SOUNDTRACK: YOUNG FATHERS-Tiny Desk Concert #442 (May 19, 2015).
Young Fathers may have the shortest Tiny Desk Concert ever. It’s only 4 minutes long. I know that these are edited down from the full show, but wow.
Young Fathers evidently sing a kind of hip-hop, but in these two songs they don’t really rap very much and are more soulful. The members met in Edinburgh but are from distant exotic locales like Ghana and, um, Maryland.
Something must have happened with their technology. As the blurb says, “Full-on drums and electronics weren’t going to happen on this day.” So they chose a simpler path.
They sing two songs virtually a capella. I don’t know any of the members’ names, but there’s one singer for “Am I Not Your Boy” (the guy in the photo above). He has a soulful voice (more or less R&B) and there’s a simple keyboard backdrop.
On “Only Child” there are three vocalists, each taking a turn with a verse. It is surprising that the man who sounds Jamaican (the first singer) is white. The final vocalist raps, and then all three harmonize very nicely over the final chorus.
Bob Boilen raved about them when he saw them live. I’m not all that impressed, as they sound like any other R&B band to me, but a four-minute sampler isn’t all that much to go on.
[READ: February 12, 2015] Prime Baby
I’ve enjoyed just about everything that Gene Luen Yang has done. But I had no idea that a) he wrote a serialized comic strip and b) that it appeared from 2008-2009 in the New York Times Magazine!
It’s interesting to see these strips presented in one strip per page format. But far more interesting is the very strange direction that this story goes in.
It begins with the main character, a boy named Thaddeus K. Fong. He is a reasonably selfish young man with a penchant for saying things to get him in trouble. (He calls himself a martyr for truth). And then his parents have a baby. And his whole life is upended.
The baby girl only says the word, “ga.” His parents say that everyone develops in their own time, but he is not convinced. And one day, when he learns about prime numbers in math class, he realizes that his sister only says “ga” in increments of prime numbers. That is kind of interesting, but even more interesting is when his math teacher says that NASA has theorized that if aliens were to make contact with us it would be through prime numbers. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 