SOUNDTRACK: CLIPPING-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert Meets SXSW: #190 (April 5, 2021).
Every year, NPR Music participates in the SXSW music festival, whether it’s curating a stage or simply attending hundreds of shows at the annual event in Austin, Texas. Last year, the festival was canceled due to the pandemic, but it returned this March as an online festival. We programmed a ‘stage’ of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and presented them on the final day of the festival. Now, we present to you Tiny Desk Meets SXSW: four videos filmed in various locations, all of them full of surprises.
clipping. is an intense band. I had the pleasure of seeing them live opening for the Flaming Lips. I was hoping to see them again before the pandemic hit. This Tiny Desk doesn’t in any way replicate a live show because they play a little visual trick on the viewer–and they keep it up for the whole set.
Leave it to clipping. to innovate around the central notion of the Tiny Desk; to take the series’ emphasis on close-up intimacy and transport it to new heights of, well, tininess.
clipping is a dark, violent band
Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes craft a bed of hip-hop, industrial music and noisy experimentalism, then set loose rapper Daveed Diggs, whose violent imagery summons ’90s horrorcore and a thousand bloody movies. The band’s last two album titles — There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned — offer up a sense of the vibe, but Diggs’ gift for rapid-fire wordplay also acts as a leavening agent.
That’s right, Daveed Diggs.
The guy won a Tony Award for playing Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in Hamilton, and he still knows how to sell every word that leaves his lips.
So it’s especially amusing to see them have a lot of fun with the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert. The video opens with a few scenes of tables and gear. But when the show starts, Daveed Diggs picks up a microphone that’s about the size of a toothpick and starts rapping into it.
And when William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes come in they are playing laptops and other gear that’s barely an inch in length. I have to assume that this stuff doesn’t actually work and yet they are taking their job very seriously–touching and sliding and tapping and looping on these preposterous toys.
“Something Underneath” starts quietly and then Diggs shows off some of is incredibly fast rapping skills. Then the guy on the right (I’m not sure who is who) comes into the cameras and starts messing with his tiny gear. After about 2 minutes the guy on the left comes in and starts making all kinds of distorted beats. It starts getting louder and louder and louder until the noise fades out and its just Diggs’ voice looping “morning” as he moves the camera and he starts the slower track
The only movement in the video is Diggs moving his camera around to different angles for each song.
“Bout That” is fairly quite until a few minutes in when the song launches off.
Diggs shifts his camera and is finally fully on screen before they start the creepy “Check the Lock.” It’s got clanking and scratching and pulsing noises for the line
something in this room didn’t used to be / he ain’t ever scared tough / but he check the lock every time we walks by the door.
Midway through the guy on the left starts cranking a tiny music box and he plays it through the next two songs.
It segues into “Shooter” [is there a name for this style of rapping–each line has a pause and a punchline–I really like it].
The music box continues into “The Show” which starts to build louder and louder, getting more an more chaotic. It fades and builds noisier and chaotic once more until it reduces to a simple beat. And the guy on the right drinks from his can of BEER.
Noisy squealing introduces “Nothing Is Safe.” Daveed is pretty intense as he raps “death comes for everyone” pause and then full on sound as he resumes.
clipping is not for everyone–certainly not for people who want to see the guy from Hamilton (he was doing clipping before Hamilton, by the way). But it creates an intense mood.
The blurb says that Chukwudi Hodge plays drums, but I didn’t see or hear any so i assume that’s a mistake.
[READ: April 21, 2021] Better Than Life
I don’t recall when I started watching Red Dwarf–some time in the 90s, I suspect. I don’t even know of the show was ever very poplar here in the States, so it’s kind of a surprise that these two Red Dwarf novels even had a U.S. release. But they did. And I bought them sometime when they came out.
So Grant Naylor is the cleverly combined names of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor–back when they were working together (I’m not sure why one of them left). They penned two Red Dwarf books together, then they each wrote a Red Dwarf book separately.
This second book picks up from where the events of the previous book cliffhangered us. There is a TV episode called “Better Than Life” and this book is kind of an super- mega-hyper-expanded version of that episode. Except that the things that happened in the episode don’t even really happen in the book, either.
The basics of the episode are that Better Than Life is a video game that allows your deepest subconscious fantasies to come true. And since everything is your fantasy, this game is indeed Better Than Life. It’s easy to leave the game. All you have to do is want to. But who would want to leave a game when everything in it is better than what you’d be leaving it for?
As such, your body stars to wither and decay because you don’t eat, you don’t move, you just exist. It’s a deadly game.
Rimmer’s fantasy at the end of the first book was that he had married a supermodel–a gorgeous babe whom every man wanted. Except that she wouldn’t let him touch her for insurance reasons. Rimmer has a problem or thirty with his self image. But he was still super wealthy and women everywhere adored him. However as this book opens, he has divorced his babe and married a boring woman who also doesn’t want to have sex with him. As thing move along, he loses his fortune and, ultimately his hologrammatic body. He becomes just a voice. Through a serious of hilarious mistakes, he winds up in the body of a woman.
One of the nice aspects of this book is that Grant Naylor have Rimmer see what a douchey sexist man he’s been all this time–believing all women were either his mother or a sex bomb.
The Cat’s scenario is pretty much all libido–Valkyrie warriors serving him and he gets to do pretty much whatever he wants–his clock doesn’t have times, it has activities: nap, sex, eat, nap, sleep, etc.
The one difference is that Kryten is there with him. Kryten’s deepest fantasy is leaning, and so he keeps finding new things to clean in Cat’s world.
There’s another wonderful bit of anti-religion in this book (there’s always some anti-religion aspect in these stories). In this one they talk about Silicon Heaven.
The best way to keep the robots subdued was to give them religion. … almost everything with a hint of artificial intelligence was programmed to believe that Silicon Heaven was he electronic afterlife….
If machines served their human masters with diligence and dedication, they would attain everlasting life in mechanical paradise when their components finally ran down.
At last they had solace. They were every bit as exploited as they’d always been, but now they believed there was some kind of justice at the end of it.
Lister’s fantasy is the same as it was before. He’s living in the city from It’s a Wonderful Life and he’s married to Kristine Kochanski and he has two boys. As the book opens there’s a wonderfully touching moment with his family and his kids.
But it is abruptly demolished when a woman driving a tractor trailer crashes the truck in to Bedford Falls. Literally all of Bedford Falls–every building is demolished or caught on fire. There’s virtually nothing left. And when the woman gets out of the truck dressed as a prostitute and claims to know Lister, well, Kristine takes their boys and leaves him. He has nothing.
It should come as no surprise that the woman is actually Rimmer.
What about Holly, the ship’s computer with an IQ of 6,000? Can’t he save them? Well, no. He can’t get into the game, plus, he’s going a little crazy from being alone for so long. So crazy in fact that he decides to start talking to Talkie Toaster, a gag gift that Lister bought for $19.99.
The sequence with the toaster is hilarious on the show (it only wants to talk about bready products!) and it translates perfectly to the book as well. Essentially, Talkie Toaster encourages Holy to increase his IQ (which has been slowly leaking away) at the risk of shortening his life span. Unfortunately, things go a little awry and Holly’s IQ eclipses 12,000. But his run time is cut to a number if minutes.
So he need to turn everything off if he wants to stay alive. (more…)
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I have seen The Flaming Lips six times and they never disappoint. In fact, the last time, I said to myself that I wanted to bring my kids next time so they could enjoy the spectacle of inflatables, and confetti and balloons and lights and everything.
