Overview

Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases-or multi-crew performances-which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.

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Reviews

For more than a decade Oliver Wang has produced some of the keener insights on what's been happening in popular culture and popular music in particular. Legions of Boom is the best evidence of what Wang's instinctive intellect looks like when allowed to flourish in the long form, and will prove to be indispensable to future analyses of the cultural formations that coalesce around popular expression. --Mark Anthony Neal, author Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

As a writer and scholar Oliver Wang is relentlessly insightful and compulsively readable. Here it's impossible not to feel his passion for the pleasures and follies of immigrant and second-gen Filipino American youth, as he follows them from their suburban garages into the rapture of flashing lights and rising tempos, and the warm electricity of bodies moving together on a Saturday night. With Legions of Boom, Wang has created something indispensable--a singular document of a forgotten yet influential era in west coast hip-hop and dance music, a rare and rich account of protean Asian American creativity, and a subtle, poetic work of ethnography. --Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorizaton of America

Wang's account strikes a careful balance between oral history and analysis, grounded in ethnography while also working to interpret and elaborate the significance of the story. [W]ith an annotated oral history at its core, Legions Of Boom is centred on the words of the scene's participants and Wang's insightful perspectives as a scholar, a journalist and a DJ. --Wayne Marshall The Wire (06/01/2015)

Author Information

Oliver Wang is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He is the editor of Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide and has written for NPR, Vibe, Wax Poetics, the Los Angeles Times, the Oakland Tribune, and the Village Voice, amongst others.

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