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.
Another San Francisco Bay Area group has embraced this boombox sound system for more than artistic purposes. The underground collective, which refused to have its name printed, is "dedicated to creating autonomous spaces" and uses a combination of low-powered FM radio and boomboxes to augment its wired rig at warehouse parties or events like this summer's Mutantfest.
The group also provides musical accompaniment to the cyclists at San Francisco's monthly Critical Mass bike rides by transmitting music from an iPod to boomboxes dangling from people's bicycles.
This concept has its uses at street protests, too. The collective sent out an e-mail prior to the San Francisco Reclaim the Streets, or RTS, Valentine's Day protest, enjoining people to "Get a strap-on for RTS." The message read:
"This Saturday's Reclaim the Streets will feature a wireless, formless sound system made up of many boomboxes strapped to bicycles, and the main mix will be coming over the FM airwaves from an unseen, unknown FM transmitter. If you want to help make this the biggest, baddest sound system that doesn't exist, just bring a boombox and tune it the frequency (soon to be revealed). Strap it to your bike or carry it."
Event organizers like this setup because it means the sound system can move with the crowd.
"There is no center of the action, so people are more likely to look at others around them instead of toward a central attention point," said one member of the group, an electronics enthusiast and self-described revolutionary.
"A distributed 'bullhorn' can happen without the people who brought the equipment even being identifiable, which we like a lot," he continued.
He also criticized the Federal Communications Commission for not enforcing quality control on the receivers of boomboxes and other radios, causing there to be fewer clear slots on the dial.
"The FCC has had many opportunities to say that radio receivers need to be higher quality than they were in the 1940s but they never have. It goes along with (the agency's message) of scarcity," he said.
Both the collective and Brown and Galindo are using transmitter designs furnished by the founder of Free Radio Berkeley, Stephen Dunifer.
Patty Liu, a classical musician and member of Rajar, finds an aesthetic value in the networks made of different devices.
"When you play the same piece of music through different-sized speakers it will sound different. You could get a really crappy boombox and it could do some really interesting things to a piece of music," she said.
If the turntable can come back as a valued musical instrument and sign of coolness, said her Rajar colleague David Kwan, there is hope for the boombox.
