So as suspected, Operation Pick A Generic Rock Album I'll Have A Hard Time Getting Through was a failure; this is indeed a record of performed poetry. As not so suspected I had a hard time getting through it anyway; turns out I'm not big on poetry slams.
I don't want to bash feedBACK; my experience had everything to do with my fundamental taste and nothing to do with the quality of the poems or performances. So I don't have any concrete shortcomings to lay out but I also didn't take a lot of notes. Here, though, is what Poets sounds like.
Going by the photos and college affiliations everyone was young, probably not even in their mid-twenties, everyone was Asian except like one Latino guy, and, going by the words some of them were queer. All of those demographics still face discrimination today and I assure you things were only worse 20 years ago. So in addition to all the usual concerns of youth--finding one's identity and place within the family as an adult, sex, work, beliefs, destiny, relationships--there's a lot about bigotry and the dual identity problem faced by minority Americans.
Unsurprisingly, everyone is terribly earnest, which works to their advantage in their delivery given the subject matter. They all speak well too, crisply articulated words and solid rhythms. I mean, it's definitely poetry, not rap, but it's still rhythmic. There's some music too, electric bass on some tracks, and Chejudoh opens with what I'm guessing is traditional Korean music whose percussion remains active once the track switches over to poetry recitation. Most of the tracks are performed by individuals, with the (very) occasional duet and trio performance. However, the opening and closing tracks are full ensemble pieces in which the group trades lines in tightly choreographed rhythms--think Funkadelic's Wars of Armageddon.
And that's what I've got for the content. It's not for me but it's well done for what it is. Now to see what's floating out there in cyberland. . .
I don't think the album's in Discogs. A search for artist and album, which I know works, doesn't being anything up, and for all the site's wonderfulness elsewhere Discogs's advanced search option is lacking in some aspects, such as an exact phrasing feature, or at least one that works for single words. I'd've gone through 50 results of artists named feedback; 808 is several bridges too far.
As usual the website printed on the album is long gone; for variety it now redirects to some clickbait "best of" type site instead of a 404 error or comparable screen. It's in reasonable shape on the Internet Archive though. Still a fair amount of busted photos but it's in better condition than any other archived site I've checked out for this blog so far. Plenty of upcoming events, member bios, and statements of purpose. Also the CD came out in August '01, assuming it dropped on time. I looked a little further ahead--by early '03 the group was on hiatus. There's precious little elsewhere online, though the CD comes up on a site dedicated to preserving the history of slam poetry.
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