Date: July 8, 1995
Weeks: 7
I mentioned before that TLC's vocals can be a bit contentious, as they can come across a little bit whiny. When it works, the vocals match the music and make a good song. When it doesn't... well, the results can get a little unpleasant. Unfortunately, this song falls into the latter category.
The problem isn't that they decided to make a song with a serious message. "Unpretty" (#848) is also a song with a serious message, and I liked that one. And it's not even that the vocals are bad. It's just that the vocals and the music don't match very well. The vocals are serious and subdued. The music is serious and subdued. But it seems like both the vocals and the music are intentionally subdued so as not to overpower the other, with the result being a bit of a vacuum of sound. Just because a song contains serious subject matter doesn't mean it needs to be bland.
Even the rap verse is bland. It's monotone when it doesn't have to be, and the music isn't any different during the rap verse than it is in any other verse. It also just feels poorly integrated and tacked on and out of place when it's just tacked into the bridge. I wonder if the song might have been better if they had used the rap for the verses and then sang the choruses.
The song's lyrics are pretty well known for trying to tackle subjects that people felt were important to talk about in the mid-90s, such as gang violence and AIDS. I'm not sure those messages come across very clearly without the video to back them up. The lyrics are badly constructed. They don't reveal until the end of each verse what the verse was about, almost requiring you to listen to the song several times in a row to make the meaning clear. Also, I always thought the metaphor in the chorus was stretched really thin. "Don't go chasing waterfalls." Okay, don't pursue unattainable goals that might wind up harming you, I understand that. "Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to." What does that mean? Sure, in context I understand that they're supposed to represent safer, known goals to achieve, but metaphors generally are supposed to be intriguing when divorced from context. They're not supposed to be nonsense.
My verdict: Don't like it. It's possible that my opinion of this song was irreversibly tainted by the video, and the awful computer-generated water-dancers with their one silly arm-bob dance move that I can't help see in my mind every second this song is playing. But I stand by my opinion. And at least there's a Weird Al version to enjoy that fixes most of my issues.
I never really listened to the verses of this song before, so I didn't know what it was about. But the chorus that said, "Don't go chasing waterfalls" never made sense to me because, for me, a waterfall is beautiful scenery that you would go out of your way to find and enjoy. Chasing waterfalls is a positive experience.
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