Twitter, Trina, And A Tempest At A Tiny Desk

Photo by Selena N. B. H., CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

“Someone said something on the internet” reared its digital head again, this time producing social media complaining over a Tiny Desk episode featuring rapper Trina.

I’m not sure how such folks get so much free time on their hands, but I’d sure like to try it, just to see what it feels like to have bandwidth for such things…

Anywho…

For the uninitiated, tiny desk has been going on since 2008. Starting as something of a joke by Bob Boilen, who’s desk is the actual area the sessions are recorded in, the NPR music series has grown to host a who’s who of artists over the years. Adele showed up and did her entire set before giggling she forgot to take off her gloves at the end. Some poor staffer got the duty of lugging Booker T. Jones’ Hammond organ into frame for the authentic “Green Onions” Stax Record experience. From rap artists to singer-songwriters, rockers going acoustic, jazz and brass bands, and even bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley singing acapella gospel in what might be the shortest Tiny Desk ever, over 800 tiny desks concerts have come and gone.

One constant: criticism. While it is true that there was a definitive lean towards what could broadly be defined as pretty obscure indie rock in the early days — which, c’mon, it is NPR; what did you expect, exactly? — that has gone by the wayside, so much so that the current gripe over the weekend was complaints about — and you might need to sit down for this — a rapper using explicit language while rapping and, by tiny desk standards, a large backing band.

No, I’m not going to link to it.

NPR’s Sidney Madden responded to the caterwauling on Twitter:

And as for live instrumentation, that’s the entire point of the Desk. Always has been. For artists who accept the challenge, its the battery in their back. It breathes new life into their work.

— Virgo Grooving @ .75 SPEED (@Sid_Madden) April 8, 2023

Language is of course a subjective thing but let us be adults here; if you listen to rap or hip hop in any form, you’ve already crossed that Rubicon. Frankly, if you are reading this you are most likely a fairly online person and have seen, heard, or been exposed to a wordy-durd or two from time to time already. You do have digital tools at your disposal to set your online filters to something south of “toughen up, buttercup” if you so choose. Us 90s kids didn’t fight the war against Tipper Gore just for folks to be afraid of some naughty words if not deterred by that parental advisory label, by God.

Frankly, if you failed to do your homework on Trina’s long career before she took the tiny desk mic, that is a you problem. 25 years after fame first came on the Trick Daddy song “Nann N***a,” which she revisited during her tiny desk, Trina is as well established both in recordings and personality as one can get in the music business. In case you think there is inconsistency between her debut 2000 album Da Baddest Bitch and now, she also told NPR during her visit “I believe in who I am…The game didn’t make me; I made the game. I made it. I already came in with a motive and an initiative to know who I am from. That’s why I breed a whole universe of bad bitches.”

And that last bit I suspect is part of what is going on here with the someones who are saying some things on the internet about Trina and tiny desk.

Tiny desk is a true “artist out front” type of musical thing. In covering Trina’s tiny desk, Complex noted that the “Miami rap legend” delivered and “intimate” performance. When you’re shoved in the corner of a functioning office, there is little choice to be intimate but that is also what makes tiny desk work. Trina opened with “Mama” while talking about her mother, then the aforementioned “Nann N***a,” “Da Baddest Bitch,” “Here We Go” and then “Single Again.” The baddie is engrained, but it is more than that. It is part of the story, which the set list and Trina herself tells. It isn’t a marketing gimmick, or branding strategy, or carefully focused-grouped thing; it is her being her, with her whole life backing it up as real.

It would be really easy to get up on a high horse over the specific terminology being used here, but that would be hypocritical. Discovering rap and hip hop during my formative years, pre-internet streaming and social media, was an adventure in new words and terms that meant one thing to the artist that needed more discernment by teenage mountain kids like us before being reused, repeated, or frankly used at all. You’d learn to make sure the parents saw the at least partially censored In Living Color performance and radio edits, slowly letting them in on this newfangled-to-their-ears music that found its way even to isolated West Virginia in the 80’s and 90s. Yeah, Heavy D and Big Daddy Kane didn’t curse and fight as much as Tupac and Biggie, but we know who had the bigger cultural impact, in no small part because of the controversy and tragedy that surrounded them.

There is always going to be a group of folks very uncomfortable with a woman being successful and upfront with lots of personality and attitude. Insecure folks tend to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to police other folks’ public behavior when it makes they themselves uncomfortable. Rap has a whole wave of women right now being really successful and being upfront about being baddies, and folks just have to deal with it. If not your things, fine. However, some personal reflection should go along with it, that if the celebrated rappers of old got passes for bad behavior and pushing the envelope — and Lord did they ever — when the current women rappers do the same there should be some consistency.

Rap is not a subtle art form, and the folks that really master it are not subtle in how they wield their verbal power. Country singers don’t have to cheer up, jazz musicians don’t need to adhere to norms, and rockers don’t need to calm down because someone said something on the internet. And female rappers definitely don’t need censored during what is becoming a rich vein of women-fronted hip hop lately. Nor should they be. Sure, you can complain about it on the interwebs and join the Greek Chorus on the Isle of Irrelevancy in howling about what words should and should not be used. But for me and my house, I’ll continue to really enjoy when artists squeeze themselves into the corner office and open up for the world to see, enjoy, and hear in a setting that has become special because of what those artists do in it.

More live instrument, stripped-down rap, please. And keep it coming. Parental advisory, Tipper Gore, and the internet censoring brigade be damned.

BTW Since I mentioned Big Daddy Kane, his tiny desk is excellent and usually what I direct folks who “don’t like rap” to that they might find something different than what they expect if they give it a chance.