SOUNDTRACK: Bob Boilen’s Favorite Tiny Desk Concerts of 2019.
For 2020, I intend to put more albums in my Soundtrack section. But it’s amazing how time consuming that can be.
Nevertheless, I’ll always be posting about Tiny Desk Concerts because I watch all of them. So I’ll start 2020 with Bob Boilen’s favorite Tiny Desk Concerts of 2019.
It amuses me that Bob Boilen and I often share very similar tastes in music, but our favorite things are usually quite different.
When we first started filming musicians playing behind the Tiny Desk in April 2008, the beauty was in the intimacy and simplicity of these concerts. Now into our 11th year, after more than 900 Tiny Desks, the other treasure I find in these concerts is the variety. I remember having the cast of Sesame Street here in May, with NPR parents and their children seated on the floor watching the Muppets. The following Monday we had the blood red-faced raging of Idles, climbing all over the desk and singing “I’m Scum.” The scope of music is invigorating, especially considering a world of listening where we can not only get comfortable with what we love, but where the quantity of music from any particular genre could keep us happy all year. Tiny Desk concerts are here to shake up your tastes a little and help you stretch your ears and discover something you never knew existed or convert you to something you never thought you’d like. Here are 10 great examples of that magic from 2019.
- 47SOUL (read more)
- CHAI (read more)
- Ensemble Signal (read more)
- IDLES (read more)
- Lizzo (read more)
- Leikeli47 (read more)
- Quinn Christopherson (read more)
- Sesame Street (read more)
- The Comet Is Coming (read more)
- Taylor Swift (read more)
I don’t have a list of favoirtes, but I will make some observations about Bob’s.
Bob seems to really like bands who put their names in all caps. Also bands who have a number (specifically 47) attached to their letters.
Quinn was the Tiny Desk Contest winner. Sesame Street is pretty iconic. Taylor Swift is something of a surprise, but was clearly the biggest name they’ve ever had. And yet, Lizzo’s Tiny Desk has twice as many views as Taylor Swift’s (5 million to 2.5 million!).
Looking forward to their 1,000th show later this year. I wonder who it will be.
[READ: January 6, 2020] “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”
This was a great short story about playing a video game.
For decades, the video game industry has been releasing video games in which a protagonist kills people from other countries. Since I don’t play these games, I never really thought about what it would be like to be from that country and to play those games.
Surely people from all around the world like to play video games, and they probably want to play the popular ones as well.
In this story an an Afghani-American kid, Zoya, who works at Taco Bell has saved up all of his money (the money that he doesn’t give to his out of work father) to buy the final game in the Metal Gear series. He has been playing this series which has becomes “so fundamentally a part of your childhood that often, when you hear the Irish Gaelic chorus from “The Best is Yet to Come” you cannot help weeping softly into your keyboard.”
Zoya’s father was tortured by Russians in the Soviet War–the same Russian who killed his father’s brother Watak.
When Zoya gets home with the (hidden) game, his father calls him over and asks for help in the garden. He tells his father that he has to study first, so his father lets him go.
He puts in the game, pops in some MF Doom and gets ready to play.
The game is set in 1980s Afghanistan and the map of the country is beautiful. Zoya is not a nationalist who walks “around in a pakol and kameez” but he has been playing this game and shooting Afghanis for so long that he has become “oddly immune to the self-loathing you felt when you were first massacring wave after wave of militant fighters who looked just like your father.”
He gets into the game and the scenery looks just like the photos and his own blurred memory of his trip there when he was little. And soon enough, there is his father’s house. And there, in front of that house is Watak, his father’s 16 year old brother,
Zoya decides that he is going to save his father and uncle before they are tortured and killed. He attempts to tranquilize them, but when Watak sees the lazer beam, he freaks out and they flee. They also call reinforcements. Indeed, Zoya’s own aunt puts a machete right into his shoulder.
Then he hears his father’s voice calling to him.
What a fantastic idea and execution of a story. There’s a bit more that fully fleshes out Zoya’s home life which makes this internal struggle even more impactful.
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