Notes for "Unlimited Creations: Filipino American Mobile DJs of the Bay Area

1. Thanks to 3SA's Dave "Dynamix" Refuerzo for permission to use the photo. Dave's still passionate about DJing after nearly three decades in the game. He has a sick collection of mobile era fliers on his FB page.

2. For example, the Latino mobile scene in the Bay was thick too.

3. I don't have time to get into it here but DJing is still a predominantly male community and the mobile crews I studied were very much so. I managed to find just one female Filipino crew - the Go-Go's (who were frickin' awesome to interview).

4. One common misperception about my research is that it's about "Filipinos in hip-hop." It's not. The mobile scene predates the spread of hip-hop to the West Coast and more to the point, though rap music found a happy audience amongst the crews, it wasn't the dominant genre in this community during its heyday: uptempo dance music such as Latin freestyle and hi-NRG was. Hip-hop became big by the latter era of the scene, especially those that formed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the mobile scene was not a hip-hop scene as much as it may have a paralleled hip-hop's rise.

5. This may be pure coincidence, but as Tim Lawrence chronicles, many of the major NY disco DJs that emerged during the late 1960s and throughout the ?70s were the children of Italian immigrants.

6. One of my favorite quotes in this respect comes from Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk director George C. Wolfe:

I'm interested in how, if you actively unearth popular culture and look inside it, you can find all kinds of secrets and truths and rhythms of a time period, much more than you find in written history.

7. To be fair, I'm leaving out the other half of the story here: The Filipino American community - the one that existed before the mobile scene arose - was absolutely essential to the growth and longevity of the scene itself. Crews depended not only on their friends but especially on their family and close networks with relatives and cultural/social organizations to help book gigs. The mobile scene runs on gig money and the wider your networks to find gigs, the better you can invest in your crew. In the Bay Area, the Filipino social networks were incredibly tight, especially having been created by relatively newly arrived first generation immigrants who depended on one another for news, services and support. (This is all in the book. Hint hint).