boston progress radio

This is for those who have been sleeping, or simply are too young to know.

Back in 2000, I was about ready to graduate from college with basically no job prospects or plan for what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Scary proposition. Then again, it wasn’t anything new. I had not been a high-achieving student – or person in general - since the 6th grade, when my teacher thought I was solving mathematical equations like an idiot savant. He was half right. I’m basically still doing math at a high 6th grade level.

The only thing I knew at the tender age of 21 was that I could play guitar better than almost every Asian kid on campus, which didn’t do much to make me a hit at the parties. I also was writing poetry furiously. You know how that theory goes about 1,000 monkeys banging on typewriters? I was writing at the speed of those hypothetical monkeys – and at that approximate skill level. I had mad opinions and feelings, but as far as style went, I was copying whoever else I had ever heard and kinda liked. When I wasn’t writing poetry, I was writing pre-emo emo songs with fake earnest lyrics like Counting Crows. Basically, I wanted to be some new millennium version of Richie Havens, except without the talent, urgency, or historical importance. Maybe I was trying to be Nickelback.

But it all changed that February when I ended up not making the trip out to Yale for ECAASU because of a snow storm. One of the performers I missed at that conference was the now-legendary I Was Born With 2 Tongues. Luckily, someone was kind enough to pass on their CD Broken Speak to me, and it put a whole new perspective on everything that was happening in my life.

I remember the first time I listened to it: in my parents’s basement, I put it in the CD drive of the family computer (we didn’t own a CD player) about ten minutes before I was to leave to head back to UMass-Amherst. After hearing the first two tracks, I decided to postpone my drive back (there was no CD player in my mom’s car) to listen to the disc in its entirety.

I remember scouring the liner notes for more information about anything these four – Anida, Dennis, Emily, and Marlon – were doing. Here were Asian folks about my age writing about the political and social issues I cared about, but they weren’t confined to their notebooks, or even to their campus open mic. There was no limit to how far this could travel, I mean, I was in a completely different time zone and I could hear every syllable coming out those sterile computer speakers, which had only known the sound of that annoying error ding in the past. (In 2000, I had only been out of my time zone once before, and that was paid for through an internship. So the idea of traversing time zones was a HUGE deal to me.)

Those of a certain age will understand how serious it is when I say that Broken Speak was better than Illmatic. In fact, there’s a line off Illmatic that kind of explains what Broken Speak means to me:

back in 83 I was an emcee sparkin
but I was too scared to grab the mics in the parks and
kick my little raps ’cause I thought n—-s wouldn’t understand
and now in every jam I’m the fucking man

Obviously, something happened between being too scared to grab mics and being the man, right? I don’t know what it was for Nas, but for me, that was the Tongues. For the first time, it occurred to me that there was possibility beyond dudes at the coffee shop saying I had spit. If these four cats from Chicago could actually get funded to record their poetry, travel across time zones (!) to perform, and connect with people from all over in a meaningful way – whether face-to-face or ear-to-speaker, then there was no limit to what was possible. In a society that urges us to be complacent, I was seeing a new path being blazed right before me, and I got with it. I didn’t calculate or strategize; I just worked on my writing and it just went the way it went.

So by ECAASU 2001 at Columbia, I was pretty engrained in the spoken word scene in Washington, DC, where I had moved. I also made frequent trips to New York to get down with the feedback poets and others. Unfortunately for us, the chairs of that year’s conference wouldn’t allow us in to see the Tongues perform, and so I missed my second opportunity. I swore, man, the next time I get the chance, I’ll see them live.

Later that year, the Tongues were performing with their forebears isangmahal arts kollective at the APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit in Seattle. Guess what? I, uhh, ended up missing that show. Over the years, opportunities kept coming up, and I kept missing the live shows. By this point, I had met and hung out all the Tongues multiple times, and had even performed with them separately on various occasions, I mean, we were friends – but I had still never caught them as a group on stage.

So when they held their final show in 2003 at the Summit in Chicago, I figured it was a moment that was meant to be. Before the performance, a lot of folks from the spoken word community got on the mic to talk about how much the Tongues had meant to them and their careers. I was offered the opportunity to do the same, but declined because – shit, I wanted to get through with the talking and get on to the show!

I’m not going to recap the show because it is what it is, and it was what it was. I will say, however, that since I never took the opportunity to speak in Chicago in 03, this is my tribute.

I just realized this is less about the Tongues and more about me. Oh well, blogs are funny like that.

Relevant links:
Anida Yoeu Ali
denizen kane
Emily Chang
Marlon Esguerra
David Huang (photos)

Last 5 posts by giles

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Tags: Appreciation, Commentary.