Ghetto Blaster Hall of Fame
Sharp VZ-2500, circa 1980s, from the Ghetto Blaster Hall of Fame. A good illustration of the cultural relativity of technology and/as fashion: Portable music equipment in the 1960s and 1970s prioritized the small size recently available due to cheap, mass produced, transistors; the late 1980s and 1990s reversed that trend, fully embracing the idea of massive, heavy, and loud; today, as
Ashley B. points out, we're reversing again, with mp3 players shrinking with each new generation.
(And those of us who lived through these trends still think about them nostalgically. Boomboxes made music a public rather than private event; they provided the context into which b-boys competed; they marked out territory sonically. I guess the equivalent today would be the Mustang 5.0 with ground-pounding bass, but the small interior space of a vehicle don't support the same types of community interaction. Or maybe I'm showing my age--I guess today it'd be an Escalade or a H2.)
[via
Notes from Somewhere Bizarre]
Posted by johndan at June 25, 2004 10:19 PM
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