For this post I randomly grabbed a disc out of the stack of CDs I've got ready to go for the blog, and I have to say this is not what I wanted. See, despite the way things have been going so far, I still figure most of the albums I've got waiting are going to reveal themselves as generic rock that ranges between mediocre and bad. Eventually I will hit a sustained run of records in which the three greatest challenges will be making it all the way through a single listen, finding even one nice thing to say about it, and finding new ways to say "boring," "generic," and "this sucks." I know I'd be better off if I could break those up and I should be doing the most obvious suspects at least every other post. But every time I've consciously picked an album to post about I've ended up going for something I found interesting one way or another, and the entire point of just grabbing one and making myself stick to it was that I'd end up with a representative of that probable majority. It didn't work. Look at this:
We have a ton of people and almost no visible instruments. We have a passel of intriguing song titles. We have a group that is, by all visible indicators, American, that has no black or white people at all and a mix of Latino, Japanese, Korean, and possibly Chinese--I can recognize some name features but I'm neither a linguist nor an Asian cultures expert. It feels racist to bring up anything to do with ethnicity, but given how many black and white people there are in America, it can't help but stand out. I originally wrote "it seems odd," but then I looked at the Thank Yous and it made perfect sense.
I don't know if you can read that, but it includes a number of colleges and universities that are in or near New York City: Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Cornell, etc. A few Asian students and Asian writers' groups get nods as well, as does the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe. Given that this seems to be a poetry recording with some musical accompaniment, and given that these kids seem to be, well, kids (at first glance I thought it might be a high school project, but no high school in this country is going to let students get away with putting out something called Acid Trip Tango under their aegis), my guess is that the group coalesced out of various Asian student groups getting involved in the NYC poetry reading scene, with the Nuyorican adding a couple Latinx members. Note the 2001 copyright date: since most of the year happens before mid-September I further guess that this disc came out before the World Trade Center attacks, which would explain why, going by titles at least, 17 tracks from a bunch of New Yorkers don't have anything about 9/11 in the year it happened.
That's more elaborate than my guesses usually are, but given the amount of group members, dearth of instruments, the people, places, and organizations in the thank yous, and really everything else about it, I find guessing accompanied poetry is easy; guessing what the deal with the group is is the interesting part. I'd say we shall see on Friday, but that depends a lot more on what I can dig up online than what the disc sounds like, so it's more like we shall see if we can see on Friday.
It doesn't add any info, but here's the disc and tray art. Don't say I never gave you anything.
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