SOUNDTRACK: TIWA SAVAGE-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #72 (August 31, 2020).
I don’t know who Tiwa Savage is. Although apparently she is quite well- known. Savage is
a veteran R&B and Afrobeat singer who began her career at age 11. For her Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, Tiwa Savage returned, from London, to her birthplace of Lagos, Nigeria. She and The Alternative Sound band set up at the beautiful Jazzhole, a historic vinyl shop well-regarded among record collectors for the rarities within.
After Billie Eilish’s fake backdrop of the NPR office, this backdrop does have an NPR office feel, too.
With floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with books and albums as a backdrop, it certainly seems familiar to us, too — reminiscent of our performance cubicle at NPR HQ.
She plays four songs. I really like Kenneth Ogueji’s bass sound throughout–very fluid and grooving.
On “Dangerous Love” she “speaks to matters of the heart.” The song has a lot of high guitar notes from Phillip Akinkuande–fills and trills that flesh out the song nicely. I also really like how a few times the song seems to smooth to a halt, just to pick up in unison again.
She says “I want you to vibe with us a little longer. I want to bring some Afrobeat to your screens.”
“Attention” has a nice, complex drum opening from Stanley Unogu and some very cool bass fills and runs. There’s a lot of piano on this song, although I don’t know if it’s from Gospel Obi or Orowo Ubiene.
She sings the Reekado Banks single “Like” that she featured on. This song is kind of odd as she keeps singing “Go go shorty it’s your birthday.”
She ends the set with “Koroba,” her newest single. The song “blends her native Yoruba language with Nigerian Pidgin English, underpinned by a catchy, feel-good rhythm.”
This is the danceyest and most fun song of the set.
[READ: August 31, 2020] “Gunsmoke”
I really enjoyed this story.
It begins with the narrator, Alice, saying that her father has a gun and won’t come out of his house.
She received a call from a policeman telling her that her father has not made payments on his house recently and he is about to be evicted. And yet there he sits with his gun, pointing it at the cops.
It turns out that this particular policeman, Bobby, is someone she slept with in high school. So they have a bit of a history. She messes with him a bit (her dad has always been eccentric), but Bobby is serious. He asks if she will get involved. She says she’ll call him. But he has cut the phone lines. Shit.
Alice’s father was a stunt man in the movies. He worked mostly in Westerns in the fifties and sixties. I love this insight into the world of the stunt man. He could fall off of a horse, or a building or just about anything. His only flaw was that he was quite short, but that didn’t stop him from getting work–make up and camera angles could make up the difference.
In one movie there was a battle between the Indians and the Army. He dressed as a Comanche for one of the shots then changed into a lieutenant’s uniform for the other. In the final product, “there was a scene of a heavily made up Indian pulling a soldier off a horse. The Indian stabbed the soldier in the chest with a knife at close range. The final two closeups of the victor and the vanquished revealed them both to be my father.
Alice also works in films, although when people ask her about it they are inevitably disappointed. She does post-production voice over work. She was in Titanic–she was the screams of some people drowning and the chewing in the eating room scenes.
She arrives at her father’s house. The police are still there. She knocks on the door and immediately has to tell her dad it’s her so he doesn’t shoot her.
She only visits her dad once a year and he looks a lot older each year–desert rats don’t age well. She offers to help him pack up and move but he won’t put the gun down. She’s not really afraid of him, just concerned.
Later she heads out to the store to get some decent food for dinner (he only has soup). She sees Bobby in the store and they catch up. He says he’s on his night off from his wife–she says they are in rut so they need to bring new experiences to the marriage. He is supposed to go to the movies and come home and talk about it with her.
So Alice and Bobby go to the movies together. They watch a movie in which she is the laughter of a girl on screen and then later: “That’s my kissing sound…tongue and everything.” When he shouts to the crowd that she is the kisser in the movie, she covers his mouth with her hand. When he licks her skin, they of course end up making out in his car.
The next morning, Alice’s father has to make a decision. When the police tell him to vacate, he cocks his gun. Is this a stunt?
I really enjoyed that there were so many great details in this story–some of them didn’t really pertain to the plot but which fleshed out the story really nicely.
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