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O-dub. Courtesy of Lydia Daniller.
The Many (Soul) Sides of Oliver Wang, Part One
Activist, DJ, audioblogger, critic, photographer -- you can now add professor to the list of the many hats that Oliver Wang, aka O-dub wears. In APA's interview with him, Wang discusses the dire state of arts journalism, blogging versus print journalism, and why rappers -- and critics -- are sensitive thugs that all need hugs.
Southern California-bred and Northern California-identified Oliver Wang began hosting a well-mannered but also completely raucous show on KALX-FM radio in Berkeley as a hyphydunkulous undergraduate. From there, he went on to become a well-respected hip-hop journalist and a hip-hop internet pioneer, mixing it up with savants and idiots and idiot savants alike on many a Usenet board before becoming one of the first bloggers to give away (good) music for free. Paradoxically, such blatant middle-fingering of the RIAA only made him more legendary. He has since settled down, established worldwide credentials with a book called Classic Material (his spectacular and groundbreaking history on Filipino DJs is on the way!) and with his newly established professorship at Cal State Long Beach, will have mentored an entire group of Yellow B-Boys and B-Girls, who refer to him as the "Yoda" of postmodern Asian American culture. I don't know why he likes the Red Sox.
-- Jeff Chang, friend, fellow critic, and Oakland A's fan
Click here to view the interview in Windows Media Player.
Interview with Oliver Wang
Interviewed by Chi Tung, with additional questions by Brian Hu and Christine Chiao
Transcribed by Ada Tseng
Jeff Chang/Oliver Wang Video edit by Oliver C.
APA: Please start by briefly introducing yourself.
Oliver Wang: I’m Oliver Wang, I am, amongst other things, a freelance music writer. Going on 12 years now. I’m a music scholar. I’m going to be starting at Cal State Long Beach this fall in the Sociology department, teaching pop culture and race. I’ve done college radio for a long time. I DJ. I run a few blogs. I keep busy basically, is what I do.
APA: In terms of all the roles you have, I imagine some of them complement each other and some of them collide. Do you subscribe to the whole starving artist/writer archetype -- go where your heart takes you -- or are there more practical considerations in what you’re doing?
OW: I think it’s always been balanced between doing what I want within a pragmatic framework. I started writing when I was working fulltime and then I went to grad school. And grad school’s actually a great place to be in if you want to be a freelance writer. You sort of have a full time gig that keeps you busy, and hopefully gives you some funding or you’re teaching so you’re bringing in income -- your freelancing can supplement that, but you’re not trying to live off a month-to-month basis, which can be really, really tough. But I think all the things I do, the different aspects of it, as a journalist, as an academic, as a blogger, as a DJ, it all stems from a passionate interest in music, and I’ve been lucky to develop areas, avenues of expression in a way, as well as a profession to be able to stick with it and create a foundation in it.
APA: You, along with Jeff Chang, are one of the prestigious Asian-Americans covering the hip-hop scene and hip-hop culture. How did you go about establishing credibility initially?
OW: I think a lot of it had to do with being in the Bay Area, which is already such a multiracial, multicultural space. The hip-hop scene there has always had a multicultural flavor to it, so I had started writing and had been a DJ for a year prior to that, and these two avenues were happening simultaneously. It never struck me as unusual, because every place I went, there would be other Asian Americans there. I mean, usually Filipino, but it was close enough that I never felt wholly out of place in any space I went. And if I did, that probably had more to do with my insecurities in terms of being in these new spaces. But these days, you can’t go to any hip-hop show in the Bay without seeing tons of Asian faces there. So I think that helped.
And also, you mentioned Jeff Chang. I met him because I interviewed him for a research paper I was doing as an undergrad at Berkeley back in the early ‘90s. And just learning about his career -- at that point, he was just starting it but he had already created a name for himself, and he was one of those role models that you meet that...they don’t intentionally mentor you, but because they exist, plants a seed in your own head, that if this guy can do it, and he looks like me and has the same background, then I can do it too. One of the things I found when I was doing my research on Filipino DJs in the Bay Area, was that it wasn’t so much that they would see someone like Q-bert and Q-bert would take them aside and show them the ropes, but it was just the fact that they saw Q-bert, and all of a sudden for these other Filipino DJs, it opened up an entire world of new possibilities simply because Q-bert existed. And I think Jeff and his generation did that for a lot of people, including myself and some of my other contemporaries, who were really inspired, knowing that he wrote about hip-hop -- that that means I probably can too. It wasn’t like I was never not self-conscious about race, but I never really ran into external issues where someone called my credentials into question on that basis. I mean, I’ve had my credentials called into question for a variety of reasons, but race hasn’t been one of them.
APA: This is a question that we’ve been peddling around to cultural critics like Jeff Chang to the artists themselves. How do you define the Asian American audience, in the same way that you define African Americans being hip-hop, and Hispanics being Latin pop?
OW: I don’t think there’s the same kind of consumer base that you can count on, in terms of, ok, if you can get the Asian American consumer base to buy your album, then that’s going to get you this far in the industry. Because number one, our numbers aren’t big enough. And number two, I don’t think Asian Americans share the same consumption patterns, at least when it comes to identifying with an artist that’s Asian American. So, if you’re a Korean American artist, that’s not guaranteed that the Chinese American kids are going to be feeling you or that Japanese American kids are gonna want to buy your album. It’s much more ethnic-specific, there’s a whole 'nother layer of politics there that may not exist for African Am artists, or even Latino artists, that have their different ethnic groups, but at least Spanish is a unifying factor. You don’t have the same kind of forces that play within our own community. I mean, I do think there’s a visible Asian American hip-hop community that’s out there, especially in Los Angeles and the Bay Area and Hawaii. But on the national level, I don’t think we constitute enough of a base that someone like Jin, for example, can count on to get him 300,000 records. It just doesn’t exist like that. It may exist someday, but it’s not going to happen in our generation, and it’s probably not going to happen in my kids’ generation. It’ll be much more long term to have the same kind of base an artist can depend on.
APA: Do you think it also has to do with, not only individual ethnicities, but also that the Asian American identity is an increasingly scattered and fractured thing?
OW: I think it goes both ways. I think that at least the trajectory that I’ve followed since the early ‘90s, when my ethnic awakening of the consciousness came, you start out with this idealized pan-ethnic idea of what the community is going to look like, but as time goes by, you realize the fractures that exist, and you realize that all these individual groups each have legitimate reasons to have their own separate subjectivity and their own identity. And combined with that, we are still largely an immigrant-born community for whom the ideal of a pan-ethnic identity doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense. You might be able to convince someone from Southeast Asia that yeah, you look like someone who’s Filipino on some basic level, but that doesn’t constitute a level of solidarity that allows political levels, let alone on a cultural level. I think what it really takes is their kids growing up with each other, with other kids of other Asian ethnicities --there’s more of a formation there. But because that immigrant-born population keeps coming in, it keeps us at this more unstable, unsettled area. But on the flip side, I think the ways that Asian Americans have created a sort of cultural identity for themselves now is very different from when I was in my early twenties back in the ‘90s, and it was probably very different ten years before that, so who’s to say what it will look like ten years from now.
APA: Can you talk about the margins that are narrowing now between print journalism and blogging? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages? Is print media even sufficient anymore, especially for something so multidinuous as pop culture?
OW: It's funny because I’ve been struggling with that question, writing an essay for Jeff, as it were, and I think what I’m coming to terms with, is that on the one hand, blogging has created on a democratic level a lot of possibilities, a lot of opportunities for writers who are now given a space to express themselves and publish in ways that never existed before, even in the heyday of the zines. It took a certain learning curve and just time and money to publish your own print publication. And I can jump on blogger.com or myspace and in five minutes, I’m up and running. And there’s something very powerful, very significant, about the democratization, the way it’s been available to everybody. But, just because you have a million more voices before, doesn’t mean it’s anything worth hearing. And I think one of the fundamental differences between print and the online world, is that in print, in order to get something printed you need to have some editorial structure. Because, a print publication can’t come together without that kind of framework, without that sort of supervision. The online world tends to operate more on its own rules without having any oversight, without any accountability.
So not only do you have a lot of bad writing that exists, but you have a lot of writing that basically no one’s putting into check; people can say whatever they want without consequence, and the freedom is very powerful, but it doesn’t’ mean that it’s very progressive or that it’s pushing journalism or pushing writing to someplace better. I think it creates a lot of potential, but the inherent chaos of the system also is a step back as well. And it’ll be interesting to see. I was reading a stat that said there’s a new blog being created every second. What I want to know is how many blogs go dead in the same amount of time, and I want to know what blogging is going to look like, not even five years from now, but what’s it going to look like next year. Is this just a really hot craze that everyone’s going to be into and realize you know what, it’s really not that big of a deal? Because I’ve seen a lot of blogs that go defunct that only got started maybe in 2005. A year later, people lose interest. So I think we’re going to see a lot of that cycling through.
APA: Although in terms of keeping your finger on the pulse of things, blogging seems to make a lot of sense. For me, when I want to find out about something breaking, I’m not usually finding it in the LA Times…
OW: Yeah, I think the point that you’re making is that the online world can respond to things much more quickly; the turnaround time is much faster than the print world. And I think in terms of reporting on events, the online environment has been a superior space in a lot of ways to print. Where I think the gap still exists is that the print world, it tends to have more thoughtful and more insightful writing, because the process is actually slower and people spend a lot more time thinking about it, rather than trying to beat everyone else to report on a new story. And I was never really a news writer. I was always interested in writing as a thinking craft, as an essay craft. To me, those are better done with a little time to marinate, rather than rush rush rush.
APA: What’s your take on the New Times monopoly? Is it a crippling blow to the major alt-weekly, since they’re the only consistent source of arts journalism that offers arts essayists or hyper-intellectual commentary. How has it affected your own career?
OW: I don't think it’s affected my career too much because I haven’t really been writing for a lot of weeklies that intensely for a few years. I mean, the SF Bay Guardian was my bread and butter coming up as a writer, and I’m always thankful for that opportunity. But I haven’t spent that much time writing for weeklies for 3-4 years. I think the New Times monopoly is very troubling in the same way there’s Clear Channel for the radio market, which is that if you have one central corporate identity controlling creative content in all these different cities, I just can’t imagine that being a positive thing. There’s the argument on the creative level that it’s troubling because you’re homogenizing your content, one review written in one city gets written in 12 different papers, and you’ve lost the diversity of voices, the diversity of perspectives.
So I think that’s an issue. But from a professional writer’s point of view, it also means that when you syndicate content, it also means that’s 11 less people that get the opportunity to write and get paid for it. For New Times, it makes total sense to do that, I mean obviously they’re going to be making a lot more money, being able to syndicate stuff, but that’s also cutting out a lot of the opportunities for freelancers to write for a lot of locations. And think also with the New Times specifically, you have to look at what’s going on at the Village Voice right now, where they’re canning a lot of the veteran staff, people who really took a lot of time to build the identity and the reputation of the Voice and none of that seems to matter to the New Times really. I think they have a very different vision of what they want to see out of their weeklies. It’s probably a very homogenized vision throughout their different markets and I think it’s very depressing to see the ways that, to me, the Voice is really getting cut down. It’s gonna look like a weekly anyplace, and for alt weeklies -- I mean, it’s alternative for a reason. That’s not why they got started. It’s not to be some sort of cookie-cutter homogenized Starbucks version of a weekly.
APA: More specifically, in terms of freelancing -- on one hand, it’s a way to stay ahead of all the internal problems within a full-time publication, but is it something that’s sustainable long term, especially in the world of entertainment journalism?
OW: Not really. I mean, the number of people who I know who freelance as a way they make their living -- I can count on one hand. And none of them have a lifestyle that I envy, even the ones that get paid a fairly good amount of money to do it. The thing that we’ve seen in the last five years, and it’s probably a longer term trend, has been the decline in a lot of traditional print opportunities. And while there’s been an explosion in publications online, a lot of them don’t have the same financial base to be able to pay writers the same rate that they would have earned in print, because a lot of them haven’t figured out what their income base is. At least magazines could depend on advertising, there was sort of a structure there. But those things are being very steadily whittled away by the online world because they’re sort of taking away some of those advertising dollars. And I think it is tough.
I don’t know what kind of advice I would have for freelancers who want to work full time at it. I mean, your writing has to be good, but even better has to be your hustling skills. Every week, you have to know what you’re pitching, know who you’re pitching to, and always have things that are in motion out there. And I think with some people’s personalities, they can work like that, but for me --and I think this is like a lot of freelancers -- you’re going through these flood-drought cycles, where you’re writing way too much within a two-week space, and then you decide I don’t want to pitch anymore because I’m overburdened. But then you don’t write for two weeks and you realize you’re not going to get any checks off of that. You pitch again and it starts all over again. It’s not a very healthy way to live, to go like a sine wave basically. So yea, I think these are challenging, trying times. And maybe, the only silver lining I see is that as the online publishing world grows, it becomes more professionalized and has a financial base that they can start paying writers, so the print and online world will have some sort of equilibrium as an industry that will allow people to make a living in both spaces.
Date Posted: 6/8/2006