Click here to visit its current home at USC.
Subscribe to the APA Newsletter
Back then he had more hair. Courtesy of www.sfist.com
The Many (Soul) Sides of Oliver Wang: Part Two
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.
APA: Both your audioblog and poplicks page are incredible resources, not just for music and pop culture fans, but especially for Asian Americans that are interested in learning about their roles in pop culture. Is it only a matter of time before we see an Asian soul phenomenon?
OW: Well, there was my man Sway in American Idol this season, and he was singing definitely in that. Yea, I do think it’s just a matter of time, I mean, since I moved up to the Bay Area in the '90s I’ve seen a lot of aspiring Asian American singers, specifically singing in a sort of contemporary R&B vein, really trying to make it. I think the talent is out there in every community; it’s just navigating the music industry. There’s a whole 'nother set of skills that one needs, and I think there are certainly more challenges. I think the race thing definitely plays a role. It’s the same way it plays a role in hip-hop, why you don’t see more Asian American emcees. I don’t think it’s because of the lack of talent, I think it’s just a very challenging thing for people who aren’t black to navigate.
For historical reasons, and for reasons which make sense, I understand why it is, but for someone like Jin, he can’t get away from the fact that he’s Chinese at any point of his career, regardless of how good his mic skills are, regardless of who’s producing him. That’s always going to be part of his image. If you're lucky you can find a way to transcend that in some way. I think Eminem is an interesting model. It’s not so much that he’s transcended race, because he makes it such a prime part of his artistry, but it hasn’t hurt his career. If anything he’s benefitted from it. He knows that he’s benefited from it. I don’t think Asian Americans can quite follow the same path. As we were talking about before, it’s not like we can appeal to Asian American buyers. But I think there are strategies one can use in terms of dealing with race. And I think for Asian American soul singers, there are men and women with the pipes; they just have to figure out how to forge a career in an industry that’s very inconsistent; there’s a lot of sharks, and there’s a lot of unpredictability in it.
There have been a lot of Asian Americans that have sung jazz standards or who've sung soul songs that have sort of existed throughout. Joe Bataan is an interesting figure because his father is Filipino American, his mom’s African American. He put out an album in 1975 called Afro-Filipino. And he is a pioneer in Latin soul singing; he was one of the first people in the 1960s who merged Latin rhythms with American style R&B singing, so you have these people who’ve existed throughout history, they’re not necessarily recognized as such, but when you start digging into these different records, you find these people popping up. On the way over, we talked about James Shigeta the actor, but he actually had a singing career with Columbia Records before he started acting, and he cut a few albums for them, and I just think that’s sort of interesting.
APA: The Soul Sides compilation -- how did it come about?
OW: I started Soul Sides as an audioblog, it existed as an album review site. But as an audioblog, I started it around the spring of 2004. And I was lucky to be there on the front end of the mp3 blog wave. It wasn’t necessarily that I had a better site than ones that came up later. Ok I think I do, but honestly, I think the thing I benefited most from was that I was there early and therefore, when other people started coming up, my blog was already there, and so it benefited from being the first to market in a time where there wasn’t a ton out besides music for robots and fluxblog. But in 2005, this guy Kevin Drost, who runs a record label and a music management company in NY approached me and said, "I really like this site. I wonder if you’d be interested in curating a compilation for us. We’ll take care of the clearances and all the legal work, all you need to do is just pick the songs, and in other words, no money involved." I didn’t get paid for it upfront, but I’m not going to say no to an opportunity like that, espeically when I didn’t have to handle the what would have been the most challenging part, which would have been doing the clearances and whatnot. So we basically batted around a playlist of maybe about 20 songs, we decided on some to cut out, then we had to see what we could actually clear, and then we had to change stuff around there. But all in all, it was a relatively painless process, at least on my end. We got the album done and finished it at the end of the year, and it came out back in March of '06.
APA: You’re starting your teaching gig this fall, and focusing on pop culture and race. Do you think it’s easier to go from an academic and a scholar, to a critic and journalist, or vice versa?
OW: Yeah, definitely, because academics I don’t think hold the same sort of stature within the pop culture world as they might have a generation or two generations ago. You still have people like Cornell West and Skip Gates who manage to ride that line in-between. I think these days an academic is just seen as a talking head who’s no more or less important than someone else. But, the fact that you are an academic is a credential that you can pour over I think into the pop world in ways that...you could have done a lot of great work in the pop world, but for the most part, the academy, the people in the ivory tower could really care less about that. You could have published 16 award-winning books in pop culture prior to applying to a position in academia, and those things won’t really count that much. What they’re really interested in is what have you done within the academic system, within the academic framework, and the academy tends to be much more rigid about what they confer value upon. That’s just the nature of the system. So I do think it’s easier to go from academia to the pop world, than the other way around.
APA: You once said in an interview, that you found it funny that rappers, who are some of the most critical people out there, seem incapable of accepting criticism. In turn, how do critics usually respond to criticism or even fawning from an artist that they’ve given a positive review to?
OW: We don’t get fawned upon, so there’s none of that. I think the irony is, yes, rappers who can be incredibly belligerent on the mic, don’t always take criticism of themselves very well, and also ironically, I don’t know if critics take any criticism of their own craft very well either. I think we’re used to doling it out, but we’re not in the position where it necessarily happens to us very often -- we get the occasional Letter to the Editor that might complain about it. I think the online world has actually changed it a lot, because it’s created a lot of opportunities for people to now comment on what commentators are writing about. It becomes part of this much, much larger peanut gallery and forums of conversation. If you’re masochistic enough, you’ll go to Technorati and plug your name in and see what people are saying about you. Which is actually a really bad blow to your ego, you don’t really want to go there most of the time, but you’re always curious to see what people have to say. So I think critics do have a hard time accepting criticism of their own stuff. But I think specifically, from artists though, I think it gets really complicated because it depends on whether we think the artist has a legitimate beef. And I’ve been infamously dissed by a few different rappers, most of whom, I don’t think actually had a real logical reason for doing it, except for in one or two different cases where I can honestly say, "Yeah, I’ve never actually written anything positive about them."
But you know, as a writer, I tend to be very diplomatic. I was described by one publication as one of the most politically correct writers in the Bay Area, which means I must be the left of the left, but I’m not vitriolic. I don’t go after people in my writing, not even in my blog writing really. I’m candid, I’m honest, but I’m not an asshole. I think a lot of artists are very sensitive to the way their art is critiqued, but they interpret anything, no matter how constructive it is, as being on par with insulting their mother. And, when you have those different levels of expectations, it becomes hard to create an common understanding to have a constructive conversation with someone.
APA: Both you and Jeff have now authored the chronicles of hip-hop in different ways. Do you think we’ll continue to see more of this in the future -- canonical commentaries on hip-hop?
OW: Yeah, I think we’re really just at the opening stages of different books and looking at hip-hop historically and canonically. And in some ways, it’s kind of surprising it took us as long as it did. Hip-hop has been around for over 25 years now. And you’ve always had these books that have come out throughout that history, but I still think the publishing world as it relates to hip-hop is still actually much smaller than it would have been for rock at the same point, 25 years into rock’s history. There would have been a lot more written about it, analyzing it, historicizing it, all these different things. I don’t think that impulse has been as natural for people to follow in the hip-hop world. I do think we’re now seeing a generation of writers who are interested in doing that, and are coming up with some really compelling books. Jeff’s book certainly, I think, is going to be a new standard in the field. And there’s stuff like Ethan Brown’s book, Queens Reigns Supreme, about the South Queens druglords and how rappers like 50 Cent and Murder Inc fit into it. That’s a very interesting book that I don’t know would have occurred to people a generation ago but I think there's more interest in these stories, more interest in understanding these histories. You know, oftentimes rappers have been the best documentarians of this culture, but now I think we have a generation that is ready to do it in other avenues outside of hip-hop -- in the songs themselves.
APA: Where do Asian Americans fit into that history? Are we still sort of marginal figures, or bystanders, or are our cultural legacies still in the process of being defined?
OW: I think we’re marginal figures if only because our population is small, but in most of the key areas, especially in the development of dancing and b-boying, graffiti-writing, and most obviously DJing, it’s undeniable that Asian Americans have played a very significant, if not a formative, role in a lot of the evolutions and transformations that have happened in those particular forms. Even though Asian Americans en masse were not part of the initial wave coming out of the South Bronx in the '70s. But as innovators, their participation, you can spot all over the place. So I think we’ve built that tradition in those areas, and I don’t see that stopping at any point because hip-hop has become the dominant cultural form for all Americans of a particular set of generations, and Asian Americans are certainly included in that. So in the future, we’re going to see more Asian American producers, more Asian American DJs, hopefully at some point, there will be more opportunities for Asian American rappers to play a role in that. But I think again, as dancers, as DJs, as graffiti-writers especially, you can find a lot of seminal figures that have been in that mix that have been Asian American.
APA: This might be a gross generalization, but there seems to be greater mobility among Asian Americans in the Bay Area that you don’t see as much in LA, in terms of cohesion or community outreach...
OW: Since leaving L.A. in 1990, I haven’t been in L.A. to see how these things happen, but the impression I’ve gotten from a secondary means is that there is actually a pretty well-formed community down here in L.A.. Maybe the difference is that the Bay Area is smaller, so geographically it’s more compact, and so it might seem more cohesive just because it’s a smaller space, not like L.A. where everyone’s spread across the southland -- the geography makes some level of difference. I’ve always heard through the grapevine and seen it manifested in different ways that there is a hip-hop community in Los Angeles, which I just assumed was indicative of a larger set of relations between people that was cohesive on similar levels as it would be in the Bay Area. I don’t think it exists as much in New York, although they’re certainly out there. I think the social dynamics are very different in NY for Asian Americans out there. There’s a lot more skepticism that gets directed toward them. We’re kind of spoiled being out here in California, because numerically and demographically, we’re just must better integrated in the general state of societies and cities that we occupy.
Date Posted: 6/8/2006