{"id":649387,"date":"2026-08-21T17:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T17:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/649387\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T17:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T17:14:11","slug":"tv-on-the-radios-tunde-adebimpe-talks-spider-man-wolf-like-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/649387\/","title":{"rendered":"TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe Talks ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Wolf Like Me’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA few weeks ago, Tunde Adebimpe<\/a> woke up to see his phone alit with messages. \u201cThat never feels like a good thing,\u201d he tells Rolling Stone, laughing. \u201cThe first five things were from friends. They\u2019d be, like, just a gif of Spider-Man<\/a> from the Sixties series and just one word, like, \u2018Yo!\u2019 Nobody explained anything for the first five messages, so I was extra confused. But then somebody wrote and said, \u2018It\u2019s in the movie.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch to the singer\u2019s surprise, Spider-Man: Brand New Day<\/a> had prominently featured \u201cWolf Like Me,\u201d a song he had recorded with his band, TV on the Radio<\/a>, on their Return to Cookie Mountain album two decades ago. When the group had OK\u2019d the movie to use the song, he didn\u2019t know how the movie would feature it (\u201cIt could be coming out of someone\u2019s headphones or in the background in a deli or something,\u201d he says), so he was doubly surprised to hear \u201cWolf Like Me\u201d serve as the soundtrack to the movie\u2019s opening montage of Spidey parkouring all over the band\u2019s hometown of New York City. \u201cOh, fuck, there it is,\u201d he thought.<\/p>\n

\n\tSince the movie opened on July 31, streams of \u201cWolf Like Me\u201d have spiked dramatically. Up 834 percent in the last month, the song shot from around 32,300 streams on July 15 to around 269,500 on Aug. 5, and the interest has held steady. On Aug. 19, it was streamed around 217,500 times, according to music data company Luminate.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTV on the Radio created a great song and the filmmakers created a great film, each independent of one another,\u201d Chris Lakey, SVP of Global Creative Synch at Kobalt Music, tells Rolling Stone. His company serves as a representative for songs when music supervisors look to place them in movies. \u201cWhen the right song meets the right scene, both can become something bigger. The song gives the scene new weight; the film gives the song new context, bringing it back into the cultural conversation and introducing it to a new audience. That\u2019s what a great synch can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Adebimpe, the surge in interest is a full-circle moment in many ways. First, he describes himself as a \u201clapsed comic-book artist\u201d and a \u201chumongous comics nerd,\u201d so watching what is essentially an homage to the first issue of Spider-Man brought to life and writ large on the silver screen, with his song playing in the background, was \u201cdefinitely surreal.\u201d He says he\u2019d love a time machine right about now for the opportunity to tell middle school bullies, \u201cOne day I\u2019m going to drop the nerd hammer on you, and you\u2019re going to feel it so hard.\u201d But what also makes him feel good about it all is the fact that, \u201cThis movie, it\u2019s just really good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother full circle moment? 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Return to Cookie Mountain, the band\u2019s second full-length. TV on the Radio plan to celebrate the milestone next year \u201cin various capacities,\u201d Adebimpe says. For now, though, the band is scheduled to play a gig in October with the Strokes and Beach House and hope to line up some gigs \u201cmostly in New York\u201d before the end of the year. The idea of commemorating Cookie Mountain crept on the group, which recently played shows commemorating the anniversary of their debut LP, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, so they\u2019re figuring it out. \u201cNext year, we\u2019ll be doing more stuff and there\u2019s more coming,\u201d he says. But with Brand New Day, the timing couldn\u2019t be better.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lyrics Adebimpe wrote for \u201cWolf Like Me\u201d in 2006 are about \u201cthe idea of whatever\u2019s inside you being your true self and having that be more powerful than anything you\u2019re trying to front as because you think there might be a danger in expressing this true self, and the idea that, at the right time, you can kick into high gear and be that true self and it would be actually for the best.\u201d The title references Black Like Me, white journalist John Howard Griffin\u2019s 1961 nonfiction book about darkening his skin to pass for Black in the Jim Crow South. \u201cI don\u2019t know how [the lyrics] crossfade with Black Like Me, but I feel like there\u2019s something that maps onto it, at least spiritually, that I was thinking about,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd you write a song because it\u2019s hard to put things into words sometimes.\u201d (Separately, Adebimpe says his message beyond the music right now is, \u201cAnything anyone can do to combat fascism is really necessary at this time.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tGoing one level deeper into full-circle moments for the song, though, is another peculiar connection between Adebimpe and Spider-Man. Jon Watts, the director of the track\u2019s music video, would later direct Adebimpe in a small acting role in 2017\u2019s Spider-Man: Homecoming.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe nerded out about comics a lot while making that video,\u201d the singer says. \u201cOne of the examples that I showed him for that video, and I don\u2019t know if it really translated into it, but there\u2019s this brilliant comic artist who\u2019s good and weird named Al Columbia, and he did an underground comic called The Biologic Show. It had a vibe to it that I thought would map onto that song really well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPlacing \u201cWolf Like Me\u201d in Brand New Day has found the song a whole new audience, Adebimpe says. His friends have been texting him to say that their kids and their kids\u2019 friends are now listening to TV on the Radio. \u201cPeople sent me a lot of tweets and things, too, where parents are discovering [the song] with their teenage kids, which was a very odd feeling, but also a great feeling to know that for whatever reason the song sticks with people and means something,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a good boost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen reminded that Nickelback\u2019s \u201cHero\u201d was the biggest breakout hit from a Spider-Man soundtrack circa 2003, roughly around the time TV on the Radio was getting on its first stages, Adebimpe laughs. \u201cWe\u2019re a lateral move from Nickelback, definitely,\u201d he says. \u201cAlso, I think filmmakers and music supervisors are the people who were fans of this music when it came out. So everyone leveled up into these positions where they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, now I can draw from my influences and the well of music that I liked, and I can actually put this in this major motion picture.\u2019<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s always nice,\u201d he continues, \u201cwhen it\u2019s the message-in-a-bottle style thing of it coming back to you in a way where someone\u2019s like, \u2018I really appreciate that you put all these feelings and thoughts into a place where I could find them and connect with them on some level.\u2019 I feel it\u2019s very moving in a big way. It\u2019s also really inspiring and encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few weeks ago, Tunde Adebimpe woke up to see his phone alit with messages. \u201cThat never feels…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,19,17,327,7204,7205,124548,274495],"class_list":["post-649387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-spider-man","tag-spider-man-brand-new-day","tag-tunde-adebimpe","tag-tv-on-the-radio"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117134627064247457","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}