Archive for the 'Kai' Category
Appreciation: Kai
Bon bon kids. Welcome to another Appreciation post, it’s been a minute since I’ve done one. To catch past entries in this vein, click here.
Now that we got that out the way, let me bring you to Summer of 2000. I was less than two months removed from college graduation and working my very first real world job, which was pretty much nothing like the real world. I was a staffmember at the Organization of Chinese Americans, and was spending two weeks in Atlanta for the annual National Convention. It’s crazy that I was 21 and in charge of mad shit for real. But I can look back and appreciate that my experiences at my first job out of college - stressful though it was - really instilled me with a lot of confidence in my abilities to get stuff done. And that time in Atlanta was also interesting because 4 separate dudes I met there offered to set me up with women they knew. No wonder they call it HOTlanta.
Irregardless, that summer was also the first time I met the R&B group Kai. The name was short for kaibigan, the Tagalog word for “friendship,” and as you probably expect, they were 4 Filipino cats from the Bay plus - as you may not have expected - one Chinese dude who sang bass. They were signed to a major label, I think it was Geffen.
Although I had been taking performance poetry kinda serious for like a year or two by then, they were kinda next level for me because I had actually bought their CD single when I was in college. Maybe that seems like small-time nowadays because of the way that buying music has changed, but at the time, it was pretty big news that I could walk into Media Play in rural farmland Hadley, Massachusetts and buy a Kai CD. You young’ens might not get it, but Kai was as big API celebrities as we could imagine at that time, aside from maybe Margaret Cho. But she sucked anyway.
Tags: Appreciation, Commentary.
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