EXCLUSIVE: Lady Tigra & Bunny D Of L’Trimm Recount What Led To Major Label Split

L’Trimm—the Miami Bass duo comprised of Lady Tigra and Bunny D—were just teenagers when they signed a deal with Atlantic Records. Their inaugural album, Grab It! (1988), spawned the single “Cars With The Boom,” which peaked at No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became their biggest hit.

With each subsequent release, Drop That Bottom (1989) and Groovy (1991), Tigra and Bunny grew increasingly disinterested in conforming to what the label wanted from them. Instead, they decided to part ways and pursue their own solo endeavors. But over the years, not only have they maintained their close friendship, they’ve also reunited on occasion.

Most recently, L’Trimm was the surprise guest at 808 Day (August 8) in Los Angeles alongside Egyptian Lover, Peanut Butter Wolf, DJ Rhettmatic, Prince Paul, J.Rocc and N.W.A’s Arabian Prince. A day later, Tigra was on a boat in Marina Del Rey to celebrate J.J. Fad rapper MC JB’s 60th birthday, where she and the other guests danced to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and (naturally) “Supersonic.”

After connecting with AllHipHop at the party, an interview was inevitable. After all, there are very few with L’Trimm floating around out there and with their latest reunion, it seemed an appropriate time to tell their story—or at least part of it. Hopping on ZOOM less than a week later, Lady Tigra and Bunny reflected on their journey and explained why they decided to leave Atlantic after three albums.

“The suits came marching in and they stopped making it fun,” Tigra said, matter-of-factly. “Our prefrontal cortex hadn’t developed yet, so we had no respect for contracts and stuff like that. We were just like, ‘We’re out!’ It started with we had our whole record to ourselves. Then the second one, they started giving us concepts for songs that weren’t feeling.

“We’re Miami Bass and they’re trying to follow trends, having us remake ‘Cars With The Boom.’ There’s a song called ‘The Love Bug.’ There’s just songs about cars and we’re like, ‘What’s this got to do with anything?’ ‘Cars With The Boom’ was something we were naturally doing. We were cruising Coconut Grove with speaker systems. That’s why it hit the way it did because we meant it. But then they were like, ‘Well, you did a song about cars.’ They had us write a song about the Batmobile. They had us write a f###### ridiculous car song.”

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For L’Trimm’s second album, Drop That Bottom, the label allowed them to flex their creativity only on the B-Side. Tigra recalled, “We wrote a whole album and we only cared about half the songs, and the rest we had to do because they told us, ‘Write a song about this, write a song about that.’”

By the third album, the label was trying to turn them into C+C Music Factory, a New Jack Swing duo—basically, whatever was “hot” at the moment. But L’Trimm was evolving and weren’t interested in being kept in a “box,” as they described it, so they left the label—but not before making a definitive statement.

“I showed up with the lyrics sheet and we were ready to throw down,” Tigra explained. “And they look at it and they say, ‘Black people don’t speak this way’ and crumple it up and throw it in the garbage. We looked at each other and we’re like, ‘Oh hell no!’ The disrespect at that point by a bunch of older white dudes telling us what Black people speak like and what good Hip-Hop is was crazy. So, we were like, ‘Oops, deuces. We boycotted.’”

British pop icon George Michael had put out the single “I Want Your Sex” in 1987, which Tigra felt illustrated how unfairly they were being treated.

“It was a whole big thing,” she said. “He had this video and it said ‘monogamy’ on it and everyone was scrambling to understand what the word monogamy meant. And I’m like, ‘Well, if people who listen to pop music can go get a dictionary and look up ‘monogamy,’ they can look up the words that we’re saying. So our middle finger on the last album was ‘We Got Our Own Thing,’ where we just kind of spoke to everything that we’d experienced.”

Lady Tigra and Bunny were also facing allegations of being “soft” because they refused to dress up like the boys and liked to smile; they weren’t “mean” rappers.

“So we wore skirts and just owned it,” Tigra said. “Then I did a whole verse, pulling every gigantic word that every ancestor had left in my DNA from like my lizard brain to write a diss track to them. I dissed the hell out of them so that they couldn’t understand. So they boycotted the third album [Groovy]. If you look at the third album cover, they had to cut and paste songs from previous sessions to make the songs.

“And if you look at the album cover, even the album cover is paper doll cutouts of clothing, sort of like Dee-Lite’s style, psychedelic dresses and all that. They had to take the photos from the second album and use those photos, because we wouldn’t show up for photo shoots either. If you look at the Groovy album cover, it’s from the second photo shoot.”

Despite the tumultuous ending, Lady Tigra and Bunny engrained themselves in Hip-Hop history, thanks in part to “Cars With The Boom.” In 2020, the song saw a significant resurgence after it went viral on TikTok with more than 1.1 million videos, including one from JoJo Siwa. New generations are continually discovering the song and giving it new life, which L’Trimm loves to see.

@alexawollney

NEW DANCE ALERT 💖(for good vibes only) THE CARS THAT GO BOOM @lungcancerbaby

♬ Cars That Go Boom – L’Trimm

And they’re still working on music. Bunny, who recently retired after decades of being a nurse, is making gospel music with her husband. She also jumped on Lady Tigra’s upcoming collaborative EP, Black Rice, with producer SPNCR. The project boasts features from Egyptian Lover, Kid of Kid ‘N Play, the Pharcyde and, of course, Bunny. It will mark L’Trimm’s first new song in 35 years.

Check back with AllHipHop for Part 2 of the L’Trimm interview soon.

Photo credit: Geoff Moore
Hair: Johnny Stuntz
Make-up: Sole Alberti
Styling: The Lady Tigra