Advance praise for Legions of Boom:
“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 Colorization of America
“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 of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
Interviews with Oliver Wang:
Stories on Legions of Boom