Last Month NOW 24.6
Shake my life out of my mouth.
Last Month NOW is a sequenced and annotated playlist of 30 tracks that I spent the prior month listening to, talking about and/or obsessing over. It’s not The Best Songs necessarily, but it’s not not that. It’s also a list of the albums I liked from the previous month. And probably some other things.
I usually open these mixes with my thoughts on something music-related. This time it’s longer. Scroll way down to the end of the post for the mix if you have no patience.
Otherwise: read me asking What’s The Deal With Tiny Desk?
Recently, Vulture wrote up the 50 best Tiny Desk performances from the full run of NPR’s redoubtable series, and author Matthew Ismael Ruiz’s top picks strongly align with mine, down to his winner (spoiler, it’s Juvenile [above]). Tiny Desk celebrated its 15th anniversary this year, and it did so by sending off its founder, the recently retired NPR veteran Bob Boilen, who, legend has it, started the series behind his own (not all that small) desk after not being able to see a Laura Gibson set at South By Southwest. In the decade and a half since, Ruiz argues, the series has ballooned into what he calls “a vehicle for discovery, free of pomp and circumstance.”
I’ll come back to that description later, but before that, I’d like to think through the moment in time when Tiny Desk emerged, and what it means. If you were there in the mid-to-late 2000s, Tiny Desk was far from alone: a lot of other video series were cramming musicians into small and/or unconventional spaces and recording them playing their songs (and covering others’) with minimal production or rehearsal (the latter strongly implied, if not always actual). There was London’s Black Cab Sessions, the Parisian La Blogotheque’s Takeaway Shows, Brooklyn-based Juan’s Basement at Pitchfork, and AV Club Undercover in Chicago. Then came the late-night expansion packs: James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, and Jimmy Fallon/the Roots’ Classroom Instruments.
I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a bit since Mark—always thinking like an editor—mentioned it to me in conversation on his porch earlier this summer. A couple weeks later, my friend, TV/social media scholar, newsletterer, and erstwhile Indiana Hoosier colleague Cory circulated a conference CFP about the role of Hot Ones, Criterion Closet, etc. in “defining celebrity in the modern attention economy.”
I drizzled some of those aforementioned music series into the Google blender and, I can’t even make this up, among the top results was a fourteen-year-old review of an Asobi Seksu EP that I wrote. Just like Asobi Seksu’s music,1 writing that review had been completely erased from my mind, but I apparently scrawled:
“Remix albums might be the new live albums, but over the past few years, ‘sessions’ have also come to prominence as a way for artists to reimagine or repurpose their music in a variety of different scenarios. Things like Daytrotter, La Blogotheque, Black Cab Sessions, ‘Don't Look Down’ and other Pitchfork.tv shows, and AOL Sessions, have become the ‘MTV Unplugged’ for the era of inexpensive digital technology, constantly shifting economic imperatives, and small-but-fervent online publics.”
A bit overwritten (“come to prominence”) but overall not bad, 2009 me.
The live-to-tape online performance format started proliferating in the early 2000s as big radio stations like BBC and KCRW started plugging prehistoric digital cameras into their pre-existing live studio setups for touring bands. It made sense at a time of ever-increasing internet speeds, post-YouTube video processing advances, and a glut of “cool” Pitchfork-y bands looking for any kind of promo and a glut of “cool” sites/publications looking for the same (remember Daytrotter [above]?). It’s possible to maybe even trace a genealogy of online video streaming more generally through this kind of programming, like in 2002 when AOL saw the opportunity to provide exclusive material for its broadband subscribers, launching AOL Sessions with exclusive live sets, like this one from a young, preppy, and charming Kanye West:
By the 2010s, as these kinds of videos started proliferating, the post-freak folk “twee” moment was waning but still exerting cultural influence, and social media platforms were incentivizing displays of DIY creativity. A year before Tiny Desk launched came Black Cab Sessions, which crammed indie bands in the back of actual cabs driven by actual cabbies and shot their performances while they cruised the city’s streets. A couple years later, when Josh Modell found “a really strange round room” in the Onion’s Chicago offices, he instantly wanted “to have bands come and perform inside this odd little cylinder.” Thus began AV Undercover, which would run for eight seasons in its initial incarnation, introduce a small performative challenge—playing one of a handful of pre-chosen cover songs—into the proceedings.
Because it was part of a much larger and growing infrastructure—NPR Music itself started in 2007—Tiny Desk rose above the rest of its peers, such that “Tiny Desk” has now become a synecdoche for “video of band performing somewhere other than on stage.” And digging through the well-kept archive demonstrates two things: first, just how far digital video has evolved—this 2008 Shearwater clip looks like it was shot on a flip phone—and second and more importantly, just how “indie rock” and “roots” and “white” Tiny Desk (and NPR Music) was. That was NPR’s demo, then (and to a lesser degree now), after all: college-educated white people who like strummy guitar and retro soul. So it wasn’t a total shock when, six years in, they booked “I’m In Love With A Stripper”-singing T-Pain, on the condition that he “grace the Tiny Desk without any embellishment or effects to show what's really made his career: his voice, and those songs” (emphasis mine). T-Pain’s video going viral 10 years ago was at once great for T-Pain’s ongoing career, but also a still-irritating assertion from NPR Music that the Auto-Tuned version of T-Pain was the fake version of his artistry, instead of a revolutionary use of a studio technology.
T-Pain’s uber-viral performance was the moment when I realized that Tiny Desk Concerts were doing for 2010s music what MTV Unplugged was trying to do for 1990s rock: (re-)authenticate the music by stripping it down to the studs. Philip Auslander was the first to connect the late-1990 Milli Vanilli lip-syncing “scandal” and the synchronous rise of the MTV live performance establishment2 that, by 1992-93, was cranking out not just compelling live music TV but award-winning and million-selling Unplugged™ albums by Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey, Pearl Jam, Arrested Development, Nirvana, and Neil Young (I’ve argued before that Unplugged is the best 10,000 Maniacs LP). It’s worth noting that before any of these rock musicians recorded their sessions, Unplugged pulled the power cords on hip hop with the epochal Yo! MTV Raps episode, recorded in early 1991.
I’m not totally ready to make the jump from Unplugged’s response to a perceived pop authenticity crisis in the early 1990s to Tiny Desk hitching NPR Music’s wagon to acoustic beard-oil folk-rock in 2008, when the only rock stuff on the iTunes download-fueled charts was Coldplay and Jason Mraz. Regardless, now that the indie/roots brake lines have been severed, you can watch Tinys Desk from Rick Ross and Flo Milli and Usher and GWAR and 311 and O-Rod and Chappy Ro and T-Swizzle and just about any musician you could imagine. Indeed, more than any other music-focused publication or organization, you can chart the cultural diversification of “indie” and the U.S. music crit public sphere through the evolution of NPR Music and Tiny Desk, amid the post-Obama shift in the American structure of feeling around race and cultural difference and a refreshing turn to pop-friendly arts coverage, leading NPR (and Pitchfork and everyone else) to dramatically and belatedly reshape their staffs and coverage priorities (a much larger topic for another time).3
Of course such a great idea (and cheap, and easy to shoot, and novel) idea as Tiny Desk will always quickly swim upstream, and soon enough Jimmy Fallon and The Roots (“Classroom Instruments”) and James Corden’s less-fun (“Carpool Karaoke”) segments translated the modest format into a platform for the 1% of pop stars to sing their songs in the car or with kazoos and stuff. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay to the Tiny Deskification of streaming live-to-tape music performance is that it’s the only format within which the notoriously annoying but musically capable Fallon and Corden are even remotely tolerable. Especially with NBC recently cropping Fallon to four nights a week, what remains of live-to-tape broadcast TV vis-a-vis the ongoing proliferation of social video platforms is an intriguing thread to follow.
Live performance has always been a crucial part of the music ecosystem, but coming back to the first paragraph, Ruiz calling Tiny Desk “a vehicle for discovery, free of pomp and circumstance” feels a bit…platform-y to me. When people ask about the future of music criticism, especially after this annus horribilis for the field, the conversation eventually turns to video, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. As Pitchfork scrapes by with a skeleton crew and Vice, Spin, The Village Voice et al stumble around like zombies, NPR’s Tiny Desk crew shot 118 of these suckers in 2023 and almost that many this year. Is Tiny Desk the new Pitchfork at this point, “in terms of ‘music discovery’ for newer acts and the ever-important ‘acknowledgement translates to a better chance of getting booked at festivals’”? Are there any alternatives?
OH, RIGHT. HERE’S THAT MIX
Megan Thee Stallion f. Yuki Chiba, “Mamushi”
Gunna, “one of wun”
Junglepussy, “Effortless”
Cornelius, “Sketch for Spring”
Haruomi Hosono f. Cornelius, “Bara To Yaju”
Becker & Mukai f. Yama Warashi, Fimber Bravo, “Kinoko No Kioku”
Joe Goddard f. Barrie, “Moments Die”
DJ Mustard and Travis Scott, “Parking Lot”
James Blake, “Thrown Around”
Yaeji, “booboo”
Flying Lotus, “Garmonbozia”
Mica Levi, “slob air”
Keeley Forsyth, “The Hollow”
Kiran Leonard, “Pass Between Houses”
Asher White, “Dream Design House”
Anastasia Coope, “Woke Up And No Feet”
Marina Allen, “Red Cloud”
Chris Cohen, “Night or Day”
Luke Temple, “Second Half”
La Luz, “Dandelions”
Clairo, “Juna”
Moses Sumney, “Vintage”
Schoolboy Q f. Freddie Gibbs, “oHio”
Meshell Ndegeocello, “Love”
Titanic, “Cielo Falso”
Total Blue, “Heart of the World”
Greg Foat, “Foals of Epona”
Anna Butterss, “Shorn”
Oded Tzur, “Renata”
Tomasz Stanko Quartet, “September Night”
I’m sorry that Asobi Seksu took a stray here. I still put on for “Thursday,” a perfect song in that gushy, neon-lit, John Hughes-style teen emotion, M83 “Kim & Jessie” way.
MTV launched Unplugged after Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora played “Wanted Dead or Alive” on stools with acoustic instruments at the 1989 Video Music Awards and the guys in ties thought it looked and sounded cool.
A good portion of said broadening is due to avowed poptimist critic and mentor to countless young critics Ann Powers, whose epochal Turning The Tables series retold pop/rock history from womens’ perspectives, starting in 2017.
Good preview for this Spring—hopefully!
Terrific, Eric. There's def been some previous discussion of the unbearable whiteness of Tiny Desk and its underlying ideological assumptions (of course it is also great sometimes). But I love how you connect it to so many things here, including the state of criticism.