Cars with the Boom: Identity and Territory in American Postwar

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David Z. Morris

Technology and Culture, Volume 55, Number 2, April 2014, pp. 326-353 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/tech.2014.0059

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v055/55.2.morris.html

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SPECIAL ISSUE: SHIFTING GEARS Cars with the Boom Identity and Territory in American Postwar Automobile Sound

DAVID Z. MORRIS

The range of a bell . . . served to define a territory that was haunted by the notion of limits as well as the threat of those limits being transgressed. . . . So concerned were the men of this period with collective honor that they sometimes took things too far. They might, for instance, acquire a bell whose weight was more than their bell tower could bear. —Alain Corbin, Village Bells, 78

I’m the neighborhood pusher Call me subwoofer ’Cause I pump base like that, jack On or off the track. —Pusha T, “Grindin’”

Introduction

Most evenings at about 6 p.m. in my neighborhood in Tampa, a sound arrives. In slow waves, a dark vibration colors the air, and the windows in my old, slumping house begin to rattle. Soon the sound resolves into something more regular and defined, a steady Boom. Boom. Boom. It’s getting closer, slightly clearer. I take my tea out to the front porch. A car is coming up the street—the source of the window-rattling bass. It’s an average- looking car, except for the green neon light that creeps out from beneath it. As the car pulls nearer, I can finally make out more of the music than

David Z. Morris, Ph.D., is a writer and technology analyst currently based in Tampa, Florida. He enjoys excessively loud music of all types, and is sure to pay the price some- day. This article was conceived with the aid of Dr. John Durham Peters at the University of Iowa, under significant influence from Dr. David Wittenberg. It was guided towards completion by Dr. Timothy Havens, with the support of the University of South Florida Provost’s Postdoctoral Initiative. ©2014 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/14/5502-0003/326–53

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the wobbly wash of bass. It’s hip-hop—aggressive, graphic, full of racial slurs and sexual commands. The car pulls in front of my house, slows, and turns into the driveway across the street. It stops, the music dies, and out steps Jerome. Jerome is about five feet, six inches tall. He sees me on the porch. We wave, smile, and nod. I continue to sip tea as Jerome goes inside, to his two teenage daughters and his wife, a healthcare worker. Jerome is a stay-at-home dad with a family that SPECIAL manages the tough feat of clinging to working-class status in 2013. He ISSUE spends most Saturdays tending his lawn. But his car and its apocalyptic stereo make him an antisocial deviant, or even an outright criminal, in the eyes of many officials and citizens. There are thousands of noisy drivers like him across Tampa, and in my neighborhood most of them are, like Jerome, black. In a different city, in a different town, a ragged van and a small hatch- back pull up on either side of a “Christmas tree,” a tall array of lights that count down the start of drag races. But when these lights tick down, the vehicles don’t move an inch—instead, they rumble, then shake violently, pumping muffled waves of bass out into the midsized convention center. Roughly one hundred onlookers cheer wildly. They wear overalls, and do- rags, and work boots, and are mostly white. The cars are empty—microphones inside each cabin measure the sound levels as owners, standing yards away with remote controls, test the limits of their creations: 120 decibels, then 135, 145, each 10-decibel jump representing a doubling of volume. Then, the unthinkable—a sudden pop from the decrepit van. Its windshield shudders out of its frame, the smell of ozone filling the air as the decibel meter drops to zero. The van is disqualified by its self-destruction. The dejected owners, a man in his sixties with a chest-length gray beard, and his blond, buzz-cut son, drive their wounded weapon off the field. Later, I’ll get a look inside the van and see the rough make-do of the men’s effort—lots of duct tape and stray wire, the whole package a stark contrast with Jerome’s glowing toy. Their opponents, three younger white men, celebrate, one friend con- gratulating the winner: “That was sick, yo!” With the competition briefly paused, the convention center fills with hip-hop beats. This is Decibel Drag Racing, or dbDrag, and there’s a reason no one is sitting in those cars. At one of many dbDrag competitions I attended in San Mateo, California, in 2006 and 2007, well-known audio installer Steve Meade invited me to take a seat in his relatively unassuming Chevy Esca- lade. As he fired up the elaborate custom sound system, I was first intoxi- cated by the tactile, enveloping, detailed richness of the hip-hop he played. But as Meade slowly raised the volume, the bass began to press down into my lungs and make the bones in my face vibrate. I found myself reflexively fighting for escape, scrabbling frantically for the door handle as the sound went from entertainment to existential threat. A member of Meade’s staff

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recorded my response, possibly to add to dozens of videos posted to You- Tube of people fleeing from Meade’s cars in panic. According to Meade, this Escalade, an “everyday” vehicle with mostly invisible speakers and a fully usable cab, was capable of producing sound pressure of 150 decibels, beyond the normal threshold of pain at 130 db, and not far from the 160 db point of eardrum rupture. Competitors at the APRIL top end of the dbDrag circuit completely gut vehicles and pack every inch 2014 with speakers and batteries, reaching decibel measurements from 177 to VOL. 55 182 db. These levels can only be compared to close-range nuclear explo- sions and volcanic eruptions, and 182 db in an enclosed space can pur- portedly cause fatal embolism and failure of internal organs.1 These two moments—one an informal street expression, one a codified competition—represent two important parts of the practice of “booming” or, simply put, building and playing extremely loud car stereos. Using high-end car audio technology first pioneered in the 1970s by audiophiles in pursuit of a homelike listening experience, “booming” turns that refinement on its head to make the car into an aggressive broadcaster of muddy, menacing bass. Booming first gained real cultural cachet when it caught on among young African Americans in the 1980s, and the culture of hip-hop has since become integral to booming across racial lines. Booming has been framed as an epidemic by law enforcement and governments, which have undertaken a decades-long battle to shut down boomers, an effort rich with subtle and overt expressions of racial antipathy—and also so far unsuccessful.2 The appeal of driving a disruptively, confrontationally loud car, though, seems to transcend simple demographic categories of race, class, or geography. In 2013, at any given moment, tens of thousands of cars worldwide—some expensively modified by ambitious hobbyists, others bone-stock systems wielded by momentarily emboldened civilians— pump bass-heavy music out of open windows and into the ether. This article traces the evolution and meaning of the technologies of high-power car audio, which began as a high-class amenity but came to take on meanings of marginality and threat. This development is a dialec- tical phenomenon in which a practice and its response produce meaning interdependently—the resistance of authorities to “noisy” cars adds to their meaning and value, encouraging more “noise.” In what follows, after a historical overview that situates boom cars, I use a variety of sources— including law enforcement practice, political discourse, hobbyist docu- ments, ethnographic observation, and popular culture—to describe their significance for creators, bystanders, and opponents.

1. Jurgen Altmann, “Acoustic Weapons”; Pioneer, “Team Pioneer Shatters SPL World Record”; Stephan Wilkinson, “A Car Stereo That Can Kill You?” 2. Craig Curtis, “Car Stereos and the Criminal Sanction”; Jeremy Packer, Mobility without Mayhem.

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The Postwar Technological and Cultural Development of Auto Sound

The cultural significance of extreme car audio co-developed in the United States with its technology, and both paths can be divided into periods of U.S. history before and after World War II. The prewar development of car audio deserves its own treatment,3 but it can be briefly encap- SPECIAL sulated as the story of white, middle-class “tinkerers” whose solutions to ISSUE the technical problems of car audio became the foundation for a fast-bur- geoning industry, then a means for constituting middle-class national identity.4 The story of the postwar is, as with so many other historical strands, the story of that identity’s fragmentation, as wider technological penetration allowed for alternate uses of car audio technology, particularly by U.S. racial minorities. Two key technological innovations that facilitated that fragmentation emerged during or immediately after World War II—the alternator and the transistor. Early car radios, like all early radios, relied on vacuum tubes that were bulky, consumed a great deal of power, and frequently broke or burned out. The necessity of frequent, expensive replacement generally limited car audio to a small segment of the privileged. In the 1930s, industry commentators saw the limitations of tubes and mused about the possibility of “some sort of so-called ‘cold’ tube” that would solve them.”5 This pre- saged Bell Labs’ development in 1947 of the transistor, which would replace vacuum tubes in most electronics applications while being lighter and more durable and consuming less energy. Further, because of its rugged construction, the transistor could be manufactured by highly automated proc- esses and at extremely low cost. Rapidly commercialized through the late 1950s and especially 1960s, it made car audio, and portable radio in general, a mass phenomenon. While 40 percent of cars had radios in 1946, by the mid-1970s, 90 percent of them did.6 Engineers at American auto manufacturers pioneered the other major element that transformed car audio, drawing on advances in battlefield technologies. The very earliest car radios ran on independent batteries that required frequent replacement.7 Slightly later prewar automobile electrical systems recharged with onboard generators, but because generators were constructed with moving parts in contact with each other, they required frequent maintenance, had low generative capacity, and were unreliable. The wartime need for mobile electrical power for a variety of electronic de- 3. A study in progress by the author. 4. See Matthew Killmeier, “Mobile Media.” 5. Orrin E. Dunlap Jr., “Call of the Wild.” 6. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In, 226; Christopher Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned. 7. J. B. Smith, “A Radio Set for Your Car”; Henry Hoyle, “A Compact Speaker for Your Car.”

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vices on the field of battle drove the development of the alternator, whose friction-free design allowed motor vehicles to generate more power with less maintenance than with a generator. Chrysler introduced the alternator to the civilian market in 1960–61, followed by GM in 1963 and Ford in 1965. This effectively tripled the generative capacity of car electrical systems, from 500 watts in 1960 to 1500 watts at the end of the 1980s, allow- APRIL ing an array of technological accessories to move into the car.8 2014 World War II had profound effects not just on sound technology but VOL. 55 on its cultural meanings. The 1940s saw the invention of broadcast jour- nalism, and hours devoted to news increased 300 percent between 1940 and 1944.9 The car radio, which had been a leisure amenity, became a tool of personal and national efficiency—an ally in the war effort. Matt Kill- meier cites a 1942 Motorola advertisement promising the mobile busi- nessman that car radio will “double the value of the time you spend in your car” because you “need up-to-the-minute news.”10 The advertisement constructs the radio as a tool of administrative and managerial power, a necessity for decision makers. In the context of America’s racial hierarchy of the period, the audience invoked and constructed by this conception of radio would have been middle class, professional, white, and male. This phenomenon predated the first efforts to transform radio listening from a family to an individual activity, which began with the Radio Manufacturers’ Association’s 1948 sales campaign touting the benefits of “A Radio in Every Room,” including the ability of different family members to enjoy different shows at the same time. Car audio, framed as a private accessory for the business commuter, was an early push toward privacy through sound, an impulse that would later resurface in the Walkman and iPod, enabling the creation of private audio spaces as the user moved through public space.11 The war fed the development of another semiprivate male experience, the “hi-fi” culture of the 1950s. Some elements of hi-fi technology were specifically developed for the military purpose of training sonar operators, but the war’s biggest impacts were indirect. Returning soldiers were ex- posed to more advanced sound equipment in Europe, and applied electronics know-how acquired in the military to their home stereo systems.12 Hi-fi culture became one in which sound quality indexed class and power, feeding off of what Jonathan Sterne calls “the dream of verisimilitude.”13 This ideological faith in the power of technology to continually advance

8. George S. May, ed., The Automobile Industry; Society of Automotive Engineers, The Automobile. 9. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In, 189. 10. Killmeier, “Mobile Media.” 11. United Press International, “Radio in Every Room”; Jim Koscs, “Rhythms for the Highway”; Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello, Wired for Sound. 12. Keir Keightley, “‘Turn It Down!’” 151. 13. Jonathan Sterne, MP3, 6.

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toward the perfect reproduction of reality, including sound and image, would remain powerful as hi-fi moved into the car. The years following the end of the war saw massive shifts in the role of cars in the American lifestyle. Intraurban walking and mass transportation within cities were increasingly replaced for middle-class, white Americans by daily highway commutes to the suburbs.14 A mass migration of newly empowered African Americans from the rural South to the urban centers SPECIAL of the North has been shown, together with rampant racial antipathy, to ISSUE have directly triggered this “white flight” into the new, nearly all-white suburbs.15 This mass mobilization reinforced segregation by creating all- white suburbs, continuing the widespread “unspoken assumption that public space is white” by relegating public urban spaces, and their non- white occupants, to second-class status.16 Because the major sources of noise are the transportation, industrial, and construction activities con- centrated in urban areas, the corollary to this is that white people were headed out to the quiet suburbs en masse, while people of color and the working poor were increasingly relegated to noisy urban cores.17

The Power of Sound in Space

The establishment of the suburbs and the car interior as white, middle class, “normal,” quiet, and safely private spaces would soon be challenged, a new refrain in a long struggle between bourgeois privacy and populist publicity that has recurred throughout the history of sound technologies. Sound’s social power comes from its part in the process of territorialization, or the articulation of culture and identity to place, and music in particular forms the basis for the “latching” of identity onto daily lived experience.18 Control of sound and sonic “latching”—the use of sound as a reference for identity—are not equally available to all; generally, producing loud sound has been a privilege of the powerful, though the disempowered have often vied for the right. Alain Corbin describes fierce battles in postrevolutionary France over village bells that defined zones of influence, infusing a real battle into a symbolic one in which “the loudness of a bell constituted a challenge.”19 Late-nineteenth-century knowledge workers, including Charles

14. Killmeier, “Mobile Media,” 85; Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 60–65. 15. Leah Platt Boustan, “Was Postwar Suburbanization ‘White Flight’?”; Antero Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood; Manuel B. Aalbers, Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets. 16. Alan Nadel, “Black Bodies in White Space.” 17. Birgitta Berglund, Thomas Lindvall, and Dietrich Schwela, Guidelines for Community Noise. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life. 19. Alain Corbin, Village Bells, 75–76.

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Dickens and Charles Babbage, lamented how noise hampered their produc- tivity, but antinoise campaigns of the turn of the century targeted peddlers, street musicians, and public transportation rather than factory noise.20 In- dustrial noise was a sign of power and wealth and was therefore less regu- lated—“poor towns [were] quieter than prosperous towns”—while German physician Theodor Lessing highlighted the classed nature of the battle when APRIL he framed noise abatement as a battle of civilization against barbarism.21 In 2014 surveying such modern discourses of noise, Jacques Attali concluded that VOL. 55 “any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form . . . noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power.”22 The automobile, then, appeared in a world where struggles over sound had been articulated with particular meanings in terms of class and power, and the combination of cars and sound created a new field of struggle within this matrix of meaning.23 On the one hand, the car was very early on aggressively engineered and marketed as a space of isolation, where the middle-class worker could escape the noise of urbanity and engage in pro- ductive, private listening.24 Ethnographies of automobility have found that the radio is specifically tied to the sense of the car as “home”—the ultimate nexus of place and identity.25 Drivers were moreover reminded that noise could often mean a malfunction, a threat to the sanctity of the moving home-away-from-home.26 But cars were also very quickly used to produce noise, to extend sound power, and to break the bubble of privacy and homeliness, inciting conflict with bourgeois authority. As early as 1935, a campaign mounted by New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia specifically sought to silence the disrup- tive noise of automobile radios. By 1963, Motor Trend could write a typol- ogy of “Driving Nuts” that identified many by their improper use of sound: the magazine’s profiles of sound offenders included the working-class “Time-Clock Puncher” and the implicitly Latino “Toreador,” whose excess auto sound indexed danger and deviance.27 A similar tension between margin and center suffuses automobility itself. On the one hand, cars and other “technologies of haste” facilitate industrialization, becoming symbols of status and wealth, and tools for the

20. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape, 66; Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 126. 21. Schafer, The Soundscape, 76; Karin Bijsterveld, “The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age.” 22. Jacques Attali, Noise, 6. 23. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” 24. S. Van Duyne, “How Microphones and Sound Meters Help Build Silence into Car Bodies”; Killmeier, “Mobile Media,” 84–85. 25. Michael Bull and Les Back, The Auditory Culture Reader, 357. 26. M. Bunn, “Driving a Car By Ear”; C. E. Packer, “Car Noises Have Meaning.” 27. “Mayor Orders End of Noises at Night”; “Mayor Coins a New Golden Rule to Help Give City Noiseless Nights”; Michael Lamm, “How to Spot Driving Nuts.”

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rhetorical construction of American ideologies of expansionism and con- sumerism by elites.28 On the other hand, the car has for most of its history been a widely accessible technology in America, subject to transforming meanings and uses by outsider groups. Early progressives saw the car as a means of mass social uplift that would disperse populations out of tene- ments and into better environments, and by the 1920s there were enough low-income motorists that conflicts began to arise in the streets between SPECIAL them, middle-class motorists, and authorities.29 ISSUE

Countercultural Sound and Technological Multiculturalism

Most American and modern technological rhetorics focus on varieties of progress and perfectibility, including both the dreams of speed and comfort that circulate around cars, and the audiophile’s dream of “perfect sound forever.”30 Marginalized social groups, however, have a complicated relationship to ideologies of technological perfectibility. For reasons of necessity, as well as to secure identity and express differing core values, the poor and ostracized have long “been using whatever technology they can get their hands on . . . pushing it, stretching it, redefining it.”31 In the case of sound technologies, the values of privacy and control embodied in mainstream practices of automotive listening would be stretched and rede- fined by marginalized groups in favor of noisier, more public uses. Even as World War II sent some soldiers home to middle-class nor- malcy with a new idealism about technology and the American Dream, it also produced an oppositional parallax, putting new expertise and finan- cial resources in the hands of members of various disaffected and down- trodden groups. These returned soldiers, with technological know-how but a “dubious sense of social responsibility,” were key in the exploration of new technological values that expressed a broader resistance.32 These emergent alternative automobilities included, at opposite extremes, both hot-rodding and lowriding. In lowriding, older cars’ suspensions were dropped and their appearances made extravagant, with the intent that they would go “low and slow,” attracting public attention in the street with their colorful paint jobs. This technological rhetoric showed a defiance of mainstream automotive values of speed and power, both dramatizing Latino and other communities’ limited economic means and valorizing their aesthetic sensibilities and creativity. Postwar American hot rod cultures, mul-

28. Robert C. Post, High Performance, xvii. 29. Peter J. Ling, America and the Automobile, 6; James J. Flink, The Car Culture, 29. 30. Kieran Downes, “‘Perfect Sound Forever.’” 31. Vivek Bald, Alondra Nelson, and Thuy Linh N. Tu, “Appropriating Technology,” 89. 32. Quote from Post, High Performance, 6. See also Ben Chappell, “Take a Little Trip with Me”; Paige R. Penland, Low Rider; Ben Chappell, Lowrider Space.

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tiethnic at a time when that was rare, went in the opposite direction, using limited means and great ingenuity to make cars go as fast as possible. What hot-rodders sacrificed in the pursuit of pure speed was the sense of the car as a place of comfort, safety, and refinement—a typical early hot rod was an uncomfortable, often ugly death trap with no bumpers or seat cushions, all considered unnecessary weight to be stripped away in the pursuit of APRIL pure speed.33 For hot-rodders, the overt flirtation with danger—of which a 2014 crucial component was loud motor sound—was an expression of self- VOL. 55 worth and defiance. As one contemporary observer managed to immediately grasp when observing lowriders, “This isn’t engineering, this is community consciousness.”34 In the 1940s and ’50s, cars including the Cadillac were a symbol of a- chievement for upwardly mobile, respectable members of the black middle class, with the notably nonmilitant Ebony declaring that the Cadillac was a “weapon in the war for racial equality.”35 But by the 1970s, the rise of sepa- ratist Black Power ideologies affected the car culture of some young African Americans. Aggressively customized cars with splashy paint jobs, gaudy chrome wheels, and mechanical modifications made up a style that, though associated with criminals, was deployed by wider populations as a transgressive counter to “respectable” integrationist attitudes. “A pimped-out automobile [became] clearly associated with criminality and gangsterism [but] . . . the line between real gangsterism and its fictional and lived mimicry was not particularly clear.”36 This form of display was a precursor and eventual corollary to sound performance in minority uses of boom cars. While the mobility of different bodies in space and the culturally in- flected reappropriation of technology were remarkable impacts of postwar affluence, at least as influential was the rising technological flow of marginalized sounds. From its inception through the 1940s and much of the 1950s, broadcast radio overwhelmingly represented the perspective of middle-class whiteness. Even as radio began to incorporate jazz broadcasts in the 1930s, African Americans and other minority groups had notably limited access to the production side of the radio and recording industries. But the economic gains of postwar African Americans led to more black- owned recording studios and labels, more black DJs on the air, and more black musicians able to record their own material.37 These new information networks of difference short-circuited physical space with lines of symbolic affiliation, an alluring proposition to whites finding the new suburban status quo stiflingly conformist. The young in particular sought out mediated latching to a different, distant identity. For

33. H. F. Moorhouse, Driving Ambitions; David N. Lucsko, The Business of Speed. 34. Ted West, “Scenes from a Revolution.” 35. Paul Gilroy, “Driving While Black”; Packer, Mobility without Mayhem, 197. 36. Packer, Mobility without Mayhem, 209. 37. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices, xix; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 110.

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instance, by tuning in “hepcat” DJs from faraway Nashville and Memphis, New York WASP teen Bobby Smith discovered, in his words, “another universe”—one that he would eventually occupy as preeminent rock ’n’ roll DJ Wolfman Jack.38 The home consumption by white youth of difference at a distance would have, by itself, only indirectly or symbolically connected groups across established racial barriers. But by the late 1950s, affluence, industrial SPECIAL policies, and technological advances put large numbers of used cars into ISSUE the hands of teenagers, and these cars would make it possible for sonic identification to turn into a more public practice. A survey showed that nearly half of all male high school seniors had a car by the end of the spring of 1961, and it can be estimated that about half of those had radios.39 This produced “cruising,” a close relative of today’s boom car culture. With cars, radios, and time on their hands, in the late 1950s and early 1960s “teenagers could—and did—use broadcast music to become squat- ters: they claimed territory that wasn’t really theirs by blanketing the space with rock ’n’ roll.”40 This is not the first instance of car audio transgressing the privacy of the automotive bubble, but it seems to be the first moment when car audio was put to the work of asserting identity in a concerted, countercultural manner. Here, sound, in the form of rock music, was being publicly deployed to mark affiliations across racial lines. This sonic trou- bling of race is continuous with the oscillation of twenty-first-century booming from a reappropriation of sound technology by the black community back into a panracial practice that infused sound technology with “blackness.” Postwar sound technology played a role in grounding not just the con- frontational identities of youth, but also more conventional gendered identities. Both the mechanical “tinkering” of early, do-it-yourself radio technology and the pursuit of high fidelity in the postwar years appealed particularly to men. Expertise in sound technology first helped reconcile tensions between competing masculine values of individual expression and social achievement, and in the 1930s helped compensate for and normalize the identity threats of economic depression.41 One manifestation that emerged through the early days of radio but blossomed in the depression era was a

38. David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd; C. Wright Mills, White Collar; Douglas, Listening In, 240–41. 39. Some speculative extension from Douglas, Listening In, 253. In 1946 nine mil- lion cars, or 40 percent of those on the road, had radios, while by 1963 about fifty mil- lion cars, or 60 percent, had radios. Cars handed down to teenagers would have been older models, perhaps putting the percentage at half—but it’s also possible that teenagers would have been more likely to install after-market radios, given the importance of music in the lives of young people at the time. 40. Douglas, Listening In, 253; Alexander Todd Russo, “No Particular Place to Go”; Howard L. Myerhoff and Barbara G. Myerhoff, “Field Observations of Middle Class ‘Gangs.’” 41. Douglas, Listening In, 65–68; Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies, 141.

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practice known as DXing, in which radio hobbyists competed to see who could tune in stations from the farthest possible distances. And while the low power of early radio did briefly lead to a style of intimate “crooning” that catered to women, the hi-fi boom was seen as distinctly masculine, as it focused on technical expertise and high volume, both strongly marked as male.42 APRIL

2014 The Emergence of Boom Culture VOL. 55 Boom cars are a continuation and outgrowth of many of these threads of technocultural history. They are an elaboration of the alternative automobility of the lowrider and pimp car, with their defiance of conventional ideas of automotive speed and power. Boom cars, by focusing on sound over speed, serve, in new and subversive ways, the desire of lowrider and pimp car drivers to claim space and assert identity. By turning a car from a tool for getting somewhere into a tool for unmistakably being somewhere, boom cars use mainstream technology in ways that both challenge marginalization and create pretexts for authoritarian action by police. They also reinforce masculine tropes of aggression and conquest, a gender divide that is arguably further reinforced by the hip-hop music strongly associated with booming. Much of the technology that would undergird boom cars came directly out of the home hi-fi movement, as pioneers pushing the limits of car audio simply installed home speaker cones and amplifiers in cars. This was the case with the vehicle often cited as “the first ‘boom car,’” a 1969 Volks- wagen Bug designed by Paul Stary and Rich Coe and named “Audiomobile 1K VW,” which was first shown publicly at the Winter Consumer Elec- tronics Show in 1978.43 Stary and Coe, coming from backgrounds in rock ’n’ roll production, designed the earliest high-power amplifiers for cars’ twelve-volt electrical systems and started the company Audiomobile to manufacture them on a small scale. Stereo shops installed these compo- nents, and several such shops in California played a prominent role in pro- moting the idea of high-end car audio. During the same period Dr. Amar Bose, an MIT electrical engineering professor already famous for his work in home hi-fi, started to work on making car sound “as good as a home listening environment,” and in 1983 Bose developed the first factory-installed premium sound systems for GM.44 The goals of hi-fi car sound design, as articulated by Bose and others,

42. Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio; Timothy D. Taylor, “Music and the Rise of Radio in 1920s America”; Allison McCracken, “‘God’s Gift to Us Girls’”; Keightley, “‘Turn It Down!’” 43. GlassWolf, “A Brief History of Car Audio”; Eric Holdaway, “Interviews with In- dustry Pioneers.” 44. D. Schutt, “Car Stereo Takes a Power Trip”; Fred M. H. Gregory, “Sonic Boom”; Koscs, “Rhythms for the Highway.”

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were clarity and accuracy of sound reproduction. Hi-fi car sound pursued the ideological values of privacy, efficiency, and sonic clarity first advanced during the wartime reconception of car radio listening and by the home hi- fi movement. The ideal was “living-room sound,” with the car explicitly constructed as a surrogate or temporary home.45 Early guides to high-end car audio counseled that when purchasing a car speaker, one should “listen for crisp highs and clear lows (no thumping or ‘muddiness’ in the SPECIAL bass).”46 “Subtlety and nuance” were singer Mel Tormé’s priority when he ISSUE installed a car hi-fi system.47 In fact, audiophile writers asserted that the car was a superior setting for careful and refined listening, its combination of small size and resonance-dampening construction making it “about as close as you’re going to come to a perfect listening area,” one in which “any speaker sounds at least four times better . . . than in a house.”48 These ideals of clarity and fidelity, though they may seem self-evident, are ideological constructs and therefore open to contestation.49 Under- standings of car sound that valued power and even noise over clarity and relaxation existed even within the emerging car hi-fi phenomenon: “Power is the name of the game in car stereo—and for some very good reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that your car is not your living room—it’s a lot noisier. The engine growls, the ignition spits fire and the transmission bumps around. . . . It takes a lot of juice to rise above the din.”50 The desire to drown out outside noise is still in some ways related to the desire for privacy: “if you drive through constant noise, you should spend enough to buy the power needed to overcome that noise.”51 But volume was also described as an experience in itself for the passenger/listener, as in Mel Tormé’s car where the “bass notes are like shots to the body,” or a Jeep outfitted for a “young Arabian petro-heir [where] guitar lines slice through the truck like a chainsaw.”52 The rise of car audio’s uses in assertive publicity-production occurred during a period when economic and technological forces began to con- strain many men’s ability to express personal skill and self-worth through their cars’ mechanical power and speed.53 The oil crisis of 1973, which boosted production of compact, fuel-efficient cars in the United States and brought on lower national speed limits, made smaller, less powerful cars

45. “Buying Stereo for Your Car.” 46. Robert Serata, “What to Listen for in Car Stereos.” 47. Gregory, “Sonic Boom.” 48. Anne K. Dukes, “How to Pick the Right Sound System for Your Car”; M. N. Marcus, “Complete Guide to Car Stereo Systems.” 49. Sterne, MP3. 50. Frank Vizard, “What’s New in Car Stereo.” 51. Serata, “What to Listen for in Car Stereos”; Michael Bull, “Soundscapes of the Car.” 52. Gregory, “Sonic Boom.” 53. Moorhouse, Driving Ambitions; Henry Robert Jr., “Hot Rods and Customs.”

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more prevalent, and legal opportunities for speed much less available.54 Smaller cars were less able to satisfy the cravings for speed and power that hot rods and muscle cars of the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s catered to, while advancing auto technology, particularly computerization, made cars more opaque to the amateur home mechanic.55 Yet amateurs could still cus- tomize car stereos, and these elements of the automobile were not subject APRIL to clear-cut legal limitations. Car stereos moved to the forefront as a vehi- 2014 cle for ego: something that would perform publicly to represent the owner.

VOL. 55 By the late 1970s, car audio was “a power struggle that even the Joint Chiefs of Staff would admire.”56 Car audio competitions codified the appeal of sound as a vehicle for ego and identity-making. A store called Good Vibes in Champaign, Illi- nois, formally began such competitions in 1980 with a contest dubbed “Car Wars.” These early competitions seem to have been focused on volume rather than sound quality: the first national championship, held in Texas in 1984, was won by Wayne Harris, who would go on to found the volume- focused dBDrag racing competition format. Harris remembers “manufacturers showing up with pallets of subwoofers for the competitors to blow up” by overpowering them.57 These competitions, advertised under a variety of names and formats, were major marketing tools for high-end audio companies. For instance, in the mid-1980s Rockford Fosgate began send- ing its dealers “Challenge Packages” that “included almost everything a dealer would need to put on a successful crank-it-up [stereo competition]: score sheets, banners, trophies, prizes.”58 These records, though, speak for a mainstream consumer—even the “Crank-It-Up” competitions represent sanctioned venues for technological performance. It is harder to get an insider account of the emergence of the boom car in the street, as a fact of everyday American (and then global) life. But tracing the vernacularization of this technology through the mainstream public record is enlightening in unexpected ways. Public reactions to extreme car audio suddenly exploded between 1988 and 1991, with words and deeds conveying extreme disapproval by authority figures and many citizens. There were dozens of bans and noise ordi- nances enacted, attempted, or suggested, at all levels of government. Just a few examples include a statewide ban on booming in Illinois, and bans proposed or passed by city councils in Florida, Ohio, and California, and even a health department in Utah.59 The nature of these bans varied, and

54. Michael D. Thomas, “Life in the Loud Lane.” 55. Laura Fox, “Car Stereos Gearing up for Higher Power”; David Gartman, Auto Opium. 56. Schutt, “Car Stereo Takes a Power Trip.” 57. GlassWolf, “A Brief History of Car Audio.” 58. Rockford Fosgate, “Who Is Rockford?” 59. Matt Krasnowski, “Gov. Thompson Inks Creative DUI Sentencing”; Thomas Tobin, “Noise Rules Could Get Stricter”; Alan Miller, “Councilwoman Wants Mufflers

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they continued to be the source of considerable contention because of the often subjective enforcement standards. By 2008, Florida was still attempt- ing to curb booming by instituting a law against music that was audible more than twenty-five feet away from a car—but because the law exempted commercial and political messages, it was deemed an unconstitutional limit on free speech.60 Commentators, meanwhile, piled on critiques not just of booming as a SPECIAL practice but of boomers as people, describing loud cars as sources not just ISSUE of “noise” but more generally of “trouble,” and singling out boomers as self- ish, “offensive,” and “stupid.”61 An editorial from Orlando in 1988 made the characteristic conclusion that the “preoccupation with building the world's greatest ear-splitting stereo system for your cars is just the latest evi- dence that young American males are public nuisance No. 1 in this coun- try.”62 A more recent letter to the editor bemoaned that “Hardly a day goes by when our citizens are not bothered by those who play their stereos much louder than they need to.”63 Though more subtle, this comment shows the construction of the issue in “us vs. them” terms, positioning “citizens” a- gainst others, implicitly outsiders, who behave improperly with sound. This positioning of boomers as other helps explain why concerns about free speech rights accompanying controls of communication have been over- shadowed by discourses of booming as nuisance and threat.64 Some reports at the time treated booming as a sensationalistic freak show or described the phenomenon as a novel teen trend.65 Very few pieces from the period attempted to understand the practice by talking with boomers, but one reporter quotes a youth in the 1980s talking about booming: “If it’s a bunch of punks, going around with their music thumping and staticky, you try to blow ’em out. . . . But if it’s your friends, you turn it down and talk. Or if you see some girls, you lower the sound and try to talk to them.”66 This account shows that the practice of booming was not all that different from the cruising of the 1950s, continuing the relationship of car sound to sociability and identity “latching.”

on Car Stereos”; “Huntington Park; Loud Car Stereos Will Be Subject to City Citation”; Vince Horiuchi, “If Health Department Has Say.” 60. “The Florida Supreme Court Strikes down State Law Banning Loud Music from Cars as a Violation of the First Amendment.” 61. Jeff Vice, “Town Aims to Make Cruising a Drag”; Ron Russell, “Residents Con- sider Measures to Discourage Cruisers”; Gabe Fuentes, “Group Meets.” 62. Skip Lowery, “Fed up with Those Boom-Boom-Booming Car Stereos.” 63. Vice, “Town Aims to Make Cruising a Drag”; Russell, “Residents Consider Measures to Discourage Cruisers”; Fuentes, “Group Meets.” 64. “Listen with Care; Boom Law Boon to Peace If Handled Correctly”; Fred Le- brun, “Noise Limit Puts a Gag on Freedom.” 65. Associated Press, “Today’s Car Stereos Can Blow Your Doors Off”; Kevin Lonn- quist, “boom! boom! boom!”; Patrick McDonald, “Rolling Thunder.” 66. Linda Shrieves, “Behind the Boom in Stereo Roar.”

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The emergence of booming as street culture may also be better under- stood by reading between the lines of practices in the car audio industry. Marketing materials and discourse from the late 1980s and ’90s show an industry struggling to police its high-end image against associations with “trouble” while trying to appeal simultaneously to the new consumers at- tracted by those very associations. The magazine Car Audio and Electronics APRIL showcased clean-cut hobbyists and cars that show no association with 2014 booming, lowriding, or any but the most restrained modifications. Articles VOL. 55 showcase cars under titles like “Father Knows Best” and “School Days.” (“Between classes, tests, and studies, this college student managed to put together a killer system.”)67 Impressionistic celebrations of volume are less common than product showcases that focus on component specifications and lab testing, with results displayed in charts and graphs.68 On the other hand, Auto Sound and Security played with audio’s dangerous image, putting racy models on its cover, trading in sometimes-awkward hyperbole to celebrate sound as “earthquakes” and “psychotic.”69 This tension between the clean-cut and the transgressive took on many forms, as when it was formalized in the division between SPL (sound pressure level, or volume) and SQL (sound quality level) car audio competitions—the first focused on sheer volume and increasingly associated with deviance and defiance, the second on the car as a homelike listening space and working to maintain hi-fi’s association with refinement in listening. In the more clean-cut, SQL-focused venues, there were signs of disdain for SPL competition and boomers, as when SQL competitor Todd Matsubara con- fessed that “I used to be a boomer . . . used to. I got tired of it pretty fast. . . . My system just didn’t sound good, and I wanted natural, realistic sound.”70 Here is Sterne’s “dream of verisimilitude” in action, separating refined and private car hi-fi from the low-quality, public sound of booming. Ads from the 1940s touted the silent interior of the car, and the early 1970s hi-fi boom still embraced the ideology of relaxed and refined listening. Starting in the 1990s, however, the car audio industry increasingly touted their products’ ability to annoy and confront, giving speakers and amplifiers names like “Jackhammer.” However, the tension between these two ways of thinking about sound was still evident as late as 1995, when MTX marketed the aggressively named SAS Bazooka in terms of “unsur- passed performance” and “perfect” sound, over a sepia-toned image of a woman in evening wear exiting a luxury vehicle.71 The unspoken subtext of both the dismissive treatment of booming and

67. Bruce Doney, “Father Knows Best”; Amy Ziffer, “School Days.” 68. “Test Report: 2500F1.” 69. Dan Sweeney, “Gettin’ Real”; Theodore Pond, “S.A.S. Bazooka Starts an Earth- quake!”; Christopher Ruserts, “Psychotic Syclone.” 70. Michael Gelfand, “King of the Hill.” 71. Pond, “S.A.S. Bazooka Starts an Earthquake!”; SAS, “Experience Perfect Bass In- terface in 5 Minutes or Less.”

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the increasingly aggressive marketing efforts to appeal to boomers was the specifically raced nature of the phenomenon. There is an oblique strategy at play here: while almost all marketing materials from the 1980s and ’90s stay as far as possible away from any identification between car audio and blackness, their invocations of threat and transgression connect their products to an explosion of articulations between extreme car audio and blackness in popular culture more broadly. This is most clearly seen in a multitude of SPECIAL hip-hop songs of the period connecting the pleasures of booming to hip- ISSUE hop and African American youth. Early bass booster Terminator X released the solo album Return to the Valley of the Jeep Beats—“jeep beats” being a term of art for a particular kind of bass-heavy beat particularly effective for kicking heavy bass out of a car. While audio marketing avoided connections to blackness, hip-hop magazines during this period sometimes rated records based on their appropriateness for public booming.72 Many bass-heavy “jeep beat” songs, particularly those in the Miami Bass subgenre, revolved around the articulation of bass not just to race but to sexuality.73 For instance, in L’Trimm’s “Cars with the Boom” (1988), two attractive, teenage, black female rappers declare “we like the guys with the cars that go boom.” The artists specifically articulate conventional masculinity, deep bass, and the control of space through sound: “So turn down the treble, and flaunt your bass / so your car can be heard almost any place. . . . So if your speaker’s weak, then please turn it off / ’cause we like the cars that sound so tough.” Other famous bass/sex articulators include Sir Mix- a-Lot and 2 Live Crew. Of course, just because hip-hop is a predominantly black form does not mean that all or even most boomers, in the 1980s or now, were black, any more than all the teenagers blaring rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s were black. Al- ready by the late 1980s, the majority of hip-hop audiences were not black, but much as with cruising in the 1950s, the powerful voice of hip-hop culture has infused the practice of booming with cultural blackness, anywhere and in whatever form it surfaces. The raced meaning of these sounds would have been key to the appeal of both hip-hop music and expensive audio equipment for defiant youth of all races as well as being a big part of authorities’ growing understanding of them as a threat.74 The white uses of hip-hop are part of a much larger historical dynamic in which, as George Lipsitz has put it, rebellious “white Americans may have turned to black culture for guidance because black culture contains the most sophisticated strategies of signification and the richest grammars of opposition available to aggrieved populations.”75

72. Tricia Rose, Black Noise, 197. 73. Joseph Nunes, “The Newest Sound in Town Is Loud.” 74. Nelson George, Hip Hop America; George Lipsitz, “The Hip Hop Hearings”; Rose, Black Noise; W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain. 75. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight.

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MTX’s “Jackhammer” was for a time the world’s largest subwoofer, standing three feet high with a forty-inch diameter. It eventually made a key appearance in what is to date the broadest popular representation of the connections between extreme car audio, marginality, and race: the MTV show Pimp My Ride (2004–07). As part of its weekly overhauls of older cars, Pimp My Ride replaced stereo systems with “extreme” after- APRIL market versions. While many of the show’s contestants—those having 2014 their cars revamped—were white, African American rapper Xzibit hosted VOL. 55 the show, the show’s audio specialist was black, and its terminology (including the term “pimp”) and soundtrack (entirely hip-hop) constantly asserted its articulation to hip-hop and blackness. The aesthetics of the show’s overhauls, including gaudy paint jobs, body modifications, and running light systems like Jerome’s, clearly showed its debt to the lowrider and “pimp car” styles. The show illustrated the penetration of those styles into mainstream consciousness, with at least some of their defiant over- tones intact and with extreme audio as a new, crucial component. The centrality of aggression to the uses of sound in boom culture was illustrated in the episode in which the show’s audio team removed the back seat of a sedan in order to make space for the installation of an MTX Jackhammer. The modifiers also installed an aircraft-style warning light in the dash that read “warning—Ridiculous Bass!” They wired the light to flash when the car’s sound reached a particular level, and the consequences of such “ridiculous bass” were comedically illustrated by camera trickery that showed the destruction of a nearby office and the stumbling efforts of bystanders to remain on their feet. In Pimp My Ride’s twenty-first-century iteration of the alternative automobility first codified in the lowrider and pimp car, the lingering aggressive stance of the Black Power movement finds new, raw expression in pure volume. Comedic or not, Pimp My Ride’s representation of powerful sound at the nexus of an aggressive blackness was clearly consistent with both boomers’ and authorities’ understanding of their practice. Terminator X was also a member of Public Enemy, whose “Bring the Noise” encapsulated the ambiguity of boom cars in its first couplet: “Bass, how low can you go? Death row—What a brother know.” Bass is a homonym for base, or crack cocaine, the foundation of the devastating gang and drug culture that swept black communities in the 1980s and ’90s. The U.S. Department of Justice has issued a fifty-odd-page manual intended as a guide for local police in understanding and responding to boom cars, which, fairly enough, describes them as “one of the most common sources of sound complaints in some jurisdictions.”76 More than just a nuisance, though, the manual stresses that noise from boom cars is an index of more serious crime, and suggests a risk of violent confrontation in any action to silence them. The

76. Michael S. Scott, “Loud Car Stereos.”

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manual, which draws on police records and news accounts but no formal studies, states that at least one purpose of the stereos themselves may be to attract customers for illegal drugs and cautions that the sound of boom cars can “make naturally aggressive people more aggressive.”77 Given the strong cultural connection between boom cars and black and Latino populations, we can read in that statement the deeply racist impli- cation that people of color are “naturally aggressive.” In practice, because SPECIAL policing according to culture is not considered racial profiling by most U.S. ISSUE laws, there is nothing to stop authorities from interpreting extreme car audio as probable cause for drug intervention or harassment, which would exacerbate the well-established record of disproportionate targeting of young minority drivers, most of whom are engaged in no illegal activity beyond noise disruption.78 As most communities of color are all too aware of rampant police profiling, it may seem strange that young men would invite police attention by booming. The aphrodisiacal articulation of booming and sex in hip-hop points toward one historically recurring explanation: like so many forms of sound production before it, booming is an assertion of individual, and particularly masculine, pride. Where sound technology had earlier been the saving grace of white masculinity as replacement work or to claim domestic space, in the 1980s and ’90s it became particularly vital for a black masculinity in crisis. The collapse of the urban industrial base in the 1970s and ’80s undermined the economic and social advances made by African Americans during and after World War II, a slow-rolling crisis that cleared the ground for the urban drug trade.79 Authorities’ unimaginative confla- tion of an aesthetic attempt to ameliorate the crisis (booming) with a material form of resistance to it (drug trafficking) has probably been the source of much racial profiling and selective enforcement.80 Another attraction of booming is that, for something so loud, it is in fact a surprisingly evasive practice of self-assertion and social defiance. The human hearing system locates sound sources by comparing the arrival time of sound waves at the right and left ears, and the greater width of bass waves makes the sounds’ source more difficult to pinpoint than those of shortwave treble sound. Simultaneously, bass frequencies travel farther than high frequencies, covering a greater swathe of sonic territory, while

77. Ibid. 78. Craig Curtis, “Car Stereos and the Criminal Sanction”; Packer, Mobility without Mayhem. 79. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!; Michael Omi and Howard Win- ant, Racial Formation in the United States. 80. The proportion of drug arrestees who were black men tripled between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, leading to a U.S. prison population that was half African American. By 1998, one out of every fourteen black men was in prison or jail, and one out of four would be imprisoned at some point in their life. Eric Schlosser, “The Prison- Industrial Complex”; Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

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producing a sound that is “muddy” if a listener is more than a few feet away. The individual characteristics of a piece of music are dispersed, leav- ing only an indistinct pulse that can be heard for blocks and blocks. This makes the boomer surprisingly hard to locate at a middle distance, weav- ing through urban blocks.81 It also completely repudiates mainstream standards of fidelity—and APRIL this pulse, more than any musicality, may be the boom car’s deep purpose. 2014 In hip-hop, like many African diasporic cultures, rhythm takes primacy

VOL. 55 over the melody that structures Western classical music. Rhythm is, moreover, a particularly important element of the latching of identity to sur- roundings through sound, an analog of the touching of skin that anchors the most basic dimensions of human existence. 82

Conclusion Theorists of totalitarianism . . . have all explained, indistinctly, that it is nec- essary to ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality. —Attali, Noise, 7 Space is inseparable from time, space is produced by sound—all of these things are entwined. —Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 10

During the war and postwar periods, huge corporations marketed cars as private and insulated from the outside world, and pitched radio as a tool of efficiency for middle-class working males. But in a powerful case of the unpredictability of technology’s effects and uses, when transistorization lowered the costs of electronics and planned obsolescence put more cars in the hands of socially marginalized groups, these groups found new uses for the technology in claiming space and challenging middle-class “normal- ity.” What resulted was today’s culture of booming. The social dynamic of booming is best grasped through complaints about “noise.” Adding to our archive of fuming city councilmen and letter writers, Tricia Rose recounts a conversation with an ethnomusicologist who complained that despite hip-hop’s sometimes interesting lyrical content, it was musically worthless. “They ride down the street at 2:00 am with it blasting from car speakers, and wake up my wife and kids. What’s the point in that?” 83 Of course, along with the drivers’ own sonic enjoyment, it’s pretty clear that the annoyance of people like the ethnomusicologist is

81. Noise Consultancy, LLC, “Code Drafting Tip for 2006”; David Howard and Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics. 82. Rose, Black Noise, 35; Brandon LaBelle, “Pump up the Bass”; John Mowitt, Per- cussion. 83. Rose, Black Noise, 62.

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a large part of the point—booming is an embodied, public expression of discontent against, among other things, the privilege and hierarchy per- ceived in the higher education system. State power, motivated by a racist status quo, has long been marshaled to put pressure on the locations of marginalized bodies, and this continues today.84 Meanwhile, American society has frequently deprived minorities of stability and is becoming less stable for working-class people. The eva- SPECIAL sive sound of bass is one way marginalized drivers continue to aggressively ISSUE struggle for basic access to public space, while also exteriorizing the insta- bility of their experience, passing over lines of reasonability to contest private space and even private property. The boom cars’ ability to trouble the safe and quiet domesticities of the private home is celebrated, for instance, in “Knockin’ Pictures Off the Wall,” by Houston’s DJ Screw, whose heart would have been warmed by the idea of an older, elite professor being “troubled” by bass as he slept in his comfortable house. The boom car also struggles to produce a particular kind of space. Ad- rienne Brown attends only to the visual when arguing that “the value of the hip hop car seems to reside less in its chrome and rims [than] in its ability to galvanize types of looking, seeing, and being related to collective forms of ownership.”85 But a bass pulse is even more effective than spinning rims in anchoring a distinct countercultural identity, providing a nearly irre- pressible index of the presence of undisciplined marginality. Booming adds synchronic extension to driving’s diachronic mobility, making boom cars among the most literal manifestations of territorialization as that “act of rhythm that has become expressive.”86 Mladen Dolar has argued for the importance of the voice as a bearer of identity, emerging as it does from the deepest, and therefore by some rubrics truest, part of the physical self. This is on display in early radio crooning, in which the singer dangerously invited listeners down into the vocalizing depths of the body. By contrast, the boomer pushes the interior of the homelike car out into the ether. The boomer turns the private acts of driving and music listening into public noise, putting the inside on the outside, projecting the uncanny, the unheimlich, the un-homelike.87 This inside-outness is also, often, a racial subversion. Not all boomers are black, but all boomers project blackness. Obscured in the body of the car, a white driver blasting hip-hop becomes, like early white rock DJs, a racial ventriloquist, an audio minstrel, with all the complicated cross-cur- 84. D. A. Harris, “‘Driving While Black’”; Angel Davis, “Race, Cops, and Traffic Stops.” 85. Adrienne Brown, “Drive Slow.” 86. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 87. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 37; McCracken, “‘God’s Gift to Us Girls’”; Freud, The Uncanny; Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen, Art and Thought; Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimity.”

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rents of “love and theft” that implies—including, crucially, an index of class identification across racial lines.88 This makes booming part of the long history of the adaptation of black gestures of defiance by whites, poignantly and hilariously illustrated in the 1999 film Office Space, when a frustrated, impotent, white office drone is shown blasting obscene hard- core rap as he drives.89 The music fills him with brash confidence, and he APRIL sings along, venting his frustrations—until a car driven by black men pulls 2014 up next to him. He shrinks in his seat and surreptitiously turns the music VOL. 55 down, admitting to himself and to the audience the problematic racial thinking that enables his catharsis. The troubled inside-outness of booming is the product of an uncanny historical reversal in which technological efforts shaped by an ethic of efficiency and clarity led, through a roundabout transformation, to a contemporary counterculture of defiant cacophony. Acoustical engineers worked to eliminate noise by baffling and dampening car interiors, producing a homelike space that encouraged the development of higher-quality, higher-volume car audio. These tools were eventually turned from the goal of creating interior intimacy, insulated from a noisy external world, to that of creating yet more aggressive noise. By creating an ideal listening space in a traveling semiprivate bubble, engineers paved the way for later audio enthusiasts to pack that bubble with superpowerful audio equipment until, finally, it burst.

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