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October 27, 2004
Boomboxes are Back! Listen to my Beats…
Though never truly out of style the boombox has seen better days. Where it was once the iconic accessory of the ruling hip-hop and break-dancing street culture, the boombox, in recent years, has lost some of its appeal. Newer, cooler, musical listening devices such as mp3 players became the hot item. The boombox faded into the background, even with its ever present, hard to ignore, bass boost. The boombox was no longer cool — until now.
Boomboxes are Hip Again
There was a time when a boombox on your shoulder was as much a badge of hipness as the white earphones signifying an iPod in your pocket are today.So cool was the portable music player in its heyday that it found its way into numerous films and advertisements in the 1980s, as laid out in the Pocket Calculator Boombox Museum, a site dedicated to retro consumer gadgets. Even rapper L.L. Cool J had his say on his 1985 album Radio, which dedicates numerous verses to the virtues of the boombox.
Those days are gone. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, only 329,000 boombox units without CD players were shipped in the United States in 2003, compared to 20.4 million in 1986.
The boombox, a self-contained audio device measuring 1 to 3 feet wide, became an essential part of street culture during the 1980s as people started to carry their boxes with them or used them to blast music in public places.
Today, you still see the occasional person carrying a blaring ghetto blaster down the street in the United States, despite the advent of personal stereos, which are much smaller than boomboxes and are designed to be used with headphones.
Some city dwellers, like San Francisco-based urban dancer Skorpio, use both a boombox and a personal stereo.
"I like to share my beats with everybody else," he said.
In other circles, the boombox lives on in unusual ways. Mark Argo and Ahmi Wolf, students in New York University's interactive telecommunications program, have removed the tuner and tape deck of a large 1980s ghetto blaster and filled it with a computer and Wi-Fi access point to make their Bass-Station. People can access shared media stored in the Bass-Station and manipulate playlists of music that gets amplified through the box's original speakers.
On the West Coast, sound artists such as five-piece group Rajar and collaborators Guillermo Galindo and Chris Brown use boomboxes along with other radios as part of their musical arsenal. Both groups performed at a recent event at Southern Exposure, a San Francisco artists' organization and gallery.
Rajar uses sounds captured from radio -- whether radio stations or the sounds of other transmissions such as faxes -- as its raw sonic material. At Southern Exposure, the group also picked up its own sound as it was being broadcast by the low-power FM transmitter managed by a community radio project, Neighborhood Public Radio, and fed the noise back into its mix.
Brown and Galindo broadcast sounds from their laptops and other electronic devices through four low-powered transmitters to any receivers nearby. Normally, they encourage audience members to bring boomboxes so that they themselves form the amplification system, modulating the sound as they move around. At Southern Exposure, they broadcast to boomboxes dotted around the room. More…
Posted by BIGBAER at October 27, 2004 12:48 PM
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