SOUNDTRACK: ROD WAVE-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #201 (April 29, 2021).
I was shocked when this show open and Rod Wave started singing because his voice was terrible!
He couldn’t hit the notes and he’s straining all over the place. So I was rns out shocked to read
It’s been said that Rod Wave could be an R&B or blues singer in another era. With this Tiny Desk concert, anchored by the interplay of flute, piano, bass and drums, he seems to suggest: Why not this one?
What? The rest of the blurb gives some context, I think.
The first song Rod Wave performs in his Tiny Desk concert comes with a bit of a wink. The St. Petersburg, Fla., rapper interpolates Drake’s “Over My Dead Body,” the delicate intro to Take Care. Like Drake, Rod Wave makes sad, melodic rap music.
The rest of “OMDB” is rapped and his rapping is pretty solid, but man, when he sings, it’s so awkward.
He talks about his new album after the song and I honestly didn’t understand a word he said the first time. How can a decent rapper be such a bad speaker?
I like the music on “his 2020 hit record ‘Rags2Riches.'” Live flute always sounds great and it sounds especially good here when Tomoka Nomura-Jarvis plays against the slow bass from Franckelson Brunot.
I’m always surprised when I find out someone I have never even heard of is huge: “he’s quite clearly one of the biggest rappers in the country right now.” So obviously I don’t know anything.
“Street Runner” starts with a sampled female voice–I assume that’s what the (“featuring Ruth B.”) refers to–and piano from Gil Smith. Drummer Hosny Franck mixes organic and electronic drums to good effect on this ballad. But I swear he is flat when he sings “higher and higher.”
The set ends with “Don’t Forget.” Tomoka Nomura-Jarvis switches to saxophone (which I like a lot less than the flute). Although the end of the song features an instrumental jam that I quite like. Especially the drum flourishes from Franck.
[READ: June 1, 2021] “Ice Cream and Ashes”
The June 11 issue of the New Yorker had several essays under the heading “Summer Movies.” Each one is a short piece in which the author (many of whom I probably didn’t know in 2007 but do know now) reflects on, well, summer movies.
Roger Agnell says that summer movies don’t have to be about summer [true] and don’t have to open in the summer [um…].
He argues that summer movie are movies that come up with friends on a long drive or hanging out or just before bed: “What was the name of the movie where the cow falls down a well and everybody’s looking for that famous old Irish tenor?” Of course now we would just look it up, but in 2007 we had to … no wait, in 2007 we could look it up, too.
Some summer movies are counter-classics. 1940’s Remember the Night which isn’t Double Indemnity, or Tremors the Kevin Bacon vs underground-monster-worms movie that made sequels and has ended up on TV at all hours. He even mentions Trees Lounge, which opened and disappeared in a nanosecond [but which I really liked]. Steve Buscemi directed, wrote and starred.
But the bulk of the essay is about Quest for Fire, a movie that I have seen maybe way back in 1982. I think of it (or the title at least) fairly often, but I don’t remember much about the movie. His summary makes it sound pretty good.
It’s a 1982 French-Canadian caveman movie–about Neanderthals trying to get fire when their fire source goes out. There’s no subtitles, because the dialogue (created by Anthony Burgess!) is mostly grunts–but different grunts depending on the tribe. Rae Dawn Chong is the heroine–covered mostly in ash for the movie.
The movie has a lot of drama and tension as well as a good score (by Phillip Sarde).
He says it wasn’t quite a box office hit and it wasn’t cheesy enough for a cult, but the joy of watching it was finding friends “who had also just come upon this strange little flick for the first time and were dying to talk.”
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