Sue Me, I Like Tiny Desk

Picture: NPR

It’s easy to make fun of NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, the stripped-down musical showcase that often goes viral on YouTube. “Since this is a Tiny Desk concert, we gotta be quirkin’ it up,” says Ramy Youssef as a generic cardigan-wearing lead singer on Saturday Night Live’s parody of the series. “Yep,” says Chloe Troast as one of his backup musicians, “that’s why I play a milk carton shaker.” By the end, for reasons you simply have to watch the sketch to understand, they’re singing a song about what it’s like “if you’re gay or a robot in a small rural town (beep beep beep boop).”

Tiny Desk is definitely peak NPR in many ways. It’s like something out of Portlandia, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s TV sendup of life in crunchy Oregon from the 2010s. The first concert aired in 2008, with the soft folksy guitar of Laura Gibson, and the whole thing has retained the self-consciously threadbare affectations of that era well into the 2020s. Some people find the whole set-up completely unbearable, which is probably why singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert was laughed to scorn on Twitter/X when she sang her single “Sue Me” at a recent Tiny Desk concert. “Sue me, I wanna be wanted,” sings Hobert in a casual pitchy tone.

Maybe it’s because I’m a hopeless Millennial, but I find it all totally charming. Tiny Desk is probably not the optimal venue for Hobert, whose particular mode of carefree flailing works best when she’s rocking out in her music videos like a teenager in her bedroom. But in a time of exhausting digital micro-scrutiny and brand curation, the hipster obsession with lo-fi authenticity is probably not the worst aesthetic in the world to revive. 

“Found it on twitter after people were hating, but it genuinely bangs,” wrote one commenter on the YouTube video of “Sue Me,” which has 3.5 million views. Tiny Desk was founded because NPR’s Bob Boilen and Stephen Thompson couldn’t concentrate on the performers at the massive corporate festival South by Southwest. They wanted a more intimate setting where people could focus on artistry, and they made one you can access even amid the hubbub of the internet. There’s good reason why this kind of thing, mockable as it is, might resonate with people right now.

So sue me, I like Tiny Desk. The latest guest is “Weird Al” Yankovic, singing the deathless parody of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that he wrote by cribbing spoilers off the internet in 1999 before the movie came out. “My my, this here Anakin guy,” sings Weird Al to the tune of “American Pie,” “May be Vader someday later; now he’s just a small fry / ... / Do you see him hittin’ on the queen, / Though he’s just nine and she’s fourteen?” No matter the venue, some lyrics just land. And the Tiny Desk, for all its quirks, is a great venue. I raise a glass of organic artisanal small-batch kombucha in its honor.

Associate Editor