Driving Off Into the Sunset: The California Street-Racing and Mobile-DJ Scenes

The rest of the world eyes the lives of Golden State tribes—Hollywood “movie people,” surfers, gay San Franciscans, Silicon Valley programmers—with a mixture of fascination and longing. What is the powerful appeal of the California subculture? How have writers, filmmakers, and historians—whether they’re stuck on the outside looking in, or remembering a time they once belonged—tried to explain what it’s like to be part of a California scene?

Oliver Wang’s book about the mobile-DJ scene in California’s Bay Area between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, Legions of Boom, is a microhistory of an obscure subculture. During this decade and change, groups of Filipino-American teenagers living in the suburbs around the Bay coalesced into a party scene very particular to its time and place. “Crews” of mostly male friends—DJs, plus those who put together the physical infrastructure of turntables, lights, and speakers—anchored parties in garages, church basements, and assembly halls. Without the benefit of social media or much coverage in newspapers or on the radio, these mobile DJs assembled a scene: loose networks of people who competed against one another, bolstered one another, and saw one another on the dance floor every Friday and Saturday night. Almost as soon as it began, the scene was over, but the people Wang interviews still remember those days as something extraordinary—an unusual time that defined who they were as a community.

The Fast and Furious movies—there are seven in total, produced between 2001 and this year—are a huge cultural phenomenon that’s spectacularly financially successful. While it can be hard to remember, given the way the later installments have bloated beyond recognition, the films began modestly, with another tiny California subculture at their heart. The first installment is about a golden-boy undercover police detective, Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), who infiltrates an illegal street-racing scene in Los Angeles while trying to solve…some crime or another. The point of the movies is the racing itself, and the group of attractive driver-criminals led by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), a transcendentally authentic and powerful figure whose influence acts (as his sister Mia puts it) “like gravity” on those around him. Over the course of the series, O’Conner, always an ambivalent officer of the law, leaves mainstream culture for this subculture; he finds his true love, true family, and true self in the process.

The mobile-DJ scene and the street-racing scene evoke strong emotions: the sensation of mastery, the love of a chosen community, and the feeling of joyful escape from the routines of everyday life. On the one hand, we have a series of candy-colored, laughably unrealistic movies that draws incredibly loyal audiences; on the other, an earnest book, written to academic standards, that takes its duties of reporting and interpretation very seriously. Neither approach to representing a subculture can quite satisfy the onlooker’s insatiable desire to be there: to be part of what happened. Maybe it’s in the very impossibility of satisfaction that the lure of the subculture can be found.

The group dynamic of a subculture, amplified by the sun and utopianism of the California dream, forms the core of the narrative appeal of the Fast and Furious movies. The camaraderie on display is far overdrawn—Toretto is forever making heartfelt toasts to “family” at the end of backyard barbecues—but it’s also a powerful force, defining the difference between these racing people and the everyday world around them. Every Fast and Furious movie needs to have a street-race scene, which shows how racing fans (75 percent of whom seem to be scantily clad women) are able to assemble an illegal party out of nothing, making a parking garage or an anonymous bridge into a stage set for their own temporary...