Produced by Dallas Austin, “Creep” put the sonic scientist that much closer to his dreams of making tracks as enticing and sexy as the ones his hero Prince created for Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6.

“The sound of those records took you to a different atmosphere, and that’s what I wanted for TLC,” Austin said in 1994, citing the Apollonia 6 track “Blue Limousine” as the track that lit his fire. “I wanted T-Boz to sound like Prince used to sound, but put on her own thing. From the beginning, I made sure that TLC had a distinguished sound, but on CrazySexyCool, I wanted to bring out the Prince side.”

That same year, Austin’s work was developing into an edgier electro soul as heard on the 1994 debuts he produced for Highland Place Mobsters and Joi. Before building his now-legendary recording studio D.A.R.P., the producer had a graffiti-on-the-walls spot called the Soul Shack where he worked on Ooooooohhh... as well as some of their much anticipated follow-up. “CrazySexyCool is a word we created to describe what’s in every woman,” Left Eye explained to writer Joan Morgan in 1994. “It doesn’t just describe us [TLC] individually, it describes all parts of every woman.”

L.A. Reid was determined that TLC “go beyond hip-hop,” as he was fond of saying to the press. It was that phrase that led Reid to reject the original Lionel Martin-directed clip (see below) for “Creep.” Commissioning a splashy Matthew Rolston video that was less “urban” and Madison Avenue commercial chic, when the video debuted on MTV, much to the surprise of a public used to TLC’s tomboy style, they returned as lipstick liberators.

Embracing the text and textures of CrazySexCool was easy. TLC fueled the disc with loads of personality and individual flavor; it didn’t matter that the women didn’t write (with the exception of Left Eye, who wrote her own raps) or produce; they were still telling their own stories.

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Although I love and prefer their debut, I understand they couldn't have stayed the same on their second album and expected to be a hit.