TLC

The relationship ran both ways. TLC recorded two songs from Prince's world — "Get It Up," originally cut by his group the Time, for the Poetic Justice soundtrack, and Sign o' the Times' "If I Was Your Girlfriend" for CrazySexyCool — and Prince noticed. At the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards he skipped his own scheduled performance to introduce them instead: "I decided I'd rather come introduce my favorite group." The bond outlasted flattery — during TLC's mid-1990s bankruptcy fight with LaFace Records, T-Boz said, Prince "always" had their backs, one label-battle veteran offering solidarity to a group still fighting its own.

listen: upstream & heresource: People — Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins Remembers Prince ↗share

1987

If I Was Your GirlfriendPrince

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1994

If I Was Your GirlfriendTLC

listen forPrince's original whispers the entire song in a helium-pitched falsetto, blurring gender and turning jealousy into something intimate and strange. TLC's cover, produced with Sean "Puffy" Combs and Chucky Thompson, drops that vocal disguise but keeps the hushed, conspiratorial delivery — three real women trading the same possessive questions Prince invented for an imagined one. Rolling Stone put it bluntly, crediting TLC's version with doing "Prince better than the Artist has all decade" — less an insult to Prince than proof of how completely the group made his song their own.

Both non-Watkins members trace themselves straight back to one album. Chilli was a teenager working in an Atlanta hair salon when Janet Jackson's Control aired on MTV; "For young girls, like myself at the time," she told MTV in 2001, "I looked at her and I was like, 'now, that's how I've got to do it.'" Left Eye went further, renting Jackson's Control and Rhythm Nation videos to copy the choreography for her own auditions, and wearing the same key earring Jackson made famous — tribute worn on her own body before TLC existed.

listen: upstream & heresource: The Famous People — Rozonda Thomas Biography (background, Janet Jackson influence) ↗share

1986

ControlJanet Jackson

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1995

Diggin' On YouTLC

listen forPlay Control's title track against "Diggin' On You" and listen for the same restraint: Jackson rides Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis's clipped, percussive synths without oversinging a single line, asserting control through understatement rather than volume. Babyface gives TLC's ballad the same spare, keyboard-led hush nine years later — the group's harmonies stay conversational, almost whispered, letting the groove carry what Jackson's restraint carried first. It's less a shared lyric or riff than a shared idea about how quiet reads as power.

Left Eye dated her own convictions to a single record: by her account to The Independent, she was fourteen when she first heard Queen Latifah and Monie Love's "Ladies First," a song built to make room for women in a genre that hadn't offered them much. Latifah wrote it linking Black pride directly to feminism rather than treating them as separate causes, a fusion later writers have called a template for hip-hop feminism. Lopes carried that same fusion into TLC's writing sessions, pushing the group's biggest records toward frank social commentary voiced by three women who wrote and rapped as much as they sang.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1989

Ladies FirstQueen Latifah

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1995

WaterfallsTLC

listen for"Ladies First" moves like a cypher, Latifah and Monie Love trading assertive, unhurried verses over a stripped-down break beat, refusing to raise their voices to be heard. "Waterfalls" borrows that same confidence in its structure: Left Eye's rapped verse, blunt about drugs and AIDS, sits inside Chilli and T-Boz's sung chorus rather than being sidelined by it — exactly as Latifah's rap sat at the center of her own record instead of its edges.