The Story of TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’

By Oliver Tearle

Many stars of the music industry who subsequently become famous in their own right started out as backing singers or supporting artists for established groups. So long before he was telling everyone in roofless rooms to be happy, Pharrell Williams was appearing on SWV’s Michael-Jackson-sampling hit ‘Right Here’ in 1992, while Sheryl Crow appeared in the video for Jackson’s ‘Dirty Diana’ in the late 1980s before embarking on a successful solo career.

I’m sure there are other examples not involving Michael Jackson. In fact, here’s one: long before enjoying chart success in his own right with songs whose titles contain certain rude four-letter words, CeeLo Green contributed backing vocals to TLC’s 1995 single ‘Waterfalls’.

Curiously, the group weren’t named in honour of the famous expression ‘Tender Loving Care’ (TLC), although the existence of that phrase perhaps influenced their decision to name themselves TLC. The main reason, however, was that TLC formed an initialism (not an ‘acronym’, as Wikipedia erroneously calls it) for the names of its early members Tionne, Lisa, and Crystal.

To retain this name when the line-up altered, the girls adopted nicknames: ‘T-Boz’, ‘Left-Eye’, and ‘Chilli’. And yes, Lisa ‘Left-Eye’ Lopes’ sobriquet was derived from her penchant for wearing a condom over her left eye as a symbol of the group’s endorsement of safe sex.

All of this is relevant to ‘Waterfalls’, whose meaning might be summarised as follows: don’t pursue short-lived pleasures with no thought for the devastating consequences. In the song’s chorus, those waterfalls – rushing, enticing, beautifully dazzling when the sunlight hits them at the right angle – are contrasted with the more staid but also more constant water-sources, the lake and the river.

The first verse focuses on a mother watching her son from a window: a neat metaphor for the mental and emotional distance separating them, as he falls in with the wrong crowd while she vows to stand by him, no matter what he does. He’s presumably involved in gang warfare (and, with it, drugs), and his fate is to become another body lying dead in the gutter.

But it’s the song’s second verse that’s attracted the most attention. Here, HIV is alluded to: those ‘three letters’ sent the young man to his grave, after he gave in to sexual temptation and succumbed to infection. His health deteriorated with the onset of AIDS until he no longer recognised himself in the mirror. So the group’s promotion of safe sex – even signalled by Lopes’ distinctive choice of eyewear – is even tacitly included in this, probably their best-known song.

The video itself was shot on a lake (the same lake at Universal Studios where Jaws had been filmed twenty years earlier). It brings to life the two vignettes described in the song’s two verses, and bravely includes the young son from the first verse being shot by a rival gang member on a street corner (although to incorporate the slow-moving tableau showing the luckless youth dealing drugs before his unhappy end, the video has to tread water musically for the best part of a minute, and in doing so loses the momentum built up prior to this point).

The second verse is vividly brought to life, too: here, a lank-haired man who looks as if he’s auditioning for a fashion catalogue for men’s underwear indulges in a bit of bareback sex with his girlfriend (who nudges the condom packet out of his hand before getting down to making the beast with two wossnames). Because he failed to rubber up beforehand, he ends up copping a dose of something nasty from her and winds up resembling something out of a low-budget vampire flick, complete with pallid skin, unnaturally light blue eyes, and (buff torso and biceps aside) a generally haggard and anaemic look.

One thing which makes ‘Waterfalls’ a memorable song is that, although it deals with some dark themes – drugs, gangs, murder, AIDS – it is a curiously upbeat song (musically at least). It’s also a song which is brave enough to tell us that it isn’t always desirable simply to ‘follow your dreams’.

Instead, sometimes dreams should be resisted if they’re likely to put us on the path to (self-)destruction. First and foremost you should be true to yourself, and find what makes you grounded (those rivers and lakes), thinking about a long-term future rather than short-term thrills or gains. Following her death in a car accident in Central America in 2002, Lopes’ rap lyrics from ‘Waterfalls’ were engraved on her casket, and in many ways, it’s the rap – delivered in Lopes’ distinctive style – which is the most distinctive thing about the song, from a musical perspective. Soul, rap, and R&B all collide and make a cohesive whole.

TLC didn’t invent the idea of raising awareness of HIV through music. Anyone remember Frankie Goes to Hollywood admonishing the gay community to ‘wear condoms’, and to ‘Relax’ when they want to ‘come’, over a decade earlier? But ‘Waterfalls’ did offer a timely reminder of the consequences of unsafe sex at a time when AIDS was still running rampant and consciousnesses needed raising. And, just as importantly, it offered a classic slice of 90s R’n’B.