You think being a female rapper in 2002 is tough? What about being a prim sixteen-year-old semi-nymphet from Miami with one of the raunchiest hits the 80s ever had?
“We got so much shit,” recalls Tigra, one half (alongside Bunny) of the duo L’Trimm, about their cult hit “Cars With The Boom.” “Some people called us soft, because we liked to wear heels and makeup. But at the same time, when I was singing, ‘Grab it like you want it,’ I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. We were virgins!” L’Trimm’s squeaky-clean image was anomalous in a time of thug excess and political sloganeering. It was kiddie rap with an adult twist, thanks to its Miami bass heritage. Their first album, Grab It! (the group’s retort to Salt’n’Pepa’s “Push It”), sounded like a junior-high rap-along— cute, unprepossessing, eerily catchy. “We used to skip school, get on the metro rail to downtown, and freestyle all the way there and all the way back, just not to be in school. We didn’t think the rest of the world was ever gonna hear it. I still bug out when I get my BMI checks every month.”
Today, Tigra hardly seems to have aged at all. She sports a Wu-Tang logo bracelet and a two-finger boombox ring, and her voice is just as childlike as the day she recorded “Cars With The Boom.” Five nights a week, she’s the assistant manager at one of New York’s most prominent nightspots. “I’m a nocturnal person,” she shrugs. “I’ve never been very good with the daytime.”
And even though the helium-pitched duo still keep in touch, an 80s-revival-inspired reunion isn’t likely. “Bunny’s so far away,” Tigra laments. “She lives in Indiana. She got four kids, a big house, and she’s a nurse. Me, I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when we were 14.
She’s like, ‘Why don’t you have kids? Just move here, get knocked up, do what you gotta do. Grow up already.’ I keep trying to tell her, I am grown up.”
JON CARAMANICA
