FANTASTIC
NEGRITO
____________________
How
Fantastic Negrito
Made The Video
That Won The Last
Tiny Desk Contest
Before he entered last year’s Tiny Desk Contest, Fantastic Negrito was trying out his songs on the unforgiving audiences at BART train stations in Oakland, Calif.
“I was basically a busker,” he says by phone. It was around that time that Blackball Universe, the art collective with which he still works, heard about the Tiny Desk Contest. He wasn’t keen on entering, but the other members of the collective outvoted him. He agreed to sing a song — a raw, rootsy blues number called “Lost In A Crowd.” They went to their basement with an iPad to shoot video and a Shure 57 and iPhone to capture the sound.
They filmed one take, and his videographer ended the session.
“He was like, ‘That’s it! I’m telling you, you just won,’” the musician says. “I don’t know why he was so sure even before we did it that we were going to win the Tiny Desk.”
“He just leapt off the screen,” Bob Boilen, the co-host and creator of All Songs Considered, said after the contest. “The raw and sheer power of his voice was unlike any other contestant we had.”
Since winning, Fantastic Negrito’s career has taken a leap, too. He’s played the Tiny Desk at NPR headquarters in D.C., as well as festival shows for thousands of people. He’s back in Oakland now, working on a new LP called The Last Days of Oakland.
“It just changed everything. It put what I was doing on steroids, and really shined a light on myself and the Bay Area,” he says. “Tiny Desk. There’s no way I’d be where I am right now.”
Learn how you can enter the 2016 Tiny Desk Contest at npr.org/tinydeskcontest. Official rules here. Happy music making, and congratulations again to Fantastic Negrito!