Oliver Wang
Oliver Wang is an culture writer, scholar, and DJ based in Los Angeles. He's the author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area and a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach. He's the creator of the audioblog soul-sides.com and co-host of the album appreciation podcast, Heat Rocks.
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From history's shadows, these high-quality soul tracks all feature women who deserve to be heard. -
In a vintage photo, a solitary man with a Cab Calloway mustache grabs his hat with two hands and lets out a yell. Off the page and across 30 years, you can still hear the holler. Oliver Wang reviews a collection of music and photos from Chicago's 1970s soul scene.
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Soul singer Lee Fields may be a rhythm-and-blues veteran, but don't call him a relic. Since the 1970s, the North Carolina native has amassed a prolific catalog of albums, and part of the secret to his success has been flexibility. To younger fans, Fields is retro-soul royalty. For his older fans, Fields has been a stalwart of Southern soul music.
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The Chicago rapper's new album, 808s and Heartbreak features him singing instead of rapping, but he's filtered his vocals through the voice processing system known as Auto-Tune, an increasingly popular trend among pop artists. The result is a melancholy, intimate and decidedly quirky effort.
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Nicole Willis is a retro soul singer from Brooklyn. Her really tight band, the Soul Investigators, is from Finland. The group sounds like it's from Memphis – and it's one of Oliver Wang's favorites of the year so far.
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Many critics are calling The Reminder by Feist, the new recording by the Canadian songwriter and singer, her best yet... and this may be her moment. She was the subject of an extensive New York Times profile. The record came out this week.
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In the mid-'60s, Bob & Gene began to record sweet, harmony-drenched soul tunes for a small New York label. However, despite amassing a dozen or so tracks by the early '70s, the duo's album never made it to market. Now, more than three decades later, it's finally been released. -
Antibalas' nearly 13-minute Afrobeat epic "Sanctuary" unwinds with a graceful, unhurried pace that ever-so-slowly builds steam with each rhythmic reiteration. Though the bassline anchors the song, Antibalas works in a marvelously subtle mix of other elements. -
Migrant workers came from around the world to build Panama's transportation systems. They brought, among other things, music with them. Dozens of bands that came to be known collectively as Combos Nacionales married musical styles as distinct and distant as New York boogaloo, Cuban descarga and Trinidadian Calypso. Panama: Latin, Calypso and Funk at the Isthmus charts this uniquely Panamanian hybrid.
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The Coup realizes what the best blues and soul artists always knew: Focus on everyday people, and you'll never run out of stories. For nearly 15 years, the duo has provided one of the lone voices speaking to the trials and tribulations of working-class, inner-city black life.
