Author Info
Dr. Oliver Wang is an associate professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach. I began this research as a PhD dissertation (Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) in 2002 and have updated and revised that into a monograph for Duke University Press.
I was drawn to the history of the Bay Area’s Filipino American mobile crews for a few reasons. For one, having lived in the Bay Area since 1990, I could remember reading about DJs like Q-Bert, Apollo and Mixmaster Mike back in the early 1990s (shout out to Neva Chonin and the SF Bay Guardian) and was intrigued at how these Filipino DJs from the Bay were taking the DMC and other competitions by storm.1
I was drawn to the history of the Bay Area’s Filipino American mobile crews for a few reasons. For one, having lived in the Bay Area since 1990, I could remember reading about DJs like Q-Bert, Apollo and Mixmaster Mike back in the early 1990s (shout out to Neva Chonin and the SF Bay Guardian) and was intrigued at how these Filipino DJs from the Bay were taking the DMC and other competitions by storm.1
When I became a music journalist myself mid-decade, I began writing stories about the likes of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and Space Travellers and gradually began to hear about how almost all these DJs got their start in mobile crews, back in the 1980s. There was almost nothing written about that scene – except for what Davey D had written about – and I was intrigued by how the mobile scene linked all these different people yet so little of that history had been collected. It was my advisor, Dr. Michael Omi, who suggested I take a chapter from my original dissertation proposal and turn it into the entire dissertation itself. And so it began.
--O.W., July 2011, Los Angeles
For more on the author, visit here. Also check out my audioblog, Soul Sides.
For more on the author, visit here. Also check out my audioblog, Soul Sides.
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