Why, in the first month of 2023, am I forced to remember Hobo Johnson? It’s been almost five years since the Sacramento-based singer/poet emerged via videographic audition for NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, which was in its fourth year. The video, in which Johnson (government name Frank Lopes) jumps around his backyard talk-singing while his bandmates accompany from plastic folding chairs, had an undeniable magnetism from the minute it dropped. It may have helped that I was also living in Northern California at the time, playing music in an “underdog” scene, and so I naturally felt kinship toward Lopes despite his performance resembling a young Lin Manuel-Miranda being cast in Project X.
Hobo Johnson did not win NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, a fact that has been somewhat lost to time. The honor was bestowed to Naia Izumi, a guitar virtuoso from Columbus, Georgia. But six months after the world first met Frank Lopes in his backyard, and well after the results of the contest were finalized, Hobo Johnson & The Lovemakers appeared behind the iconic desk in D.C., notably the only contest runner-up to do so.
Hobo Johnson and his magnificent mullet came back into our lives this month thanks to the below tweet resurfacing:
The resurgent performance kicked off a myriad of takes, most of them reveling in the shared cultural embarrassment of remembering a brief moment in time when Hobo Johnson had been sort of a thing. Interestingly, this was not the only online squabble about Tiny Desk of late. There was a bizarre tweet, seemingly unprompted, from Chris Dexter Greenspan of the band Drab City:
![Twitter avatar for @oOoOOsounds](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/oOoOOsounds.jpg)
![Image](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFmSyiPTWABE_rno.jpg)
While I’m of the mind that Greenspan’s tirade is intentionally absurd and meant to cull backlash, it got me thinking about Tiny Desk as a cultural artifact in its 15th year, and what I feel is a worthwhile question: do we still need it?
Tiny Desk Concerts were born out of the frustration of not being able to hear an artist at a crowded bar. At 2008’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin, NPR Music producers Stephen Thompson and Bob Boilen were covering the festival and searching for undiscovered talent when they were disappointed by the atmosphere in a bar where singer-songwriter Laura Gibson was performing. After her set, Thompson jokingly proposed that Gibson come to D.C. and perform at Boilen’s desk, so they could hear her better. They did just that, and the first NPR Tiny Desk Concert was published to the internet on April 22, 2008. There have been 1,026 since, at the time of writing this piece. In its fifteen years of existence, Tiny Desk has arguably become the most important “live” music media entity of the digital era. Its inspirations extend as far back as mid-century staples like American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show, and it has in turn inspired innumerable contemporaries, from Jam in The Van to COLORS.
Tiny Desk’s closest ancestor, however, is the legendary MTV Unplugged which ran as a 60-minute television program from 1989 to 2009. Unlike the humble beginning of the NPR Music program, Unplugged debuted at MTV’s peak and saw almost immediate success thanks to a string of immensely popular artists paring down their usual live production to something minimal and grounded. In its first five years, the roster of Unplugged performers included Rod Stewart, Aerosmith, Mariah Carey, De La Soul, Bruce Springsteen, and Nirvana. Robert Small, the co-creator of the series, claimed that the idea for Unplugged came from his experiences as a roadie with metal bands. He was witness to the quiet, behind-the-scenes moments of hotel room and tour bus rehearsals, which allowed for a vulnerability otherwise polished over in the complexity of live production.
It’s clear that Small’s ethos of intimacy is a driving force behind Boilen and co’s project. The production value of Tiny Desk concerts has evolved considerably over time but the audio production team led by Josh Rogosin still doesn’t use a PA to amplify vocals in the room. This has been perhaps the key constraint of the Tiny Desk format: artists cannot play as loud as they are used to playing. Performers have admitted to chafing against the limitation: Adrienne Lenker of Big Thief noted the challenge the band faced in fitting their big-room sound into a small space. I can imagine that in the room that day, one might have strained to hear her understated vocal delivery but the filmed concert showcases the band’s unparalleled control and synchronicity.
Other performers have embraced the inherent disorientation of the Desk’s staging, with brilliant results, like UK post-punk outfit IDLES’ Joe Talbot going red in the face from screaming and not dialing back the energy for a single second of the band’s 2019 performance. Similarly, Paul Janeway, the eponymous frontman of Alabama’s St. Paul and the Broken Bones, begins their performance standing atop Boilen’s desk and stays there, seeming as at home as a preacher behind the pulpit, his voice soaring into the office’s tiled ceiling.
Like its predecessor Unplugged, the Tiny Desk Concert series positions itself as a sort of “antidote” to the bulk of overproduced, overcompressed, and lifeless live recordings that have proliferated television for decades. The promise of a stripped down set is the air between the songs, the chance to see an artist like Lianne La Havas shuffle a bit sheepishly and tug at her jacket while whispering to her accompanist to decide who starts first. Then she delivers a note-perfect rendition of “Unstoppable” that could have taken the paint off the walls. The promise of Tiny Desk, specifically, can be succinctly understood in the transcendent first few seconds of T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin)” After admitting that the setting was “weird as hell” and seeming on the whole unsettled, he launches into his chart-topping hit and his voice, unaltered by his signature autotune, becomes a revelation and leaves the room in awe. It was, until relatively recently, NPR Music’s most-viewed video of all time.
Tiny Desk drew some criticism in its early days for its rather restrictive curation. Bob Boilen’s musical taste leans heavily toward a certain brand of indie rock and folk, genres that translate naturally to the show’s demure setting. It’s a valid call-out, especially considering NPR’s roots in Washington, D.C., a city known for its formidable hip hop and punk music scenes. To the show’s credit, the breadth of genres to grace the Desk expanded considerably over the 2010s and many of its most popular concerts have featured artists who didn’t “fit the mold” at the time of recording. The credit for this evolution is with the team of NPR Music producers who have advocated for artists and single handedly gotten them on the program, like Frannie Kelley who pitched the aforementioned T-Pain set, or hip-hop staff writer Rodney Carmichael who presented Saba and was an early force in changing the makeup of Tiny Desk artists. Carmichael’s work has been continued by Bobby Carter, one of the show’s newer producers, who has orchestrated a recent highlight from Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, and booked a relatively unknown Noname during her first tour in 2017.
Despite its admirable and ambitious reach, Tiny Desk can still be accused of having a sanitizing effect on its performances. The necessity of quiet, intrinsic to the limitations of its production, is not befitting of all artists if the goal is highlighting the truth and emotion behind their music. I believe that is the thread of resonance in Greenspan’s bizarre tweet. By slotting artists of such varied sub-cultural identities into the same performance space, NPR may be guilty of complicity with the Tezeta effect: unintentionally enforcing a compliance with a sort of “Tiny Desk sound,” and removing a rage and complexity that often needs a darker space in which to exist. A sound that doesn’t translate to a D.C. office, awash in daylight.
The series faced a towering challenge in how to adapt to the pandemic, and in some ways their pivot to “home” concerts was masterfully done. Tiny Desk enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and invited artists to bring their artistic vision and production prowess to the home concerts. Unfortunately, the concession of the constraint, of the desk itself, has weakened the series irreversibly. Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts have featured genuine superstars (Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo, J Balvin) who by no means need the platform to reach their audience. It was a curious decision to include such big names, who even in the height of the pandemic had access to resources, production, and locations that their less well-heeled counterparts did not. The desk was the equalizer, for better or worse, and the disparity created by the home concert series is a serious challenge to the ethos that has powered the concerts since their inception.
Do we still need Tiny Desk? It’s been a difficult question to consider, especially as I researched for this issue and found myself falling back down the rabbit hole of the show’s video archive, remembering the performances that I love dearly: Tyler, the Creator in all white, playing the series’ only nighttime concert, a young Angel Olsen (with bangs) plucking a white Stratocaster alone, the quintessentially bizarre experience of Moon Hooch. It’s a stunning catalog, but I think the concert series may be close to running its course. Tiny Desk proposes a sensation that we don’t often see in real life: a spontaneous performance. The kind that fits into the corner of a room but feels like it could fill a whole city block. It’s a manufactured experience, not as dubious or soulless as the exploitative Sofar Sounds, but still more a smokescreen of intimacy and vulnerability than the real thing. I would be as sad as anyone to see the Tiny Desk retired but I fear that the program has truly outdone itself, bloating a marketplace that needs room to grow. The end of Tiny Desk would not mean the end of the form it helped to define. In fact, I’m excited and hopeful about the new and innovative presentations of live music, analog and up close, that would spring up in its absence.
This month’s “playlist” was a team effort. I asked a few subscribers to share their favorite version of what Tiny Desk does: presenting an artist in a unique setting, highlighting their remarkable talent in an intimate way. Take a tour of some favorites and leave a comment on this post with your own! And a sincere thank you to all who contributed.
Here’s the link, Subby won’t let me embed for some reason :(