Interview: Soul-Sides Founder Oliver Wang

The music blog landscape is filled with overly loquacious writers who love their own prose or are just looking to hop on whatever bandwagon is handy. However, a few manage to stick out from the pack, showcasing real lost gems and showing genuine love and insight regarding the music they love.

One such blogger is KALX alum Oliver Wang. Since he started his blog www.Soul-Sides.com in 2004, Wang has spit some serious blog game, writing up pieces about his extensive record collection and all things relating to the funky and the soulful. Now releasing the second volume of the site’s compilation series, Wang sat down to chat about his love of music, why DJing changed the way he looks at the Internet and how it all began with a taped copy of Licensed to Ill.

Daily Californian: You post a lot of MP3s, even if for a short time—what do you feel your role is in getting music to the public?

Oliver Wang: I’ve always been aware I’ve operated in a legal gray area. I’ve always been very conscientious that if an artist, label or rights holder has an issue with me posting their music, I take it down immediately.

That said, with most of the music I’m putting up, I’ll hear from the artist or the family of the artist, and it’s all appreciation—I’ve only had one case where someone had a problem with it. To me, I started audioblogging as an extension of doing radio—I don’t see it as being fundamentally different, because you’re playing songs to introduce them to the public. And although I’m operating in more of a legal gray area, I think both serve the same function through a different medium; the things I don’t do on Soul Sides I wouldn’t do on the radio. I won’t play or share an album in its entirety. I put up sound files that are decent enough to listen to, but aren’t audiophile quality.

I don’t want people to replace or forgo seeking out this music because they can get it from my site. That interest in broadcasting, the impulse to share, is the same from terrestrial radio or audioblogging. If I had never done radio, if I came in through record collecting through the route other collectors take, they’re loathe to share what they have, because they feel like they’re giving stuff they’ve slaved over, spent time and money on, for free, with people they don’t even know. I’m not commenting on whether or not I agree or disagree with that philosophy, but I think coming into record collecting through radio means sharing.

DC: What is your first memory of being affected by music?

OW: I have a memory of being 4 or 5 years old, dancing to disco. I watched “Dance Fever” because I had to get through it to watch “Battlestar Galactica.” I didn’t grow up in a musical household, but later on I got a portable radio and that turned me on to Top 40.

DC: When did you start DJing or taking music more seriously?

OW: There were a series of moments in which my “musical consciousness” got awoken, for lack of a better term. 1986 was really key, which was when a friend made me a cassette dub of Run-DMC’s Raising Hell on one side and the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill on the other. That was my first real exposure not just to hip-hop, but it was the first time I listened to an album from beginning to end. On my own, I discovered De La Soul’s Three Feet High And Rising in the summer of 1989, and that album changed my life. It’s what had me fall in love with hip-hop, and from that point on, I wanted to know what was this music, who else was making it. That was when I started buying albums in earnest.

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