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MUSIC IN NIGHTCLUBS Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area. By Oliver Wang. (Refiguring American Music.) Durham, nC: Duke University Press, 2015. [xiii, 218 p. ISBN 9780822359043 (hardcover), $89.95; ISBN 9780822358909 (paperback), $24.95; ISBN 9780822375487 (e-book), various.] Illustrations, bibliography index.
Oliver Wang's Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area chronicles the historical trajectory of Filipino American DJs-from the mobile crews to the scratch DJ-through the lived experiences of practitioners and patrons. The book's title (a play on Legions of Doom, the DC Comics evil superheroes) was inspired by an allegiance between five different DJ crews in northern California's Bay Area (including South San Francisco, Daly City, Fremont, and Union City): Sound Sequence, Images Incorporated, Creative Madness, Midstar Productions, and Styles Beyond Compare (p. 27). In the first chapter, Wang notes that many of the DJs descended from the third wave of Filipino migrants to the United States: the professionals. Under U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson's Third Preference Act, Filipino doctors, engineers, nurses, entrepreneurs, and businessmen established themselves primarily in coastal areas. Second-generation Filipino Americans, the children of the migrants who settled in a metropolis, became exposed to American popular music in the discotheque nightclubs.
In the second chapter, Wang documents the formation of the earliest Filipino American mobile DJ crews and their efforts to bring the discotheque experience to their community. His first informants, Sound Explosion, were the pioneers of the technique of nonstop mixing by Filipino American DJs. These three DJs- Rafael and Ricky Restauro and Sam Beltran-subsequently developed a grassroots movement for Filipino American mobile DJs that was both self-funded and financed by their parents (what the author calls "soft infrastructure"; p. 57). With the success of Sound Explosion, other Filipino Americans formulated similar mobile crews. The Electric Sounds and the Gogos (the only female mobile DJ...