Lady Tigra (née Rachel de Rougemont) and Bunny D (née Etterlene DeBarge)—collectively known as L’Trimm—were driving around in a black Peugeot when they heard their debut single, “Grab It” (1987), blasting through the speakers for the first time. Fueled with nothing but adrenaline, they hopped out of the car and started stomping on the hood, screaming with excitement. It was only the beginning for the two Miami teens, who would go on to find even more success with “Cars with the Boom,” the third single from their inaugural album, Grab It. The track, which landed at No. 54 on the Billboard Hot 100, was a playful ode to cars with bass-rattling speakers and the boys who drove them, and exploded with popularity upon its release.
In 2020, “Cars with the Boom” saw a massive resurgence thanks to another kind of boom—TikTok. With more than 2.8 million creations, soon it wasn’t just adults in their 40s rapping “It’s Tigra and Bunny/And we like the boom,” it was 15, 16, and 17-year-olds, a blessing not lost on Tigra and Bunny, who remain close friends.
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SPIN bumped into Lady Tigra on a yacht during a birthday party for J.J. Fad rapper MC JB in Marina del Rey last summer. She was as youthful as ever, full of love for hip-hop and anticipating the 2025 release of her new EP, Black Rice, which features Egyptian Lover, the Pharcyde, Kid of Kid ’n Play, and the first L’Trimm collaboration in 35 years, “Guillotine.” A few months later, we linked up with Tigra and Bunny to talk about “Cars with the Boom” and how two teenaged best friends help put Miami bass on the map.
IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY
Bunny: My grandfather wrote a song called “Hambone” when I was younger, so I grew up in Chicago going backstage at his performances. Then my other grandfather was also a recording artist with Chess Records. So he used to perform with Ray Charles and everything. The music thing is deep in my family. My great-grandfather is Louis Armstrong, my adopted great-grandfather. He’s playing music around the house. Lamont Dozier is my cousin, who was with Motown. He wrote all those songs for the Supremes and all that stuff under Dozier and Holland. It was Holland-Dozier-Holland. That’s my cousin.
Tigra: My family’s musical background was very different. My grandfather was the head of the National Philharmonic in Haiti, so he played the instruments. Bunny would come over to our house and there’d be drums and piano, and we’d just be playing music. When they moved here, my youngest uncle was 14 and my mom was in her 20s. Because there were nine of them, they had really different musical tastes. So my grandma would play classical music, but my uncle would play Bob Marley, my aunt would play Diana Ross and my mom would play French ballads. We grew up with that.
DIVINE INTERVENTION
Bunny: Tigra and I met when I went to Sunset High School. She went to Sunset High School. And then I moved to Kendall. And that’s how she and I met.
Tigra: I later moved to Kendall to go to high school because I was actually going to Pearl Gables High in Coconut Grove and the girls kept trying to jump me. So my mom was like, “Oh, we’re out of here.” They’re trying to cut my face and stuff. That’s how I ended up moving to Kendall.
ORIGINS
Tigra: When I met Bunny, we were featured dancers for this teen club, and the Gucci Crew used to film it and put it on pirate TV every Sunday. So we’d sneak out of the house and go dance. At the time, I was in a rap group with my junior high friend named Nikki, who ended up on our label later as Tricky Nikki doing a comeback song to MC Hammer’s “You Can’t Touch This” called “I Touched It.” Nikki went to another high school, and we met Bunny. She was cool, such a good dancer and so pretty. The three of us would do these little line dances to rap songs and one day, she was like, “I rap too.”
NO BEEF, THANK YOU
Tigra: We had a friend named Rob Gonzalez, who went by Mighty Rock. He had a popular local song called “Fresh Out the Box.” He was our ride because we didn’t have cars yet. We were too young to drive. One day he stopped by his studio, and Bunny and I were just kind of being Bunny and I, giddy and rapping and stuff. They’re like, “Have you ever heard of Salt-n-Pepa’s ‘Push It’? Can you guys rap?” And we’re like, “We already have a dance choreographed to it.”They’re like, “You think you can write a comeback song?” But we didn’t want to because they were our heroes. We didn’t want beef with them.
VROOM, VROOM
Tigra: We did just the first line [for “Grab It”] and then it just devolved into us talking about how great we were. The song locally kept getting bigger and bigger. As we were writing songs for an album, there was a B-side song and one of the guys in the office was like, “You should write about what you guys do all the time, when you cruise through the streets with the cars.” But we were like, “That’s whack.” It was the last song for the record. But we wrote it really quick. We’re like, “Yeah OK, let’s do a song about it.” We called it “Cars with the Boom” and banged it out. That ended up blowing up.
Bunny: We did the whole album really fast, too, in like a week. If that. It maybe took three days to do the whole album. But when I first started, I was already in a group with two guys and myself. I was so excited when Rachel and I got together because it’s so much better in a group with a girl. The guys were girl crazy. We hadn’t done anything yet, but they had the groupies and the whatever.
WAIT, WHAT?
Tigra: It was confusing [when “Cars with the Boom” blew up] because we felt like we had really strong tracks that we put our time into, where our flow was really displayed along with our creativity. We were like, “That’s the one that blew up?”
Bunny: We were surprised. But I remember we were driving down the street and they played our song on the radio for the first time. We were in Tigra’s car, going to go pick someone up from the airport.
Tigra: And the song comes on the radio, “Grab It,” the first single. When they said they were going to press 100 records, we didn’t understand. We only needed two. They’re talking about contracts and we’re like, whatever, because we wrote “Grab It” so fast. So we’re like, “Oh, cool. We get to have records. We’ll show off to our friends. Maybe we’ll give them out.”
We had no idea it would be on the radio until we were driving down the street. My aunt was picking someone up at the airport and she lived with us. The song comes on and she’s like, “Hey, stop playing. How did you do that?” I was like, “It’s not me! It’s on the radio!” All of a sudden we were touring. We had some other songs that had some mild success like “Better Yet L’Trimm” and “Sexy,” but nothing like “Cars with the Boom.” That song is what caused Atlantic to give us the distribution deal because we were on Hot Productions first.
Henry Stone, who started TK Records, noticed that there was a rap thing coming up and that Miami was doing the Miami bass thing, Uncle Luke [of 2 Live Crew] was already there [at the label]. He thought he should get rap girls, too. And boom, we kind of magically showed up at the studio. It just worked out.
STYLIN’ & PROFILIN’
Tigra: Atlantic put up a budget for the music video and flew us out to L.A. We always styled ourselves and designed our own costumes and stuff, but we had a stylist this time. She took us to Melrose, and we went to all the little shops and picked the pieces we wanted to wear. They had a choreographer for us, AJ Johnson, who was in the Kid ‘n Play movies, and she choreographed the dances before she started doing the video.
Bunny: I think the budget was $40,000. Back then, that was a good budget.
Tigra: I remember the cars. There was one that had a computer, which was like a big deal. There was one that had a shaving station.
Bunny: There was one with the hydraulics.
Tigra: And one with speakers that would make your hair blow back.
IT’S STILL HITTIN’
Tigra: I feel happy whenever I hear the song. That was a pivotal time in our lives. It was such a blessing. Kids our age didn’t get to do what we did. If they had a weekend job or a summer job, it was usually fast food. They didn’t get to do what we did and make the lifelong friends we got to make.It makes me happy when I think about it.
Bunny: This is something I never told Tigra. When I hear the song, I think about all the times that we spent together when we were kids and I miss her.
Tigra: We were always laughing and giggling. We were always together. We’re still always laughing and giggling. That’s how much fun we had too. I don’t pick up her phone calls unless I know I’ve got a good hour and a half to two hours.
Bunny: I do miss those days.
Tigra: We’re sisters. We grew up together and experienced something together that not many people in the world can ever say they experienced alone. We actually got to experience it with a best friend, a sister.
Bunny: It made it so much better that I had her.
A TIKTOK BOOM
Bunny: “Cars with the Boom” went viral on TikTok. That was a blessing.
Tigra: I love that it’s crossing generations. We’re always getting messages like, “My mom named me after you” or “I named my cat after you.”
Bunny: We are both getting that. I’m getting a lot of girls who are saying their mom named them after me, so it’s cool. For me, the coolest thing was my children getting excited. They’re proud to say I’m their mom now. That was really nice.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Tigra: You hear a lot about the misogyny, but I do want to shout out the dudes that were around us because they did treat us like little sisters.
Bunny: They were gentlemen.
Tigra: When you think about 2 Live Crew, you think of misogyny, but they wouldn’t let us out of our dressing rooms to watch their shows because they were protecting us. If we had events where we had to make appearances in some city, 240 Shorty from the Gucci Crew would literally drive to each of our houses to pick us up, and they’d stick us in the VIP room. We could only watch the dance floor. They wouldn’t let us get away with any shenanigans. So a lot of the guys were like big brothers, and they were not trying to hit on us. Of course, there were some who did, but most of them were gentlemen.
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