I’d like to start today by mentioning that the impetus for this paper came a few years ago when I was doing work on the iPod shuffle and urban epistemology. This was around the time that Sound Studies first started to cohere as a proto-discipline, and a lot of the new scholarship on mobile media had just emerged:the Auditory Culture Reader, and Hearing Culture and Michael Bull’s first book Sounding Out the City are just a few examples. Like many of the authors included and referenced in these collections, I found a historical precedent for contemporary mobile music technologies in the Sony Walkman.

This comparison is useful given the similar ways that iPods and the Walkman mediate our sonic surroundings. But the narrative of the Walkman doesn’t completely contain the ways that people use mobile sonic media technology today. A more fitting predecessor for all of those activities might be the boombox.
After an initial round of research, I realized that practically nothing had been written about what many consider to be a defining icon of music in the 1980s. With the very rare exception, it seemed as though the only thing that academics found significant about the boombox was the umbrage that they took at being subjected to noise by unruly teenagers and other such miscreants.

I’m interested in the silence that emanates from what was once the paragon of noise, and the absence of critical attention to this curious silence. What can account for this glaring omission in the recent history of mobile music, and why is the boombox understood in such limited and negative terms?

I should mention here that when I say the word boombox, I’m not referring to a single monolithic object with a fixed meaning. Rather, the term signifies an assemblage of sorts, always centered around mobile technology, but taking in at times language, cultural practices, social relations, public policy, and market forces. I hope that my nearly exclusive use of the term “boombox,” as opposed to the many other names the device has been give, from “ghettoblaster” to “jambox” to the transparently offensive “wog box,” is taken less as an exertion of scholarly authority than as a strategy of expediency.

It’s significant that the boombox has many names, because this highlights to the decentralized history of the development of the boombox as a cultural text. Unlike the Walkman, whose name, design, and functionality were all determined by executives at Sony and enthusiastically embraced by consumers, the boombox as a distinct concept emerged as much from the culture of its users as from the drawing boards of its designers. Cultural practices and manufacturing decisions fed back into each other. Portable combination radio/cassette stereos had existed for years before they came to be known by the names people have given them, and their functions evolved over time, as companies continued to add features and auxiliary ports to satisfy consumer demand. Conversely, although portable stereos still exist, and are still popular, the language and practices that made them a boombox seem to have faded away, disappearing into history.

Faced with a lack of existing scholarship on the boombox and a desire to understand the ephemeral, fleeting nature of this phenomenon some call the boombox, I was forced to rely on original research. I have found that interdisciplinarity holds greater potential for understanding than a strict study according to the approach of any single discipline.

Today I will invoke several methodologies in order to demonstrate a relationship between the myriad flows within the boombox. The first is ethnography. This paper is part of a larger project that I have undertaken with the brilliant hip hop scholar Joe Schloss. Over the past few months, Joe and I have been conducting interviews online and in our home neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, talking to people about their experiences and memories of the boombox. This collaborative ethnography, itself quite an experimental concept, focuses on the boombox and issues of mobility, and we hope to create an end product that presents our work.

Because of the fact that the life of the boombox played out for the most part in large urban cities in the United States, primarily New York City, I turn to urban studies and history in order to situate our understanding of the machine within appropriate historical and social contexts. New York City radically transformed in the era of the boombox, a time that initially was seen as dangerous, dirty, and chaotic, but eventually gave way to the post-Giuliani age of a corporatized Times Square, clean subways, and the exponential increase in incarceration of petty criminals and social delinquents. This transformation, enacted through government policy and the thrust of changing public opinion, is directly related to the cultural practices and meanings that people ascribed to the boombox.

I also find media studies particularly useful for this project, in so much as it provides a lens through which one can analyze the meaning of popular representations. I borrow my understanding of the inseparable relationship between media, politics and culture from Melani McAlister, who demonstrated in her 2001 book Epic Encounters that this relationship hinges on two facts: one, that politics and policies are themselves meaning-making activities, and two, that culture is “an active part of constructing the narratives that help policy make sense in a given moment.” For McAlister, the point of media studies is not to analyze texts on their own, or even as reflections of their social contexts, but rather, as Pierre Bourdieu claimed, to “explain the coincidence” that brings cultural texts and political discourses into conversation.

Finally, despite the larger claim of this talk, I do find that the substantial body of work that exists on the Walkman, much of it coming out of the British field of Cultural Studies, still provides a useful, if somewhat tenuous, springboard for the ideas I am about to lay out. As Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus posit in their book, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, there are two ways in which Sony executives conceptualized the usefulness of the Walkman: ESCAPE and ENHANCEMENT.

Much of the work written on the Walkman, as well as work on later devices, including the iPod and less so mobile phones, theorize the sonic practices that these devices afford along the lines of these two concepts. Ian Chambers discusses the Walkman in terms of conspicuous consumption, the listener setting himself apart from the rest of society by tuning into an alternative soundscape. Rey Chow describes the political efficacy of headphones as a tool for escaping the pervasive sonic propaganda of the communist government in China.

And in my own ethnographic research on the New York City Subway, a majority of people with whom I speak about their headphone practices use the language of escape and enhancement to explain the value of their devices. In such a cramped, noisy, unavoidable space of modern urban life as the subway car, people seek refuge from unwanted sounds through the mediation of their headphones and earbuds. Many even go so far as to wear earbuds without listening to music as a sign to fellow passengers that they seek to avoid interaction, another form of escape.

The language of enhancement most commonly falls along the lines of the desire to provide a soundtrack to the hum-drum experiences of everyday life. Jean-Paul Thibaud writes of re-territorializing the city through spatio-phonic behaviors. As Caroline Bassette demonstrates, mobile phones provide an alternative soundscape, simultaneously present and absent, that enhances as much as it detracts from one’s surroundings.

We can easily speak of the boombox in terms of escape and enhancement. In fact, a significant portion of the boombox experiences that people have chosen to share with me work within this logic. For many people, the formative years of youth in which listening to music is integral to subject formation and the construction of self-identity were spent alone in the bedroom playing cassettes on the boombox, a space of solace and comfort that contrasted with the worries of social pressure and doubts about the future.

But in these instances the boombox is being used less like a boombox and more like a portable stereo. By this I mean that when people share these experiences with me, they are less likely to use the term “boombox” when identifying the machine Also, representations of the boombox in cinema and popular culture rarely foreground these uses. The practices through which the came to be known as the boombox don’t fit the rubric of escape and enhancement as easily. They spill out of the theoretical container, if you will. I would like to offer two additional concepts that I find more useful in discussing the meaning-making that the boombox has allowed its users over time. These terms are COOPERATION and CONTESTATION.

The examples of mobile sound technologies’ usefulness in terms of enhancement that I listed above take on an additional layer of distinction when considered in terms of cooperation. This distinction lies in the difference between listening alone and listening collectively is actually profound, and it is inherently political. The Walkman, iPod, and other headphone-based mobile music technology privilege individual experience, a retreat into a private soundscape, at the sake of civic engagement and a shared acoustic experience. Of course, headphones can spill out into others’ ears, earbuds can be shared by two listeners, and the second model of the Walkman even had two headphone jacks. Conversely, listening to a boombox need not involve speakers or multiple listeners, as this clip from the 1980 film Fame demonstrates:

Fame, 1980

But for the majority of the people with whom I spoke, the boombox had the greatest impact on their lives when it fostered community through the possibility of shared listening experiences, something that headphone users rarely mention.
Whether at the beach, the pool, a park, or on the stoop of one’s building, the boombox encourages collective participation in musical performances, through varying degrees of active listening, dance, and singing. As Stacey told me, “With your boom box - you always were ready to party.”

Footloose, 1983

Speaking with other people, I learned of even more complicated examples of boombox cooperation. One man, Anthony, recalled “going to "the fountain" at Central Park (NYC)on Sunday afternoons. . . the city kids from all the borroughs would gather around and set up all the boomboxes in a giant circle, tuned to the same Sunday "house music" station. We're talking about 30 boomboxes all SCREAMING at top levels. . . 300 kids dancing!!!”

For Stacey, even when only one boombox was involved, listening was still a collective experience, something that people shared with each other. She explained, “You played the mixed tape that you recorded - rap from WBLS Marly Marl and Mr. Magic show or house from Paco on WKTU. They were expensive to use because they used about 20 D or C batteries which made it so heavy to carry. I remember having to chip in for batteries if we wanted someone to bring their box with them.”

Stacey’s mention of the weight of the boombox leads us to the notion of CONTESTATION. For many, possession of the largest, heaviest, and loudest boombox was a point of pride. When two boomboxes met in the street, there often followed a battle to determine whose machine owned the space, sonically. These contests, although taken seriously, rarely crossed over into the realm of animosity, and often ended in the establishment of new friendships. As B P Bagua explained, “many times after the bigger box won, the 2 of us would hook up to copy music, then boost the power by playing both boxes at once…. My other buddies used to sweat the possibility of a fight when I did this, but even in philly, most guys were about the music, which equaled a common ground.”

Perhaps the most prominent illustration of the boombox’s potential for contestation comes from what we could call the late boombox period, appearing in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do The Right Thing. Radio Raheem, rarely seen without a hulking boombox in his arms, moves throughout the public spaces of Brooklyn, temporarily occupying them sonically. John Brenkman has described Raheem as “the veritable archetype of the conflict between black youth culture and urban civility and decency. The tenderness of Radio Raheem’s love of the music and the box is easily eclipsed in the eyes of others by its volume and his bulk.” But Raheem’s music hints at another meaning of the word contestation, that of bearing witness, or contradictory testament. In the following scene we see Raheem and his boombox join the fight to get black figures included on the wall of fame in Sal’s pizza shop.

Do The Right Thing, 1989

The actions of Radio Raheem succinctly demonstrate the subtle interplay between cooperation and contest and provide perhaps the most nuanced representation of the political dimensions of sound for black communities in New York and other cities in film. As Brenkman pointed out, the death of the boombox at the hands of Sal, who reclaims control over sound and space, stands as “an irrational but accurate measure of how important images and music are to creating one of the neighborhood’s few public spaces.” Inserting a black soundtrack in his surroundings, Raheem provides the sonic equivalent of Buggin’ Out’s struggle over the photographs.

It should come as no surprise that the boombox is so frequently associated with sounds and images of hip hop. As a subculture ignored by and in opposition to the circulations of popular culture, hip hop thrived on precisely the sorts of shared musical experiences that the boombox encourages. They could even be dependent upon them. As Fab Five Freddy recently claimed in an interview with National Public Radio, the rapid popularization of hip hop in the late 1970s and early 80s was only made possible because of the circulation of music via cassette culture, with boomboxes used either to capture live DJ sets or dub mixes for further dissemination. This points to yet another, slightly Marxist interpretation of the term cooperation. When a second cassette deck was introduced to the boombox, users began operating the two decks in coordination, copying music and creating an alternative form of public circulation of sound, one almost entirely beyond the reach of the music industry.

By 1989 the boombox had developed a web of meaning that was complex enough to support such a nuanced portrayal of the contestation of sound and space as Radio Raheem. But we can observe a disparity between the representation of the boombox in earlier examples of popular culture and the diversity of uses that others have shared with me in my ethnographic research.

These representations almost always establish a connection, however tenuous, between the boombox and deviant social behavior. It appears most often in the hands of unruly teens, rebelling against the teacher or preparing for a street brawl.

The Warriors, 1979

The boombox stands in for the unknown dangers of the big city. It came to signify civil disobedience, embodying the potential to disturb the peace of the commons with unwanted noise that intrudes on decent citizens’ homes, businesses, and bodies.

Times Square, 1980

Even an image as innocent as two young white girls dancing together suddenly finds itself yoked with ominous overtones when the tune to which they move emanates from a boombox hanging from the shoulders of a strange man in seedy, pre-cleanup Times Square. This disparity is not inconsequential. The representation of boomboxes in popular cinema doubtlessly shaped public perception of the device, especially in locations where hip hop and punk culture had not yet reached. The discourse implied in these representations provided a rhetorical siphon through which debates about noise and public policy were surely filtered.

The sudden proliferation of noise ordinances that started in the 1980s has several causes. Perhaps the most important was Reagan’s abandonment of the Federal Noise Act in 1981, transferring the onus to regulate noise into the hands of local governments. But the implementation of noise codes is just as much a reaction to the popularity of the boombox. Some of these noise codes even gathered the unofficial name of “boombox ordinances” reflecting the centrality of the device in public debate.

When certain uses of the boombox are prohibited, namely the playback of music at a volume that reaches a large number of listeners, this acts as a privileging of the desires of one group of people above another. Noise ordinances serve private individuals, protecting their personal space and property from unwanted sonic intrusions. But this space and property are luxuries that not all can afford. As Tricia Rose has pointed out, in the post-industrial spaces of the Bronx and Brooklyn where Hip Hop culture first sounded, “indoor community spaces in economically oppressed areas are rare.” Because of this, people resorted to claiming public space as their own, and the cooperative listening that boomboxes brought into open areas, according to Rose, actually “satisfies young black people’s profound need to have their territories acknowledged, recognized and celebrated.”

Surprisingly enough, New York City, which serves as the backdrop for nearly every early cinematic appearance of the boombox, was actually one of the last cities to reform its policy on noise pollution to address boomboxes and other mobile sound technologies. The original code, created shortly after the enactment of the Federal Noise Act in 1972, only prohibited the use of amplified sound recordings by commercial businesses and on public transportation. Only in 2007 did revisions prohibit the excessive volume of playback, long after the era of the boombox had waned.

But boomboxes still exist. They fetch thousands of dollars from collectors in online auctions and Japanese boutique stores. People still use them in ways that belong to the milieu of the boombox. But the collaborative practices that they afforded, at a time when popular music was still for the most part a unidirectional flow from producers to consumers, have been folded back into the business model of the music industry, a demonstration of the pervasive creep of capital into every corner of public and private life that is typical of the current post-Fordist condition.

In conclusion, an exploration of the boombox is actually a tracing of the confluence of material objects, cultural practices and products, public policy, and market forces that together form the event that we understand as the boombox. Following the course of this event through the twenty years from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, we see the emergence of a cultural movement in reaction to the deleterious conditions of post-industrial urban spaces of the U.S. The accelerated popularity of this cultural movement, distinguished by a predilection for cooperation and contestation, led to a wave of representation in the media that simultaneously profited from the movement and played on the racially motivated fears of mainstream society. These representations in turn provided a discursive ground from which public policies emerged that allayed these fears by constricting and regulating the formative activities of many underserved urban communities. This double movement of commercial appropriation and governmental prohibition led to the transformation of the boombox to the point that its original form seemed to disappear.

Understanding the boombox in this way provides a helpful route through which we can chart the relationship between race, politics, and the circulation of cultural practices in the period that marks the transition from the late capitalism of the last century to the current, post-Fordist era in which mobile music devices resound.