was that a group that sold ten million copies of CrazySexyCool could file for bankruptcy the same year. (After Pebbles and the record label's take, each TLC member's paycheck came to about $50,000.) What's more shocking is that TLC have sold more records than any other female trio in history - more than 20 million worldwide, which breaks down to an average of almost a quarter million records sold every month for the past eight years - but their take per record is so low, they've had difficulty covering expenses. (Eventually, TLC, their record label LaFace and Pebbles' management company settled out of court; TLC and Pebbles have since parted ways.)

Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes with TLC founder, Ian Burke, behind the scenes of the photo shoot and interview.

Perhaps to avoid ever again having to explain why she's broke, Left Eye juggles a dizzying number if projects: an upcoming "hip-hop, R&B, and alternative" solo album; a men's and women's clothing line called Kyle Young (at Macy's this fall); even an animation studio. (Chilli is contemplating a solo record and an acting career; T-Boz is producing a Children's animation show called It's a Fly World.) Left Eye is such the practical capitalist, she's now "able to step to the other side of the table, as an executive." And she remains unapologetic about the contest she proposed after the EW debacle: "If Tionne and Chilli had taken the challenge, it would have been the most anticipated thing out there." Do the other members of TLC beg to differ?

Chilli: "I thought it was ridiculous/ I was like, why would I compete with my own group member? I didn't understand that mentality. I mean, I understand that for her, it was for us to make a different kind of money. But I don't want to make money that way. I don't want to tear my fans apart and make them choose. I mean, we all individually have our fans, but they collectively love us together."

T-Boz: "Lisa is sweet, but wrong is wrong. You don't go walking off set in the middle of a shoot. You don't have to put a letter addressed to me in a magazine - you see me every day. Just say. 'Excuse me, Tionne, I'd like to talk to you." I don't have time to figure out why Lisa does these things, because I'm not her mama."

Left Eye (explaining): "This is not the first time two-against-one has happened, but I'm normally not the one and then there's the two. It's usually someone and me, and then the third. But I'm not a vengeful person; I don't hold grudges, and we've never had these problems."

Chilli (later): "Well, she alienated herself. When me and Tionne were in the studio recording FanMail, she would say that she was on the way and not come. It's weird because I love Lisa. When I first met her, I clicked better with her than I did with Tionne. Whereas now, the person that she has grown to be is someone I can't click with. Some people grow apart. I've totally grown away from her."

Left Eye: "That's one of the things they complain about. They say that I sued to be more playful, and now I'm different. When you mix the personal with business, you use things against people and become vengeful. Anyways, my part is not just to be an artist - I gotta have a part in the way in which the media is going to take things. I just try to make sure that it's interesting. And that's not too hard to do, because the most interesting things with TLC are real."

And how. TLC could run a school for scandal. Aside from management battles, bankruptcy court and intragroup squabbles (the latest being over Left Eye not thanking the other two members at the Soul Train Awards, of which Chilli says: "That wasn't a Left Eye award, that was a TLC award!"), these trauma queens can out-dys (as in, dysfunction) all the kings of rock 'n' roll put together. Chilli, abandoned by her father before birth, was reunited with him recently on Sally Jesse Raphael (and she still feels, well, a tad bit chilly toward him: "He's the proud dad now. He's like, 'That's my daughter.' I'm like, You should have been 'That's my daughter' back in the day"). T-Boz suffers from sickle-cell anemia - a condition nobody knew about ("People used to think I had AIDS") until she collapsed during the first tour. (T-Boz is now a spokesperson for the painful blood disease.)

Then there's Left Eye, who in 1994 burned down her then-boyfriend's house to the ground after a knockdown fight, and who now says, "If it wasn't for the alcohol, we would have been fine." TLC's tribulations are so dramatic and public that when Left Eye had plastic surgery - normally prime gossip fodder - the media barely paid attention. "It's something I wanted to do since I was 15," says Left Eye, who got a nose job. "The majority of the times that I looked into the mirror, it crossed my mind. So one day, I just went and had it done."

TLC trouble ahead? Says Chilli about her 2-year-old: "When he gets to kindergarten, I'm through [with TLC]. That's just the way it's going to be."

*Chilli clarified with MTV News after the magazine came out, clarifying what she said:

"In order to clarify the quote in 'Mademoiselle,' I would first like to say that I love TLC and I will always be with TLC," Chilli said in a statement released to MTV News on Monday. "What I stated to the 'Mademoiselle' reporter is that when my son Tron reaches kindergarten, I will no longer continue with the 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week schedule. This in no way means I'm leaving TLC." *

There are a few TLC traumas that you haven't heard of, such as:

T-Boz's Early Outlook: "I grew up angry at the world. I don't like authority figures. My father left me when I was 3. He apologized when I was 25; I didn't talk to him until I was 29. I couldn't keep a job; I was a hairstylist and a manicurist. High school was hard for me - I got kicked out four times for my mouth. I may have been wrong, but teachers disrespect kids, and if you're not my parent, feeding me and putting a roof over my head, you can tell me to be quiet, but you can't tell me to shut up."

Chilli's Motherhood Jones: "I've always wanted kids. Each birthday since I was 22. I'd get depressed because I didn't have a baby. I'd just cry and break down. I was like, My life ain't right. When I got pregnant at 26 with my son, Tron [his father is Chilli's boyfriend of ten years and fiancé, TLC producer Dallas Austin], my mom was so relieved."

T-Boz's Lack of Faith in Relationships: " I never thought I was going to find a man. I was prepared to work to death and be by myself. I wasn't looking - he just fell in my laps. [Rapper Mack 10, whom T-Boz is marrying next month and who is the father of her child-to-be, met her on the video shoot for the FanMail hit "Unpretty"] We've every itty-bitty thing in common. He's the guy version of me and I'm the girl version of him."

No matter what TLC's past troubles, they've never hidden them from the public and have always answered all questions, straight from the heart, at length. For walking cute bombs, they are the furthest thing from coy. (Case in point: Don't ever expect T-Boz to smile for a big cheese: "I don't kiss butt. If you're meant to be my friend, it'll happen, but not because I jumped over three chairs saying, "Ohmigod, he's the president of Warner Bros.'") They still believe in the fun, unfiltered feminism of Ooooooohhh... on the TLC Tip!. Since then, they've continued to speak their minds on themes both tragic (AIDS as a consequence of risky behavior in CrazySexyCool's "Waterfalls") and tropical (crippling beauty anxiety in "Unpretty"). All their contradictions, conflicts and credibility have made them more than record-industry royalty, beyond mere princesses of hip-pop. In case you haven't noticed, they're the songstresses to the soundtrack that is your life.