“No Scrubs” vs. “No Pigeons”: The Battle of the Sexes That Shook Radio in 1999
After Ru0026amp;B supergroup TLC dropped “No Scrubs,” a little-known New York rap group called Sporty Thievz responded with “No Pigeons.” It launched a gender war on and off the airwaves, amplified by two trios, two songs, one beat, and zero apologies.“No Scrubs” vs. “No Pigeons”: The Battle of the Sexes That Shook Radio in 1999
After Ru0026amp;B supergroup TLC dropped “No Scrubs,” a little-known New York rap group called Sporty Thievz responded with “No Pigeons.” It launched a gender war on and off the airwaves, amplified by two trios, two songs, one beat, and zero apologies.
Welcome to 1999 Music Week, a celebration of one of the most interesting, vivid, varied music years ever. Join us as we count down the best singles and albums of the year, remember the days of scrubs and the girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch, and argue about which albums stood above the rest.
“A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly / And is also known as a buster / Always talkin’ about what he wants / And just sits on his broke ass.”
It took only four lines, razor-sharp in their assessment of certain men, to start a war.
In February 1999, TLC—Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Rozanda “Chilli” Thomas, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes—cast the first stone in what would become a battle of the sexes with the song “No Scrubs.” The first single from the Atlanta-based R&B trio’s third album, FanMail, was a playful-yet-scathing evisceration of good-for-nothing men. With a blunt chorus, TLC let the world know not only who and what they wouldn’t tolerate, but why.
By this point, TLC’s previous album, 1994’s CrazySexyCool, had gone diamond. “No Scrubs” wasn’t as big as the ubiquitous juggernaut “Waterfalls,” but it gave TLC another huge hit following a four-year hiatus. It also gave women an anthem, empowering them to crush any overconfident bum who approached. If you were a poser, a philanderer, or a deadbeat, they were definitely talking to you. Despite the late Left Eye explaining to Jay Leno that being a scrub had less to do with social status than lack of principle (“You also have the executive scrub,” she noted), the word burrowed under men’s skin as the song’s immense popularity wedged it into popular lexicon. Writing for The New York Times in 1999, Douglas Century described the resulting friction: “To TLC fans, ‘No Scrubs’ is an anthem of female self-sufficiency and self-respect, a rejection of men with no motivation. But some African-American men consider it denigrating.”
In the shock of the year, the song placed men and women at odds. “Some of these successful women in hip-hop have a lot of money, and it gets to be easy when you have a lot of money to demand what you expect,” journalist and author Danyel Smith told the Hartford Courant in 1999. “Men are trying to figure out what it means to interact with a woman who is independent.”
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Some men interpreted “No Scrubs” as an airstrike targeting their egos. “It’s interesting that men took offense to it, but that’s how you know it hit a nerve—especially with the scrubs,” says Kim Osorio, former editor-in-chief of The Source. The song was triggering: I’m a bum just because I’m riding shotgun? I need money to approach you? Who are you to judge me? That was the biggest offense to these dudes: Certain women, to let them tell it, had no business using the word. Soon after came the official male response. It arrived in the form of a Timberland boot hurled defiantly from Yonkers, New York.
In May 1999, the hip-hop trio Sporty Thievz—consisting of Kirk “King Kirk” Howell, Shaarod “Big Dubez” Ford, and Marlon “Marlon Brando” Bryant—released a brash rebuttal: “No Pigeons.” The rappers, whose debut album arrived the previous summer, had earned a minor buzz in New York for clever rhymes that showcased a brazen sense of humor. “No Pigeons,” which borrowed the same instrumental Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs crafted for TLC, was a testament to Sporty Thievz’s sensibilities: They wouldn’t be taken advantage of, nor would they be derided by anyone whose own life was in shambles. They held a mirror up to women who dared to call them “scrubs” and returned fire with a dig of their own: “A pigeon is a girl who be walkin’ by / My rimmed-up blue brand new sparklin’ five / Her feet hurt so you know she want a ride / But she frontin’ like she can’t say hi.”
Hitching their wagon to one of the year’s biggest songs was savvy, but Sporty Thievz had no idea their counterpunch would mushroom into a hit of its own. “No Pigeons” topped both the Billboard Hot Rap Singles and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles Sales charts, peaking at no. 12 on the Hot 100. “It became so big that women were loving it,” says longtime New York radio DJ and Notorious B.I.G. affiliate Mister Cee. “You had women out there like, ‘Well, they ain’t talking about me.’” “No Pigeons” absorbed the power of “No Scrubs,” helping to create one of the more fascinating pop culture moments of 1999. “One ignited the girls, one ignited the guys,” says DJ Funkmaster Flex of NYC’s Hot 97, where “No Pigeons” first became a phenomenon.
Long before social media, where today’s Hot Girl vs. City Boy competition has ballooned into an ongoing Twitter repartee, “No Scrubs” vs. “No Pigeons” pitted an R&B supergroup against a crew of rap underdogs. But for the record, the battle was never about TLC facing off with Sporty Thievz. This was something far more grand: a never-ending war between men and women amplified by two trios, two songs, one beat, and zero apologies.
Both “No Scrubs” and “No Pigeons” were created during down times for their respective groups. Xscape singers-songwriters Kandi Burruss and Tameka “Tiny” Harris were also on a break from their own R&B quartet when, using an instrumental from Briggs, they created a demo of “No Scrubs” for a side project. Executives at TLC’s label, the now-defunct LaFace Records, had other plans. “We brought it to life on our own song for ourselves, and then the producer She’kspere had played it for some of the powers that be at LaFace, and they immediately were like, we want this song for TLC,” Harris told Rolling Stone in 2014.
Chilli recognized the song’s potential the first time she heard it. “I knew immediately,” she told Billboard in 2014. “I went, ‘This is a smash.’ And I was like, ‘I gotta get it.’” Released as a single by TLC on February 2, 1999, “No Scrubs” took off almost immediately, landing atop the Billboard Hot 100 in April and remaining there for four weeks. Pop music was coalescing into something new as the decade drew to a close, and a specific kind of earworm with clear traces of R&B influence was all the rage—check Britney Spears’s dominant “...Baby One More Time” and Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle.” In addition to TLC’s bona fides, “No Scrubs” had the right mix of R&B aesthetics and pop’s light, inoffensive sound to attract wider audiences. The sweeping success of “No Scrubs” and FanMail reaffirmed TLC’s position as one of R&B’s preeminent acts after a long break.
While TLC was once again flourishing, Sporty Thievz was searching for a niche. The group’s first offering, Street Cinema, was a concept album: street tales told with sharp wit in vivid fashion. King Kirk says the group wanted “Spy Hunter,” a lurid account of espionage, to be the album’s lead single, but their label, Ruffhouse Records, and its distributor, Columbia Records, preferred the he-said-she-said banter of “Cheapskate (You Ain’t Gettin’ Nada).” This disagreement nearly shut everything down before Street Cinema’s release on August 18, 1998: “I said, ‘If y’all do ‘Cheapskate,’ I’m not coming to the video shoot. And everybody looked at me and said, ‘Alright, there won’t be any Sporty Thievz then,’” King Kirk remembers.
King Kirk had a change of heart, and Sporty Thievz moved forward with “Cheapskate” as Street Cinema’s lead single. The song was a mission statement informing women that they couldn’t get over on the group. Big Dubez raps at the top of the second verse: “Can you what? Nah, I ain’t the herb on the ave / I don’t understand them three words, ‘Can I have?’” The catchy hook reinforced the group’s position re: not being anyone’s meal ticket or an easy come-up. “You ain’t gettin’ nadaaa from us / Not even a dollaaa from us.”
Sporty Thievz’s style was conversational—listening to “Cheapskate” felt like hearing them roast girls live from a stoop in Yonkers—but their audacious sense of humor didn’t translate into much commercial success. “Cheapskate” reached only no. 31 on the Hot Rap Singles chart; the remix, dubbed “Even Cheaper,” peaked at no. 27. Further complicating their situation were issues with Ruffhouse Records that left the group in limbo. “Something was going on, internally, with the label,” King Kirk says. “We were getting held in the middle because of that, so we were trying to get released.” Their lifeline? An unexpected gift from the mixtape gods.
As the popularity of “No Scrubs” increased the popularity of the word “scrub,” a New York–based DJ named Rhude started thinking. “I was like, ‘Damn, they’re getting at the fellas. I need somebody to answer this,’” he says. Unable to address the situation directly, DJ Rhude found a rapper to handle the task. “At the time, I was working with this MC named Mr. Wood$ from Far Rockaway, and I was like, ‘Yo, come up with a quick response to this so I can put it on the next mixtape,’” he says. Rhude ripped the “No Scrubs” instrumental from a cassette single, Mr. Wood$ added a verse, and the freestyle—then titled “No Vultures”—was added to a mixtape he dropped off at Funkmaster Flex’s Franchise Record Pool. He remembers receiving an eager call from Mr. Excitement, Flex’s partner at Franchise, the following day: “Yo, that joint y’all did, ‘No Vultures,’ is crazy. We were bumpin’ it in the office, and Flex heard it and was like, ‘Yo, who is that?’”
The record had potential, but it needed an extra touch. “Flex said, ‘Yo, I like the concept, but I feel like it would be better to get Sporty Thievz involved because it’s more their lane,’” Rhude continues, noting that Mr. Excitement insisted that he and Mr. Wood$ be involved since the idea originated with them. For his part, Funkmaster Flex says he saw the parallels almost immediately. “On ‘Cheapskate,’ Sporty Thievz were talking about girls, so that’s what made me think of them,” he says. Not long after, Sporty Thievz entered the picture.
“We get a call from someone who said Flex wanted to meet us,” King Kirk says. “We went to see Flex, and he was like, ‘Have y’all ever heard of the record “No Scrubs”?’ And of course we had heard of it, so he played this mix record one of his DJs was blending for him with his man Mr. Wood$ bugging out on ‘No Scrubs.’ So he’s like, ‘Y’all have a record called “Cheapskate.” I think if you play around with this sort of like how he played around with that, you could do something.’” The group headed to the studio to cut the new track; Mr. Wood$ ended up getting the final verse because he showed up late, much to Rhude’s frustration. “He was going on a boat ride, and I remember saying that day, ‘Yo, cancel that boat trip, this is a huge opportunity,’” he recalls.
The song was renamed “No Pigeons” around a term that had previously surfaced on a King Kirk verse from “Even Cheaper”:
KFC is good, so girls can’t be chickens
Man listen, but what they can be is pigeons
Pigeons, the worst bird, that’s my word
Eatin’ off curbs in herds lookin’ for herb.
“I won’t say we took credit for using the word ‘birds,’ because they had been saying that in Yonkers,” Kirk explains. “But that word ‘pigeon’? I had been using that for years.” Now Sporty Thievz had the opportunity to build an entire song around the word, all while inserting themselves into a conversation initiated by one of the biggest groups in music on a chart-topping song. “We were always those type of dudes anyway, having fun with the ladies, so we just knocked it out,” says Kirk. “Two or three weeks later, our manager handed it back to Flex and he, as far as I’m told, didn’t really understand what it was.” Flex says that he didn’t anticipate what “No Pigeons” would become. “It was just supposed to just be a promo [to play] on my show,” he says. “It was never supposed to be a record.”
“No Pigeons” was a more contemptuous extension of “Cheapskate” and its remix. It castigated women who had the nerve to dole out criticism like their own shit didn’t stink. The song added a heavy dose of retaliatory venom to the group’s trademark comedic panache, all in the name of evening the score for men via a tit-for-tat approach.
Welcome to 1999 Music Week
Join us as we travel back 20 years to explore a fascinating time in pop music
The original “No Scrubs” put anyone who fit the description on notice: “A scrub checkin’ me, but his game is kinda weak / And I know that he cannot approach me / ’Cause I’m lookin’ like class and he’s lookin’ like trash, can’t get with a deadbeat ass,” Chilli sings. “No Pigeons” offered a more cutting breakdown: “I got two nuts bitch, choose a ball / You only walk pigeon-toed ‘cause your shoes are small / You don’t shop, you just cruise the mall / No dough with Lee press-ons, frontin with your girlfriend’s dress on,” Big Dubez raps. And Sporty Thievz just piled on the antagonism from there.
“The concept is dirty chicks who are doing niggas dirty, so we’re calling them this—and then ‘No Scrubs’ was vice versa,” King Kirk says, who was 24 at the time of the song’s release. “I think it was really more of an expression of how we felt back then. We were young and that’s how the ’hood was. It was disrespectful like that.”
King Kirk maintains that Sporty Thievz wasn’t personally offended by “No Scrubs,” noting that he even agrees with TLC’s denouncement of a certain type of loser (“I call those niggas birds, too,” he says). Instead, he insists “No Pigeons” was a humorous attempt to battle the “scrub” label, especially when it didn’t fit: “It was more like us putting on Superman capes. We weren’t battling rappers, it was more like we were battling this entity—this word.”
TLC always held the position that non-scrubs shouldn’t be bothered by “No Scrubs.” Any accusations of materialism, or attempts to point out the irony of TLC’s critique considering they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1995, were moot because being a “scrub” was about not being shit rather than not having shit. “If you’re not a scrub, then … a hit dog will holler, right?” Chilli told NPR earlier this year. And anyone who seriously believed “No Pigeons” would restore balance to the universe in the name of gender parity lived in an alternate reality where women had equal rights in the first place. There’s rich humor in men taking offense to a record that justifiably takes them to task, considering how men have disrespected women on wax for years. TLC’s being honest about what they wouldn’t stand for was treated like an affront to men at large. A reasonable statement of preference—“I don’t want a scrub”—dug into their insecurities. Even though the response record highlighted those insecurities, TLC viewed it primarily as entertainment; after all, their record was already a smash on its own. For Sporty Thievz, everything changed after Funkmaster Flex put “No Pigeons” in rotation on Hot 97.
“He put the needle to the vinyl, and it never got off,” King Kirk says.
Mister Cee was one of Funkmaster Flex’s colleagues at Hot 97 for 20 years. As a result, he heard “No Pigeons” quite often back in ’99—even before it became a national hit. Exclusivity gives DJs a competitive advantage, so Flex never wanted the same records other DJs had. “No Pigeons” was an edge, and one Flex played a key role in orchestrating. “It’s just typical Flex: going against the grain and picking a record that’s not on anybody’s radar, on a big scale,” Mister Cee says. “He just embraced it and made it to where it became a big record.”
“No Pigeons” quickly snowballed into a hit. According to a 1999 MTV News report, former Hot 97 program director Tracy Cloherty said the song was receiving roughly 40 spins a week—an impressive number for a group who had previously failed to gain significant radio traction. (The best-known version features only Sporty Thievz, as stations began clipping Mr. Wood$’s verse. “As a DJ, I know once you get to the three-minute range, you’re not gonna rock the whole record out,” DJ Rhude says.) The song worked its way up the Billboard charts, but its most impressive accomplishment, by far, was creating a situation where DJs had to play both it and “No Scrubs” in clubs. Douglas Century’s New York Times article depicts the scene at a pre-party for Vibe magazine’s Style Awards where Biz Markie played both records in succession:
The women on the dance floor let out a collective shriek and started to sing along with the ballad that slams good-for-nothing men. “I don’t want no scrub / A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me / Hangin’ out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride / Tryin’ to holler at me.”
But after only a few teasing bars, Biz Markie segued into a new response record, ‘’No Pigeons,’’ by Sporty Thievz, a rap trio from Yonkers. Now, it was the male revelers’ turn to whoop and holler, waving glasses of Moet overhead, and rapping along with lyrics like: “This ain’t my Benz, it’s my man’s yeah / But this ain’t my car like that ain’t your hair.”
Undaunted, the women only got louder, trying to drown out the men by repeating the hook of the TLC hit.
“In a club, the whole thing is to get people to engage on the dance floor,” Osorio says. “When you have an anthem like that, you have the ladies on one hand who are going to call it out and just have fun with it. Then, of course, you want to play the response, so you get that same energy from the men.”
According to Flex, it was at Manhattan’s Tunnel, arguably the most storied nightclub in hip-hop history, where he first saw the potential of “No Pigeons.” “I knew it was big because I threw it on in the Tunnel and it tore,” he says. “That’s how we knew we had something.” It was men’s impassioned reaction to “No Pigeons” in the clubs that also confirmed the song’s power to Mister Cee. “To hear men recite certain parts of the record, they were doing it just like how women were doing ‘No Scrubs,’” he explains. “When I saw that type of reaction in the club, that’s when I knew it was a monster record.” Conversely, King Kirk realized its magnitude upon seeing women’s response to it. “To watch women sing what we threw at them for throwing things at us—and to sing it harder than what they threw at us—it was amazing,” he recalls. “We didn’t expect it to be that powerful.”
This wasn’t, of course, the first instance of a response record igniting a huge cultural moment. “It’s like ‘Roxanne, Roxanne’: The record became so big that everyone wanted a piece of it,” Osorio says, comparing the situation to the famous Roxanne battles of the 1980s. But “No Scrubs” vs. “No Pigeons” was bigger than both songs, escalated by the disconnect between men and women. “This battle of the sexes has been raging since some caveman first competed to provide his woman with the biggest moose pelt,” Lonnae O’Neal Parker wrote for The Washington Post about the response to “No Scrubs” in 1999. “Money on a man is like pretty on a woman. Both are biological hot buttons.” That’s a highly flammable situation, so adding respect, disrespect, and humor to it was the perfect recipe for conflict.
“I thought it was clever,” said original “No Scrubs” song cowriter Burruss to NPR about “No Pigeons.” “I love the fact that they flipped the song and gave the male point of view. And plus, we ended up getting all the royalties from it.” (The bottom line here, to be honest.) “I think it’s fun,” T-Boz told The New York Times in 1999. “Battle of the sexes. It’s all good, because it helps us sell records.” And the fun played out across multiple platforms.
The music video for “No Pigeons,” itself a parody of Hype Williams’s new-millennium visuals for “No Scrubs,” received heavy airplay because, as King Kirk explains, networks like MTV wanted both videos in rotation—even back-to-back in some scenarios. A 1999 Village Voice piece even says BET went as far as to edit both videos together into an extended clip: seven-minutes of gender war madness. The situation, as unexpected as it was, created the perfect setup for Sporty Thievz to further capitalize. The universe, however, had other plans.
For all of Sporty Thievz’s good luck via “No Pigeons,” they were struck by misfortune when Ruffhouse Records ceased operation in May 1999, just as the song was taking off. Street Cinema, which peaked at no. 66 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, was repackaged with the addition of “No Pigeons,” which King Kirk says was a shrewd yet desperate move. Despite the success of “No Pigeons” as a single, Street Cinema was dead in the water commercially by that point. Adding “No Pigeons” was the only way to lift its sales. “[Columbia] had no choice because the momentum wasn’t there,” Kirk adds.
The issue with catching lightning in a bottle in that fashion is that whatever new audience you gain by way of your magic trick is going to expect the same payoff every single time. “Sometimes artists get that big single and then it’s hard to come with something even bigger,” says Ski, who produced the bulk of Street Cinema and served as the album’s executive producer. “They kept making the same type of song.”
“No Bills” and “Independent Menz”—Sporty Thievz send-ups of Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills” (another song written by Burruss that wields “scrub” as a weapon) and “Independent Women,” respectively—followed the same formula but failed to yield a comparable return. And Sporty Thievz’s subsequent nonremake records were unable to find national success, even while pursuing the same themes. “They had another big New York record called ‘Fuck I Look Like,’ which was basically ‘Cheapskate’ Part 2,” Mister Cee recalls. “It wasn’t anywhere near as big as ‘Cheapskate’ or ‘No Pigeons,’ but it was big here in New York.” Although “Fuck I Look Like” gained local traction, it felt like a facsimile of what the world had come to know them for. Even “La La,” another post-“No Pigeons” original, featured the same subject matter. Meanwhile, TLC had left the scrubs behind with “Unpretty,” reckoning with women’s struggle to live up to unrealistic beauty standards. It became FanMail’s second consecutive single to top the Billboard Hot 100.
Sporty Thievz envisioned themselves as everymen with strong concepts and equally strong rhymes; their sense of humor was just supposed to be a bonus. Being the knee-jerk male response to any popular song by popular women wasn’t sustainable. On one hand, they risked sounding like the most regressive dudes in the barbershop; on the other, it made their range seem extremely limited—which wasn’t the case. “I don’t think we—and I’m speaking from a DJ’s perspective—looked at them as a gimmick,” Mister Cee says. “Now, nationally, maybe they got looked at as a gimmick.” Funkmaster Flex believes Sporty Thievz were hamstrung by the mainstream’s perception. “People didn’t really understand them,” Flex says. “No Pigeons” and the repeated pursuit of a fleeting high left Sporty Thievz pigeonholed. Still, King Kirk is at peace with how it all played out.
“I think people gravitated to something and we got stuck there, but I realized when we got stuck, it wasn’t a bad thing. Because that’s who we were,” Kirk says. “Now, at times, it’s like, ‘Damn, I want y’all to hear Street Cinema.’ That used to bother me a lot, because you can have the fun side of me that parties every weekend, bagging chicks, but it’s like, damn, y’all don’t want none of that hard shit?” Sporty Thievz were left to fend for themselves due to industry politics and siloed after being dismissed as one-trick ponies. TLC, to no one’s surprise, continued to thrive. The group won three Grammys in 2000: Best R&B Album for FanMail and Best R&B Song and Best R&B Song by a Duo or Group for “No Scrubs.”
The most devastating blow to Sporty Thievz’s future, however, had nothing to do with music. Group member Marlon Brando was killed after being struck by a van in the Bronx in May 2001. Then, in April 2002—before TLC could finish their fourth studio album, titled 3D—Left Eye died following a car accident in Honduras. The two trios are bound by another similarity: loss.
“I think that’s the reason why we never got to the next level: Because right after the politics, we lost our brother,” Kirk says.
“No Scrubs” was evidence of TLC’s resilience and an extension of their reign over the latter half of the decade. “No Pigeons,” on the other hand, was a gift and a curse for Sporty Thievz. It was an immensely popular parody that paved the way for later humorous, occasionally disrespectful rap remakes of R&B songs (e.g. the Diplomats’ revamping Ghost Town DJ’s “My Boo” and G-Unit’s borrowing instrumentals from New Edition and The-Dream). The contentiousness that carried both songs beyond music is a timeless theme. Ludacris built an album around the concept, titled Battle of the Sexes, in 2010. When Nicki Minaj released “Lookin Ass Niggas” in 2014, both battle-ready Philadelphia rapper Cassidy and singer Trey Songz offered responses. Writing for Complex in 2014, Damon Young cited the former as evidence that the “male rebuttal song isn’t extinct”—before noting that it “should be.” But the battle-of-the-sexes dynamic is everlasting. “The Cardi Bs are having fun with ‘let’s get this money, let’s get this money.’ You’ve got City Girls robbing cats in the rhymes,” King Kirk says. “The concept still applies, just in a different way.” Today, social media—home to the Hot Girl–City Boy rivalry—has given gender-based tug of wars a public medium. It’s a free-for-all that can sometimes be playful, but sometimes toxic, and often exhausting. But regardless, it’s a new way for men and women to go head-to-head without being face-to-face.
The history of “No Scrubs” and “No Pigeons” isn’t told only through their commercial successes, it’s in the interpersonal response to both records. Their legacy has always been about that energy: a distinct sweet spot in an age-old conflict between men and women. “No Pigeons” was a moment that can’t be erased, but couldn’t be replicated. The ripple effect caused by both songs eclipsed the music, extending a conversation that’s still going 20 years later.
Julian Kimble has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Undefeated, GQ, Billboard, Pitchfork, The Fader, SB Nation, and many more.