Oliver Wang appears in the following:
Dionne Warwick, Reduced To An Essence
Wednesday, October 01, 2014
Unheard Bounty On Mobb Deep's First Album In Eight Years
Monday, May 05, 2014
Under most circumstances, the release of a new Mobb Deep album would be notable in and of itself. This veteran rap duo from Queens had a short-lived but very public falling out in 2012, casting any future collaborations into question; as it is, their new The Infamous Mobb ...
The Poets Of Rhythm: A Troop Of German James Browns
Friday, October 18, 2013
Long before Amy Winehouse or Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, there were the Poets of Rhythm: a group of young, 20-something musicians out of Munich. In the early 1990s, they perfected the sounds and rhythms of '60s and '70s American funk. In the process, they became ...
Chico Mann: Plastic Keys, Blinking Lights And Burbling Beats
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Marcos Garcia took his alter ego Chico Mann not from the 1970s TV series Chico and the Man but from a bit of dialogue in the early-'80s hip-hop film Wild Style. For years, Garcia was best-known as one of the members of the New York Afrobeat ensemble Antibalas. ...
Kanye's 'Yeezus' Packs A Bite
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Rapper Kanye West experienced two births of a sort over the weekend. Most important would be the birth of his child with Kim Kardashian. Then there was the leak of his latest album, Yeezus, an event that also set the social media world atwitter. After months of speculation, the ...
Shuggie Otis: 40 Years Later, Still An 'Inspiration'
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
This isn't the first time Shuggie Otis' masterpiece, Inspiration Information, has been reissued — but that's OK. It's an album that absolutely deserves to be rediscovered every decade or so.
Released nearly 40 years ago, the album became Otis' most acclaimed work, and also his last official release: Otis continued ...
Laura Mvula's Velvet 'Moon' Is A Revelation
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
The very first notes on Laura Mvula's new album feel like a powerful invocation. You're not sure for what, but the moment is awesome — with an emphasis on awe.
On paper, Sing to the Moon may seem like yet another album by a young, big-throated British singer, but ...
On Two New R&B Albums, An Old Soul Sound That Glows
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
It's tempting to describe the voices of Charles Bradley and James Hunter as timeless, but that's not quite right. When we hear the jagged tear in their singing, we know exactly which era they're honoring.
Bradley, who's now in his mid-60s, was signed by Daptone Records ...
20 Years Ago Biz Markie Got The Last Laugh
Monday, May 06, 2013
In the late 1980s, no clique in New York seemed more dominant than the Juice Crew. Assembled by producer Marley Marl, the group's core included the larger-than-life spectacle that was Big Daddy Kane, the slippery tongued Masta Ace, the profanely prickly Roxanne Shante and the clown prince, Biz ...
Lady: Two Soul Stalwarts Find A New Groove Together
Thursday, March 14, 2013
R&B singers Nicole Wray and Terri Walker both had promising starts to their careers more than ten years ago. Wray came up on the Virginia coast under the wing of mentor Missy Elliott. Walker, a Londoner, was classically trained yet released her debut on a Def Jam subsidiary. ...
It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Decade in Hip Hop
Friday, December 18, 2009
By the end of the 1990s, hip hop was flexing a lot of music-industry muscle. But at the close of this decade, things are very different. Music critic and author Oliver Wang joins us to explain how the digital music revolution changed the genre. Plus: Oliver's picks for the best ...
Still Crazy After All These Years
Friday, September 18, 2009
Greed's Deadly Medley
Friday, February 27, 2009
In the third installment of our "Seven Sins" series, we look at the role greed has played over time in music. Oliver Wang, music writer and assistant professor of sociology at Cal State-Long Beach, talks about money and power in hip-hop. And Dan Kennedy, author of the music-industry memoir "Rock ...