People were shocked when they found out what TLC’s song “Waterfalls” was actually about

“Don’t chase waterfalls” – no, really, don’t.

How many years have you been singing TLC’s absolute smash hit in your cramped shower, tapping your foot and nodding your head on the train – and even going on stage at karaoke?

Portrait of TLC members in 1992, Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. (Photo by Tim Roney/Getty Images)

Well, the lighthearted song “Waterfalls” is actually quite spooky.

It is sung by Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who died in a car accident in Honduras in 2002 while volunteering at a child development center.

The American R&B group, who released their first album in 1992 and have more than 15 million monthly listeners on Spotify, actually opens the song with ‘A lonely mother gazin’ out of the window’.

It goes on to explain how difficult it is for the mother to communicate with her son and how “he seems unable to avoid trouble.”

The last two lines of the verse read: “So he goes out and makes his money the best way he knows how.”

“Another corpse lying cold in the gutter, listen to me.”

“He goes out to make his own money” is a reference to the drug trade, but it gets even more sinister.

A waterfall in TLC’s official music video. (YouTube/officialTLC)

According to Songfacts, the chorus tells the story of the mother begging her son not to chase “waterfalls,” which apparently means “money and respect through drug trafficking.”

The website continues: “The second verse is about a man’s relationship with a woman. His ‘waterfall’ is casual sex – he has a ‘natural obsession with temptation.'”

“This could mean that he is cheating on someone or that the woman he is seeing is cheating on someone. In either case, he becomes infected with HIV and dies (‘three letters brought him to his final resting place’).”

And people were shocked to find out. On Twitter, one user wrote: “Just looked up what Waterfalls by TLC means. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Another commented: “My colleague’s fiancée thought the TLC song was about a guy named Jason Waterfalls. That really changes the meaning of the song.”

Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas of TLC on stage in Georgia last month. (Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

And a third added: “Me and my older brother’s song is Waterfalls by TLC. It means so much to us. It makes me sad when I hear it. I miss him. I love you friends.”

But it didn’t end there.

Since childhood, we have been singing a song whose lyrics allude to drug addiction and crime.

The lyrics in question were: “Because you’re smoking in your own veins/ You’re shooting and haunting someone else’s brain/ Because you’re a victim of crime/ I say the system made you a victim of your own mind.”

However, the main message of the song was to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis.

Thomas told The Guardian: “We wanted to make a song with a strong message – about unprotected sex, promiscuity and dealing with the wrong people.”

“The messages in ‘Waterfalls’ hit the mark. I think that’s why it’s our biggest hit yet.”