Oliver Wang is an associate professor of sociology at CSU Long Beach and the author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area. He has contributed to NPR's All Things Considered, KCET’s Artbound, KPCC’s Take Two, the New York Times Book Review, and Los Angeles Times. He also writes the audioblog Soul-sides.com.

“The Producer’s Voice/Sounding Identity”
Since hip-hop music’s earliest years as a commercial genre, MCs have taken center stage and captured the majority of the audience’s attention. The distinctive voices and larger-than-life personalities of famous rappers are veritable brands that have become the focal point of the music industry and its marketing machinery. The full effect of an MC’s performance, however, depends on the work of behind-the-scenes producers, DJs, and other contributors. Therefore, in addition to considering what rappers are saying, it is important to find ways of acknowledging the significance of what rap producers and their audiences are doing. This panel seeks to better understand hip hop as music and as a site where audiences negotiate meaning and their own senses of identity. How do we recognize the “voice” of a producer working with pre-recorded samples? In what ways does a hip-hop beat contribute its own poetic content to a song’s lyrical meaning? And in what ways can we imagine audiences engaging a song—not only with respect to its lexical meaning—but also in terms of its sound? This panel seeks to offer answers to these and other questions, helping us to hear more clearly the producer’s voice and the sounding of identity in hip-hop and rap music.