BOOM BOXES
Also known as "ghetto blasters"; cassette-cum-radio players were often balanced on the shoulder, "blasting" one's music tastes to everyone in the "ghetto."
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Matt Steck, a student at Penn State, likes to share his music. In particular, he likes to share it with people who are out shopping at the Berkshire Mall in Reading, Pennsylvania. On any given afternoon, you are likely to see him there blasting new wave tunes from his 1983 JVC boom box. The man's never met a D-battery he didn't like.
"I don't do it to be different. I just like the sound quality. People are always amazed at how good it sounds," says Mr. Steck, age twenty. "It's also a way to be social. I mean, I might not be playing music that everyone around me wants to hear, but at least I'm interacting with people. And maybe I'll end up playing something you didn't know you'd like."
Back in the house where he grew up, Mr. Steck has more than twenty vintage boom boxes that he's collected from garage sales. There are ones that have a single cassette player, and ones that have two or even three. Some models have detachable speakers, while others can play records, inserted vertically. Most of them cost more than an MP3 player would today.
Boom boxes, first introduced in the late 1970s, were quickly adopted by disco-goers and break-dancers as totems of power; they were mammoth machines that refused to be ignored, whether that meant using them to get a girl's attention (à la Lloyd Dobler playing "In Your Eyes" outside his crush's window in Say Anything) or asserting power in a pizza joint (a potentially fatal move by Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing).
If few people have ever complained to Mr. Steck about his attempt to serenade the world with his Blondie and Huey Lewis mixtapes, it might be because most people around him don't hear any of it. Today's public places are flooded with people living in their own little aural universes. Personal music players give us autonomy, but they also tune out the rest of the world. It's nearly impossible to have a conversation with strangers when you're wearing headphones, let alone do the Running Man to the same rhythm as someone else.
Boom boxes forced social interaction. Yes, they may have sometimes been disruptive, but at least they were egalitarian: Anyone could whip one out if they wanted to determine which song everyone else would hear. The result was that every block had its own shifting soundtrack and flavor, and conversation and dancing with other people were possible in a way that just doesn't occur when everyone in the park is listening to their own pocket-sized device.
Of course, wielding a boom box took more self-confidence (not to mention strength) than using an iPod. Those who couldn't hack it in public might've settled for playing Ghettoblaster on the Commodore 64-a game where a character gained points by collecting batteries and tapes to put in his ersatz boom box. Others invested in handheld radios or Walkmen if they needed to satiate their yen for music on the go. But the boom box toters knew that walking down the street with a large and loud device balanced on your shoulder was in and of itself a reward, no matter what tunes you were blasting. "I had to build up the guts to do it, but once I did, I found it was really exhilarating," says Mr. Steck. "It's a real rush. And it seems much more human than walking around with little buds in your ears. That's the total opposite of social. To me, that's not what music is about."
