TLC's song "Waterfalls" will be 20 years old in a few years, and for some reason the surviving members of the trio recently recorded a version for release in Japan with Japanese singer Namie Amuro in place of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, who died in 2002 in a car crash. This understandably has not sat well with the general public.
That means it's time to revisit the classic video from 1995 for this very song. Here we go.
"Waterfalls" is one of those videos that will almost definitely be in your "life flashing before your eyes" montage if we were born around or before 1987-ish. It's a prime example of a video that managed to hit on a single image that just seemed to stick in the public psyche: the three members of TLC dancing and singing on water. The rest of the video dramatizes the scenes from the video, but it's the three members of TLC on water that everyone remembers.
"Waterfalls" is also a video that is known for its digital visual effects, which is impressive considering we were a few years away from the amazing technological advance of 56k modems in 1995. There are a few effects throughout the video but the main showpiece is the three TLC members dancing in front waterfall and made out of water themselves. As far as visual effects go, this is pretty ambituous for a music video in 1995, and although it hasn't aged as well as something from the same era like, say, the effects from Jurassic Park, it still works as an effect in 2013. It helps that the effect is used sparingly.
I'm reasonable sure that we won't see a remake of this video from the informal "Two TLC members plus a Japanese singer" group. And, as TLC embark on a reunion tour this summer, there'll be plenty of 90s nostalgia to go around, much of it for this video.
Fun Fact: IMVDb's own Doug Klinger claims that he was home sick the day this video premiered in 1995, and MTV played it "litearlly[sic] 25 times in an 8 hour span". It was also the "the fist[sic] day I ever stayed home alone".
