Author

I began writing professionally in 1994; a column for Asian Week. Then Jeff Chang recruited me to write on music for URB and soon thereafter, I landed my most important gig (in terms of my development as a writer) at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Since then, I’ve written for almost every major hip-hop magazine to have come along since the mid-1990s, including The Source, XXL, Blaze, Vibe, Scratch, etc. ¹ I’ve also written for Spin, Yolk, A Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, the LA Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, and Boston Phoenix, not to mention more/other defunct pubs and websites than I’ll ever care to remember.

These days, my primary outlets are NPR, the LA Times and Wax Poetics, and of course, my own blogs, especially Soul Sides. I write primarily on music but I do cover other arts and occasionally, politics and society. (This is all separate from my academic writing).

–Oliver Wang, Los Angeles