As TLC became the best-selling female group of all time, Lopes' ego seemed to rise proportionately. ''I'm Diana Ross, and not a Supreme,'' she sang on her 2001 solo album, ''Supernova,'' which was only released overseas to mixed reviews. She also became known as a hellion, the feisty fire-starter who burned her boyfriend and former football star Andre Rison's Atlanta home to the ground in 1994. She was fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years' probation, and shortly afterward, entered rehab for an alcohol problem. (Rison later reconciled with Lopes, to whom he was engaged in 2001; but at the time of her death, Lopes was involved with someone else, according to her publicist, Jay Marose.)
Lopes continued to channel her inner wild child through increasingly erratic behavior. Before recording the 1999 Grammy winner ''Fan Mail,'' Lopes sent a letter of resignation to LaFace expressing anger that her songs were being rejected. The label temporarily froze TLC's finances as a result. Sessions eventually resumed, but Lopes wasn't shy about voicing her dissatisfaction with the group and ditching rehearsals to work on her own solo project.
When Entertainment Weekly profiled TLC in November 1999, Thomas and Watkins retaliated. ''It's like an abusive relationship,'' griped Watkins of Lopes. ''Your husband beats you, says he's sorry, then comes back and does it again.'' Soon after, Lopes responded in a heated missive to EW, dismissing her bandmates' statements as ''merely shouts from those who only have a fractional understanding of what business is in this business.'' Lopes then challenged ''Tionne 'Player' Watkins and Rozonda 'Hater' Thomas'' to a creative battle, proposing that each cut a solo disc and that LaFace offer a $1.5 million prize to the Billboard-declared winner. Neither picked up the gauntlet.
However, friends and associates contend that of late Lopes had reached a kind of peace with herself -- and with TLC. ''She wasn't fighting anymore,'' says Marose. ''She learned to just say, 'Hey, how do I make this work for me?''' Even her trips to Honduras, where she bought property near a tribal village noted for both spa treatments and spiritual cleansing, suggested an evolution from her confrontational past.
And of course there was the promise of future musical endeavors. Several hours before her death, Rodney Jerkins met with Thomas and Watkins in Atlanta to discuss a new tune he was producing for TLC, titled ''Who's It Gonna Be?'' ''I played them the song and I was explaining what I wanted Left Eye to do,'' says Jerkins. ''Five hours later, I [heard the news] and called Chilli and T-Boz, and they were crying.... [There's] a lesson to be learned, that you can't take life for granted. You never know when your time is.''
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