Work Songs: Tiny Desk Concerts Reimagines Music Video and Public Radio
Eric Harvey / Grand Valley State University
Recently, Vulture ranked the 50 best performances from NPR’s long-running Tiny Desk Concerts series, naming Juvenile’s 2023 concert the best of the more than 1,000 performances captured at producer Bob Boilen’s workspace since 2008. I agree with the choice. It’s a unique thrill to watch Juvenile and his gregarious co-host/producer Mannie Fresh bounce between NPR-style respectability (adding Jon Batiste, Trombone Shorty, a violinist and cellist to the band) and gleeful vulgarity (performing “Back That Azz Up,” one of the most hedonistic songs to reach the top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100–and then running it back a second time for good measure). Pretty stellar stuff from an all-time great who’d only learned of the existence of Tiny Desk a couple of months earlier, when a fan tweeted at Juvenile and NPR about an appearance. Though Juvenile’s initial response was hilariously dismissive, he changed his mind after duly verifying online demand—requesting and receiving ten thousand reposts.
Toward the end of the half-hour set, Fresh spills the party out into the few dozen audience members eagerly watching and rapping along, and you can see the 70ish year-old Boilen, kneeling with his personal camera and mostly trying to stay out of the way. A few months later, Boilen would retire from NPR after more than three decades, having created one of the defining online music entertainment products of its time—and one that NPR Music’s staff helped grow far beyond Boilen’s own admittedly limited tastes to encompass the entirety of the pop world. Juvenile may have never heard of it before last year, but a record label owner recently told me that a Tiny Desk gig ranks second in terms of moving the needle for an artist’s popularity, behind only an SNL performance spot. Tiny Desk is so well-known that SNL even parodied it. In its own cute way, Tiny Desk Concerts does for NPR what the “This Is SportsCenter” ads did for ESPN in the 1990s: offers a lighthearted peek into the corporate inner sanctum of cubicles, drop ceilings, and spreadsheet-populated computer monitors, where famous and talented stars just happened to be working, too.
Tiny Desk Concerts is the most visible example of the streaming era’s disaggregation of visual music promotion formats from their host programs. It’s been a long time since music fans had to wait up to see an SNL or late-night talk show musical guest, instead of simply loading up YouTube. From the TV direction, Myles McNutt has chronicled the “successful translation of late-night programming into the nonlinear distribution logics of the YouTube platform,” where celebrity-packed Tiny Desk-esque bits like James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke and Jimmy Fallon and the Roots’ Classroom Instruments circulate on their own viral merits, without the need for a promotional boost from the mothership. Similarly, two years into Tiny Desk’s run, National Public Radio announced that it was shortening its name to simply “NPR,” because “its news, music and informational programming is heard over a variety of digital devices that aren’t radios.” Though Tiny Desk’s YouTube channel points visitors back toward NPR’s site to catch new videos a week early (a marketing tactic called “windowing” that some record labels use for new albums in the Spotify era), it’s fair to say that the show has safely left NPR’s brand orbit. A 2023 New York Times Magazine feature didn’t see the need to mention Boilen’s name at all.
Nearly a decade before starting Tiny Desk, Boilen was a key factor shifting NPR’s programming strategies toward music, and the nascent web. As the 1990s wound down, Boilen became known for the clever and compelling interstitial music cues he dropped into NPR’s flagship program All Things Considered as the show’s producer. His gift for the right needle drop earned him All Songs Considered in 2000, a pioneering online-only program which Boilen introduced as “a music show for your computer,” and which soon added Robin Hilton as co-host. In 2007, NPR let Boilen build out NPR Music as a semi-independent entity within the organization, building in the kinds of criticism and promotion that made the site a daily visit for the same music nerds who read Pitchfork, Spin, Rolling Stone, and Paste, thanks in part to Carrie Brownstein’s “Monitor Mix” blog; the music criticism of Ann Powers, who NPR hired away from the LA Times in 2011; and for a while, the site’s excellent “First Listen” feature. Five years after its launch, one executive described the unique setup as “the closest thing we have to a pure startup inside what is now a 40-plus-year-old institution.”
It took a few years for Tiny Desk to become the brand cornerstone of NPR Music, and it got there by adapting a format—musicians performing while crammed into a small space—that was familiar to indie music fans at the time. When Boilen and NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson kicked off Tiny Desk in 2008, Pitchfork was itself expanding video-ward with its Pitchfork.tv offshoot, led by the dingy intimacy of “Juan’s Basement,” a DIY/house-show variation on Boilen’s small-scale brainchild. There was the independent outlet Black Cab Sessions, which, starting in 2007, asked London cabbies to drive around the city while unamplified musicians performed a single take of a song in their backseat. La Blogotheque’s “Takeaway Shows” launched the same year by stuffing all of Arcade Fire into a Paris elevator. In 2010, writer Josh Modell of The AV Club—a webzine that itself had successfully spun off from its own well-known parent company, The Onion—found “a really strange round room” in the Chicago offices, and instantly wanted “to have bands come and perform inside this “odd little cylinder.” Add in the dimension of the band’s having to pick from a list of covers, and “AV Undercover” was born—and returned in 2024 after a hiatus for its ninth season.
Charming, right? A lot of music was charming in the mid-2000s, as the twee revolution spurred by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom took flight, inspiring everyone to put a bird on it and embrace the small and the adorable. And as the era’s defining TV show demonstrated, all kinds of twee magic can happen in drab offices. For a healthy proportion of NPR’s white, college-educated, and liberal audience, this soft, quirky vibe (exemplified by bands like Iron & Wine, The Decemberists, Feist, Regina Spektor, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes) became the alpha and omega of the long-contested term “indie.” As important to the aesthetic of the series as the titular desk (the series was actually named after Boilen’s coincidentally named old-school D.C. art-punk band Tiny Desk Unit) is the backdrop, which began as the kind of shelves that anyone who’s worked in college radio would recognize—promo CDs, oversized music reference books, the odd music tchotchke. Today, performers play in front of a Tiny Desk Wunderkammer of ephemera that has accumulated over the hundreds of performances.
Such whimsy underscores the core appeal of Tiny Desk, which is that the performers are game to buy into the bit: playing in a cramped space with no stage monitors, vocal amplification, or pre-programmed elements, in a literal office where people are working (is that an employee browsing the web with her back to Thao Nguyen?), in front of a handful of people who have taken the elevator down to watch while nibbling on their lunch. Early on, the intimate/occupational performance framework tripped up the seasoned singer-songwriter Julie Doiron, who explained with a laugh that it was way harder than a live gig in a radio station’s studio. Several years later, an NPR public address announcement temporarily sidelined a Chance the Rapper poetry reading, zapping all in attendance back to the work world for a moment, like a glitch in an episode of Severance (Apple TV+, 2022-present). But even technical or performative slip-ups are no match for the strength of Tiny Desk’s intimate video performance format, which magically transmutes re-takes or awkward banter into predictable artifacts of arbitrary conditions…proof of concept.
Any surge of videorecorded, stripped-down acoustic performances will trigger memories of MTV Unplugged (MTV, 1989-present), which Philip Auslander has aligned with the network’s early 1990s desire for a return to rock-style “authenticity” in the wake of Milli Vanilli’s lip-synching revelation. As Christopher Cwynar notes, the first several years of Tiny Desk featured a “limited diversity of musical genres and cultures that correspond(ed) to the tastes of NPR’s core audience of middle-class baby boomers.” What one could call “NPR-core” (folk, singer/songwriter, and global roots music) predominated the early bookings, and representatives of other genres were tailored toward that demo. Though in the past few years, popular street rappers like Gucci Mane, Maxo Kream, and Rick Ross have all graced the space, the only rappers to play the series’ first four full seasons were the Somali-born folk-rapper K’naan and thrift-store loving white Seattleites Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Tiny Desk’s early approach to R&B was similar: booking exclusively retro-soul stars like Raphael Saadiq (who played acoustic guitar for his set), Adele, and Hozier was an easy decision for a listening demographic that, as the logic held then, preferred its Black pop more Big Chill (Motown, 1983) than Biggie Smalls.
Even by 2013, the rare pop/electronic musician who stopped by for a Tiny Desk performance could still receive some light condescension. In the writeup for the the xx’s performance, Thompson writes that “beneath all that tightly controlled image-making lays music that’s raw and vulnerable”—a mild form of rockism, the idea that “ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of” are normative to popular music, while performative artifice and studio polish are a bright red signal blinking “no talent.”[1] In 2014, the series’ first crossover viral moment came as what felt like a rockist intervention, when producer Frannie Kelley convinced Boilen to book T-Pain, the club rapper who had scored multiple pop hits by leaning heavily on Auto-Tune, a gleefully synthetic studio trick that inspired Lil’ Wayne and Kanye West. When that style crashed, T-Pain’s career crashed with it, and his Tiny Desk booking came with the caveat that he’d be singing with his unaltered voice. There’s a slight reality TV undercurrent to the video, a guy in a corner asked to play his hit songs like a subway busker to prove he’s worth our attention again. To me, his “real” voice doesn’t nearly compare to the earworms he released as a horny R&B robot; instead, the songs sound like they’ve been bowdlerized and re-cut for a dramatic film trailer, stripped of everything that made them unique. But as a human being, I loved that the Tiny Desk session helped T-Pain re-launch his career after a pretty harrowing few years in the post-Auto-Tune wilderness.
When he started at NPR the same year as T-Pain’s visit, Bobby Carter didn’t see a culture that reflected his own. The music “didn’t scream anything for a Black kid from the inner city,” he said. “There were just so many voids when it comes to diversity.” Ten years later, Carter is Tiny Desk’s host and series producer, and his ascent up the NPR Music ladder mirrors the broader transformation and diversification of the music criticism public sphere over the past decade. Part of a national shift in the American structure of feeling around race, sexuality, gender and their numerous intersections, NPR Music’s staff has broadened and shifted to more accurately reflect the listening public (and, of course, to bring in new listeners and like/subscribers), and Tiny Desk’s bookings have followed suit. This has happened at the same time that music critics at NPR and beyond have largely (and blessedly) shed their forebearers’ romantic rockist preoccupations. Pop stars like Taylor Swift, Usher, and Sabrina Carpenter now show up to their Tiny Desks early and conduct fairly extensive soundchecks before performing. Tyler, the Creator even played a rare evening set complete with mood lighting, that, while veering close to the hyper-produced SNL style, still showed the rapper to be as charming grooving with a five-piece band as he can be mind-meltingly eccentric in other contexts.
A Tiny Desk Concert is now viewed not only as a viral boost for an indie band, but a default stop on the promotional circuit for some of the most famous people in the world. Tiny Desk hasn’t just outlasted its twee video peers from the aughts, but it’s become canonical in its own way, the latest in a lineage of live rock and pop performances made for the small screen that includes Steve Allen asking Elvis to sing to an actual hound dog and the Beatles codifying the rock band on Ed Sullivan, down through series like Midnight Special, SNL, and Austin City Limits. For those of us who find ourselves falling down YouTube rabbit holes, Tiny Desk videos are bound to algorithmically queue up behind standalone clips from lesser-known live performance shows like Rockpalast, Musikladen, Later with Jools Holland, Sessions at West 54th, and Night Music.
A difference with the web-native Tiny Desk, however, is that there’s no host—Boilen’s early attempts at that were as interpersonally awkward as Lundberg hovering over Peter’s desk—and the complete focus on the musicians, sans emcee, is part of why I think the series has resonated so broadly, if not generically. The simplicity and intimacy of Tiny Desk performances predicted, and now epitomize, the age of the stream—that cascading flow of platformed music and social media discourse that all listeners now at least have to wade into, if they want to keep up. We text Tiny Desks to each other, watch them on our phones, post about them, and extract portions that go viral on TikTok. In the Vulture article mentioned at the start of this piece, writer Matthew Ismael Ruiz characterizes Tiny Desk as “a vehicle for discovery”—that last word a buzzy description of the circuits of marketing and learning about new music in an age of digital overabundance. When Boilen was coming up, “discovery” wasn’t called that, and whatever it was, it was powered by radio DJs, record store employees, publicists, and music journalists. Now those processes are dominated by the complex recommender systems built into streaming services like Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube, and the adorkable video performance series that Boilen launched three years before Spotify came to the U.S. now counts as one of the most important outlets for new music (and, occasionally, old music presented in a new way).
There were 123 Tiny Desk performances released in 2024, for which we should be eternally grateful. But we should also think contextually: the rise of Tiny Desk Concerts on YouTube and NPR’s website corresponds with the dramatic decline of independent arts journalism everywhere else. I’m not implying causality here, of course, just noting that Tiny Desk Concerts are the exact kind of music “content” that surfaces well in the stream—700-word album reviews and longform artist profiles don’t get clipped and aggregated on TikTok (it’s here that I mention that the most popular music critic in the world is only available on YouTube). So it’s worth marveling at how NPR has done its part to build and maintain a robust performance format and promotional outlet—and one that bridged pop music’s DIY Web 2.0 era and its slick, integrated streaming-platform moment. And of course, pop music has always spread itself across the media landscape—sound recordings need text, photos, video, and live performance to complete the circuit of musical meaning—but it’s also useful to zoom out to a music landscape dominated by short video clips on proprietary platforms, and perhaps fret a bit about just how tiny it all looks.
Image Credits:
- Juvenile’s Tiny Desk Concert in June 2023
- Jimmy Fallon, Migos, and The Roots perform “Bad and Boujee” on office supplies
- The Walkmen perform in “Juan’s Basement,” a video series by Pitchfork
- My Morning Jacket’s performance on Black Cab Sessions
- Nirvana’s performance of “Come As You Are” on MTV Unplugged
- T-Pain’s Tiny Desk Concert in October 2014
- Tyler, the Creator’s Tiny Desk Concert in December 2017
- I should add that this perspective is far from prominent in NPR Music’s coverage, led by self-proclaimed “poptimist” Powers. [↩]