Cars with the Boom: Identity and Territory in American Postwar

&DUVZLWKWKH%RRP,GHQWLW\DQG7HUULWRU\LQ$PHULFDQ 3RVWZDU$XWRPRELOH6RXQG 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 Access provided by username 'llane' (21 Feb 2015 00:01 GMT) 05_Morris 326–53.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 5/10/14 6:58 AM Page 326 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 some- times 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 some- thing 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 com- ing 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/14/5502-0003/326–53 326 05_Morris 326–53.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 5/10/14 6:58 AM Page 327 MORRISK|KCars with the Boom 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 con- tinue 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—micro- phones 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 327 05_Morris 326–53.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 5/10/14 6:58 AM Page 328 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 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 refine- ment 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, oth- ers 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. 328 05_Morris 326–53.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 5/10/14 6:58 AM Page 329 MORRISK|KCars with the Boom 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 peri- ods 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.

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