Hip Hop in Print: The Writer: Oliver Wang (Urb, SF Weekly)
Writer: Oliver “O-Dub” Wang
Website: O-Dub
“A lot of beginning writers psyche themselves out thinking they can’t approach certain publications. Whatever clips you have just send it and the vast majority of times they will give you an opportunity to write for them.”
When it came time to get at some writers to finish up our Hip hop in Print Series Oliver Wang was the first person to come to mind. A prolific writer, mainly known for his reviews, Oliver’s music and cultural critiques have been published in numerous publications including Urb, The Village Voice, and The Source. Last spring he completed his first book Classic Material: The Hiphop Album Guide which reviewed over a hundred definitive albums. To get more info into the life of a freelance journalist we connected and got some great insights.
Give us a little history of the work that you’ve done.
I started writing back in 1994. The first music magazine I wrote for was Urb down in Los Angeles where a friend of mine was editing. He pretty much needed some new writers to help with the 12” reviews. I didn’t really get off writing right away. I think part of it was I never thought about it as a career or anything more than just something fun to do on the side. Probably around 1997 or 1998 it really occurred to me that this was something I could develop a lot more [by] putting more time into improving my writing and getting into new places. The bulk of my career really took off at that point.
What were some of the things you did to improve your writing?
A lot of it was just being conscientious of the quality of my writing. When I first started to write the origin of that was really posting a lot of impromptu retro reviews just shooting the shit on a lot of internet newsgroups. Most of my friends were not hiphop fans at all so I didn’t have anyone directly in my social circle that I could talk about this with so I found this community of people online that I could go off on the new Tribe album or whatever was hitting in the early 90s. A lot of that was really off the cuff and opinionated, which is fine in a particular venue, but when you’re always used to writing like that it doesn’t always lend itself to communicate well to an audience. So I think when I got more serious about my writing I started thinking about and approaching writing as a craft that needs to be really thought out, refined, well edited and well written. I just think it’s one of those things where you never take for granted that your own writing is really good, you just always assume you have room for improvement and that’s what you really strive for.
How has dealing with various venues from a paper to Urb to Complex or XXL affected how you approach an article?
Usually the glossier the magazine the more specific voice they have that they want to communicate to their audience. When I write for all weekly like the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly or the San Francisco Bay Guardian they tend to give their writers a lot of free reign in terms of how they write and that’s part of what they’re there to do to sort of encourage new writers to develop their voice. So they don’t really come down hard in terms of whether a piece fits into their publication style. On the other end of it is a magazine like Vibe, which has a very particular editorial image and editorial voice. Their editorial process really tries to push the writers into a particular style. Those are kind of the two extremes most freelancers are going to encounter. Magazines like Blender, Rolling Stone, and Spin have a particular editorial voice of the magazine and they want the writing that appears in that magazine, at least at the reviews level, to sort of be reflective of that. I’ve seen it to a lesser extent at places like XXL and Source where they have concerns but they are not quite as hands on about the way they try to tailor pieces to fit into the editorial vision of the magazine.
What do you feel makes a good article say a feature for XXL?
I think those features serve two audiences. One is people who are familiar with the artist and they want to hear something new and interesting about the artist that they have never seen before. For example, what was interesting to me was XXL had a big Q&A with Jay-Z when he announced his retirement. It was great stuff in terms that he was very open about what he talked about and they covered a lot of range and I think XXL has done a really great job on their Q&A. Then Vibe comes out with their issue with Jay-Z on the cover one month later and I’m like what can Vibe possibly have that I haven’t seen in the XXL article. As it turned out the Vibe article had a lot of things I hadn’t read elsewhere mostly because Jay kind of penned it himself. This was the first place I read [where] he said my retirement is just temporary and I’m probably gonna take a break for two or three years and come back into it. I hadn’t seen anyone say that yet so I was pleasantly surprised because that Vibe feature managed to get something new in there that was informative to me. On the flip side a lot of people that pick up these magazines don’t necessarily follow hiphop for a living. They’re gonna want to know the background and basics and I think that a good feature is able to balance those two things and serve those two audiences.
When you’re preparing your questions how much research do you do?
I think good preparation is important. Some people like to walk into interviews with nothing prepared and just riff with it and I like the element of that. The interview that’s best is an interview where you have a conversation with someone and they don’t see you as someone interrogating them and they’re providing responses. You just want to chill with someone and hope something develops out of that. The problem is to get someone to that comfort level you can’t just walk in there and say, ‘Hey what’s up, what did you do today.’ It helps to come in with some prepared questions to show that you’ve done your homework and that you’re familiar with the artist. That develops a basis for rapport. A good friend of mine is a reporter for MTV News now and he interviewed Nas the other day. Nas is notoriously a hard interview. He is a tough guy to crack because he is so conscious about his self image (this is based on other people I know who have interviewed him). My friend was able to go in and establish really early on that he wasn’t just another reporter on a junket talking about, ‘So Nas tell me about how you got started.’ This is a guy who could name studio sessions and who was in the studio at the time and he had questions around that. That really surprised Nas and he was more comfortable going more places with that writer in terms of things he was willing to talk about. I think that could only have happened if my friend had been prepared and establish early on that he wasn’t a scrub and he knew enough about the artist and respected the artist enough to do his homework. You have to do it both ways You have to allow for conversations to mature organically but you should go in there with some level of preparation so you don’t get caught unaware.
Once you amass all your information from the interview how do you go about turning that into an interesting article?
I wish there was a science to it that way I can learn it and punch it out every time and make it easy. Every story is a little bit different and the writing process is never particularly consistent. A lot of times before I go into a story I’ll start writing it in my head in terms of what I think will be really interesting and sometimes my interview helps to reinforce that. Other times what comes up in an interview takes me into a different direction and I have to junk whatever idea I went in with and start over. In terms of advice I give other writers is once you finish the first draft (always remember whatever you write the first time is the first draft no matter how complete you think it is) take off a day or two, don’t think about and go back and read it again. When I’m on a tight deadline I’ll read it again to copyedit myself but I’ll miss a lot of things because I’m so close to it at that point. I’m not really looking at it for things that if I never seen it before I would pick up right away, small stuff like using the same adjective twice in a paragraph. I don’t like doing stuff like that because it doesn’t look good to me. I did a review of Outkast’s “The Love Below” and I used a phrase three times in the piece. I wrote that piece relatively quickly because I had to turn it in but when I read it when it came out I couldn’t believe I didn’t catch it. I should have picked up on that but I didn’t write it ahead enough to take some time off and then come back and look at it with fresh eyes. I think it would have been so much better if I had done that. I would have caught those kind of errors and I might have had new ideas that would have improved the piece. I don’t really feel you ever reach a final draft. There are pieces I’ve written years ago and I’ll find new things to add or change even though I was happy with it at the time. You’ll always find something new.
What writers do you admire?
When I first started paying attention to bylines and who was writing I thought Nelson George’s stuff from the eighties was important. He had really insightful things to say. He wrote this essay about “De La Soul is Dead” talking about how they made the transition from afro-centricity to ghetto-centricity. That was a really brilliant insight that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. I’m not as big of a fan of Nelson’s writing more recently starting around the time he wrote “Hip Hop America.” I didn’t feel like he had as good of a handle on hip hop anymore but that’s another story. Jeff Chang is probably one of the writers who has had the biggest influence on me as a mentor and then later as a friend with his commitment to always thinking about the political aspect of music. I’ve always respected him for that. Some other people are Josh Kun (SF Guardian), Sasha Frere-Jones (New Yorker), he just wrote about MadVillain in the New Yorker and that’s something I thought would never happen, Hua Hsu (Wire, Urb), Dave Thompkins (Wire), Jon Caramanica. I’m biased. A lot of people’s names I’m giving are friends of mine and I’m not propping them because their friends of mine I just really respect what they do. I have a lot of respect for the Ego Trip guys for what they were able to do with the magazine and then with the book. I could go on forever.
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