The Tim Fite Experience: A Brief History
A look at the career of August's UNSUNG Artist of the Month
This is an inaugural feature of SewYKnot. The goal is to have a feature talking about the musical artist and their importance with the artist we do a featured podcast with each month. Ideally, the podcast will correspond to an act that is coming to town, but we don’t want to limit ourselves initially. (It is also possible that in coming months we may do more than one artist podcast a month.)
Tim Fite is a fitting first subject as he’s not only a musical artist but a visual one with a strong social conscience that really comes out in all his work. His parents were painters and in grew up in a small farmhouse with a barn and a milk house his parents used as a studio. It was in a rural area of New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border.
He grew up a fan of hip-hop but was on a path to being an artist, studying printmaking at Rutgers when fate intervened. In 1999 while attending Rutgers he formed a band with friends (including drummer Justin Riddle, with whom he recently recorded a Knife Work album) called Little T (his older brother’s nickname for Tim) & One Track Mike. Their single “Shaniqua” had some success on MTV and in 2001 they released the album Fome is Dape.
It inaugurated a dozen-year long excursion into music, including a couple rock bands before landing at Anti- Records for 2005’s folk/hip-hop debut, Gone Ain’t Gone. He bought albums from the dollar bins to grab samples and fashion a folk-blues milieu for what sounds like a post-millennium Jonathan Richman, a character with a wry innocence.
There are a number of highlight moments such as, “No Good Here,” with Tim trumpeting his industry: “I've been busy, baby, I keep busy / Quittin' every job in New York City,” and the appropriately titled, “Not a Hit Song,” at least passingly about a vagrant the neighbors hate. Fite definitely has the Daniel Johnston/Jad Fair vibe, that he doesn’t think like other people in a way that makes upright people nervous. There’s also a haunting Paul Robeson sample at the center of “I’ve Kept Singing.”
From there he self-released a 10-track homage to the blues that is goofy in a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion manner. It’s an insightful look into Fite’s ability to subvert tropes and his rubbery Jim Carrey face when it comes to riding rough-shod through a genre with comic insouciance. Highlights include the slacker porch ode, “It’s Only Watching,” and the loping Robert Johnson-esque, echo-laden “I’ll Never Drown.”
He followed a year later with his terrific, Under the Counter Culture, taking on war, hip-hop and consumerism and showcasing his gift for trenchant social commentary. On some level there was no preparation for this.
A fully-fleshed hip-hop album in the con-rap vein, it’s a bomb, as in ***BOOOM***. So many classic takes from war fashion/identity critique, “Camoflage,” circus/consumerism riff, “It’s All Right Here,” and the absolutely devastating, heartfelt slam on hip-hop, the title track, which laments
dem took what used to be my main lick and made it legal
watered it down, sugared it up to fuck the white people
now I can't get high no mo' (oh oh)
some old weak-ass junk
ya'll can't serve piss and 'spect dis shit's gonna be gettin' me drunk
It’s as biting as anything Jello ever served. Then there’s the faultless satire of the note-prefect Fiddy send-up, “I’ve Been Shot,” which was our UNSUNG Song of the Month. (We didn’t realize we’d be creating a new feature format as well.)
Perhaps feeling he hadn’t taken a wide enough perspective, 2008’s Fair Ain’t Fair, is loosely about the apocalypse and the lack of proper consequences. He wrote at the time that “the title itself is a reference to the sad reality of having to live with reaping what we sow – but also the redemptive essence of an apology.”
The wide-screen sonics of OTC are well-represented here, and Fite’s grown even more fiendish in wending catchy melodies to his lyrical molitovs. There’s the delicious, very expressionistic “Trouble,” which sounds like it could be the theme to the March of the Hammers in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, while it imagine a flood to wash the avarice away.
A landslide for your lavishness
Some happenstance for your happiness
A first hand taste of averageness
You better hope to God your shit float
There’s the amusing but earnest classic folk song, “Thought I Was a Gun,” the very strange and affecting tribalist glitch-pop doom “The Names of All the Animals” and his biggest hit, the seemingly heartfelt, forgiveness ode?, “Big Mistake,” where he offers a hope to make his an epic one.
Everyone gets to make one big mistake
And if you're waitin' on me, well, I guess you're gonna have to wait
'Cause I'm savin' mine up for a very, very special day
When I can fuck it all up in the most spectacular way
It feels entirely appropriate that Fite released “Big Mistake” the year the stock market decided to take a header. But that was Fite’s cultural high point, as it turned out. To be fair, it feels like the moment a lot of creativity was given its walking papers or put on notice.
In that vein, Fite’s next release was the downcast, Change of Heart, about a confusing breakup. It's not as lighthearted as his usual fare but there are some fine moments including the plunky, heartbreaking, title track and the album-ending, "Waiting for Nothing." Not gonna lie, it's some seriously Sad Bastard stuff, so don't go in unprepared.
He returned to his "Under" series with Under The Table Tennis which is about the desperate circumstances of an economy and culture in free fall. This is a fine partner to UTCC, but with more of an indie-pop keyboard driven tone. He really taps into some universal stuff here from the noisy angry "For Closure" to bohemian polka-hop "Not Covred," the riotously sympathetic, "Money Back," and one of my personal favorites, the t-shirt hawking, "Go Sell It on the Mountain."
His final Ain't album Ain't Ain't Ain't followed in 2012, and it's a nostalgic trip back to what it was like growing up, the pain, hope and unbridled passion of growing up as a teenager, with tracks like "Girard" with its refrain, "It might get worse," the playful innocent, "Joyriding," and the vaguely exultant (or at least self-forgiving), "We Are All Teenagers."
Frankly, 2014's iBeenHACKED is as funny as anything he's done since it hits since a perfect nerve. Some of the skits are hilarious, like the bragging "Self Absorbtion," which trumpets the ability to lose way by absorbing it, cell phone as child neglect enabler, "Honestly," and his ad for his fake iphone, "The Phoney." Great tracks include like the swag-slinging "Big MAC," the hip-hop "checkyrself" of "Check Yo' Cell," the social addiction ode, "Like," which pays low-grade homage to Sir-Mix-A-Lot's "(I Like) Big Butts."
His latest, outside the AMAZING Resist video, is Roar Shack, which feels like a response to the political atmosphere from "Everything is Fine" to "Character Flaw" and "Who Shares the Most," and "Fake News." It's probably the most adult album he's done on a certain level in that it feels like a compendium of modern life struggles and the musical settings are more like a modern songwriter/rock album with a lot of jazzy bits.
As he mentions in the podcast, he has also released an album as Knife Work with old Lil I & One Track Mike drummer Justin Riddle/CLINGR. It's self-titled debut arrived in 2024.
It's hardly perfect, but a decent 1400 word overview of Fite's musical oeuvre. He's also released two children's books, created art in storefront as an artist-in-residence, and done a composition with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He's quite an interesting fellow.
