About the Creator

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. For the next 10+ years, I wrote for almost every major hip-hop magazine to come along including The Source, XXL, Blaze, Vibe, Scratch, etc. 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 include NPR, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the LA Times and Wax Poetics, and of course, here on Soul Sides. I write about music, culture, arts and society. (This is all separate from my academic writing as a sociology professor).

Thanks to this blog, I was able to produce my first official CD compilation in 2006, Soul Sides Vol. 1. The second volume followed in the spring of 2007. I continue to produce mixes on my own.

In 1993, I began as a DJ at KALX FM in Berkeley and hosted a weekly show — The O-Zone — until 2004. Now I have a monthly radio show – Shades of Soul – on Artform Radio/Worldwide FM, usually every third Thursday. I continue to spin in clubs and for private events. If you got the money, O-Dub is for the booking.

Oliver “O-Dub” Wang, Los Angeles