Dig if you will the picture...

It was 1994, and TLC had just released a little album called CrazySexyCool that turned my entire tweenager identity upside down. I can’t prove it, but to say that every fifth-grader at Brookwood Elementary School played this album on repeat for two solid years wouldn’t be a stretch. Before I discovered OutKast and A Tribe Called Quest (and well before my rebellious Wu-Tang years), there was TLC.

On this flawless, tween-appropriate album, there was one track that my junior high-bound cohorts would always skip, track 11: “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”

“Eew this song is so weird. Fast-forward it!” my BFF Adriene would say. The album was our summer soundtrack while jumping rope in her driveway, and that track was on side two of the scuffed cassette tape (yes: cassette tape).

But my 10-year-old self had a secret: I liked this song. In fact, I LOVED it. T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli’s wispy vocals oozed sensuality — a sound my innocent young ears hadn’t registered until then. Oh, and the lyrics? Much more interesting than my candy-coated Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson records:

If I was your girlfriend

Would you let me dress you

I mean, help you pick out your clothes

Before we go out

Not that you're helpless

But sometimes, sometimes

Those are the things that bein' in love's about.