The Riff

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TLC Songs as Anthems for My Daughters

8 min readApr 28, 2021

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Photo by Limor Zellermayer on Unsplash

There’s always that one song the radio plays incessantly that, from the first time you heard it, you hated it. You knew it would be a song that would cause you to turn from your typical station to something else further down the dial.

The only problem is the station further down the dial is also playing this hated song. Of course it is. Pop stations seem to go into rotation with each other, piggy-backing off the top 40 hit the other just finished playing. So you turn to the station on the other end of the dial for something different. Except that station is now playing the same song. By now you’ve turned to a country station just for a reprieve from the madness.

This was me in the latter part of 1999 every time the TLC smash hit “No Scrubs” came on the radio. I hated it. I hated the reference to overly flirtatious men as scrubs. I hated the bashing of the guy hanging out his friend’s passenger side to speak to girls. I hated the unending need to tell us, the male species, that if we didn’t have any money we would not be welcomed to converse with the women from TLC.

Mostly I hated “No Scrubs” the way Carly Simon’s man must’ve hated “You’re So Vain”. I hated it the way some women hated the misogyny found in rap songs. I hated…

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The Riff
The Riff
Eddie Becker
Eddie Becker

Written by Eddie Becker

Writer published on sites such as Bleacher Report, Relevant Magazine, and The Good Men Project. | Top Writer in Music, also writing on Humor, Faith, Poetry, etc