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Authors: George Prochnik
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battlefield experience with unpunctuated ecstasy. “Cannons gutting space with a chord
ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB
mutiny of 500 echoes smashing scattering it to infinity … Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely
taratatata
of the machine guns screaming a breath less under the stings slaps
traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb
weirdness …”
Marinetti’s rhapsody to war sounds like the birth of gangster rap.
Of all the sounds that the futurists fired praise upon, the noise of an accelerating car took first prize. Marinetti’s original manifesto records the hour of the movement’s awakening: “We went up to three snorting beasts (cars), to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.” The futurists’ launch happened to coincide with the moment when the Italian automobile industry under the leadership of Fiat achieved a level of glamour and commercial importance that made it a European industrial force. While the futurists were rising to prominence, Rome was becoming , in the estimation of some, the noisiest city on Earth—because of its car traffic. Marinetti idolized the car as nothing less than the metallic angel of the future’s annunciation: “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Speed. Noise … Noise. Speed. There’s an intrinsic relationshipbetween the two that the futurists reveled in. After all, it’s when an object vibrates quickly enough that motion becomes sound. A fast-moving life is a noisy life. A powerful machine is supposed to be loud. The ur-connection between acceleration and amplification idles under the hood of the boom-car phenomenon.
Long before there were boom cars, there were drag races. In 1989 Eddie Lopez, a chunky twenty-one-year-old trash collector from Long Beach, became perhaps the first boom-car driver ever to make a direct link between the energy released in racing and that discharged in “booming.” Justifying the $1,200 in noise fines he’d had to fork over to the police, on top of the $5,000 he’d sunk into his vehicle’s audio equipment, Lopez asked a
Los Angeles Times
reporter, “When hot-rodding was in, why did you want to speed?”
Hot-rodding is not dead, but there are incalculably more roads today on which it’s possible to boom than to race. And when people’s physical horizons feel constricted, there’s a tendency to want to expand acoustically. Early in the twentieth century, Theodor Lessing, a European writer and philosopher who became a major activist on behalf of silence, had already noted this phenomenon. “A coachman who cracks the whip, a maid who shakes out the bedding, a drummer who beats the drum, detect in their noises a personally enjoyable activity and a magnification of their own sphere of power.” Ecce the boom-car driver.
Though the boom box had historical precedents dating back to the 1920s, the loud portable radio—noise in motion—first hit the scene in a big way in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasthen that hip-hop and the boom box exploded together. Immortalized in the hands of Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
(the noise of Raheem’s boom box playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” inside Sal’s Pizzeria triggers the racial confrontation at the film’s climax), the boom box became a weapon of resistance against the system. It serves as a textbook illustration for how self-expression, when it happens in the form of noise, translates into self-assertion—which in turn threatens property boundaries. The bigger your sound, the more territory you dominate.
Boom cars first began to receive media attention in the late 1980s, when the phenomenon had already been gaining popularity for several years. Contests with names
ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB
mutiny of 500 echoes smashing scattering it to infinity … Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely
taratatata
of the machine guns screaming a breath less under the stings slaps
traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb
weirdness …”
Marinetti’s rhapsody to war sounds like the birth of gangster rap.
Of all the sounds that the futurists fired praise upon, the noise of an accelerating car took first prize. Marinetti’s original manifesto records the hour of the movement’s awakening: “We went up to three snorting beasts (cars), to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.” The futurists’ launch happened to coincide with the moment when the Italian automobile industry under the leadership of Fiat achieved a level of glamour and commercial importance that made it a European industrial force. While the futurists were rising to prominence, Rome was becoming , in the estimation of some, the noisiest city on Earth—because of its car traffic. Marinetti idolized the car as nothing less than the metallic angel of the future’s annunciation: “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Speed. Noise … Noise. Speed. There’s an intrinsic relationshipbetween the two that the futurists reveled in. After all, it’s when an object vibrates quickly enough that motion becomes sound. A fast-moving life is a noisy life. A powerful machine is supposed to be loud. The ur-connection between acceleration and amplification idles under the hood of the boom-car phenomenon.
Long before there were boom cars, there were drag races. In 1989 Eddie Lopez, a chunky twenty-one-year-old trash collector from Long Beach, became perhaps the first boom-car driver ever to make a direct link between the energy released in racing and that discharged in “booming.” Justifying the $1,200 in noise fines he’d had to fork over to the police, on top of the $5,000 he’d sunk into his vehicle’s audio equipment, Lopez asked a
Los Angeles Times
reporter, “When hot-rodding was in, why did you want to speed?”
Hot-rodding is not dead, but there are incalculably more roads today on which it’s possible to boom than to race. And when people’s physical horizons feel constricted, there’s a tendency to want to expand acoustically. Early in the twentieth century, Theodor Lessing, a European writer and philosopher who became a major activist on behalf of silence, had already noted this phenomenon. “A coachman who cracks the whip, a maid who shakes out the bedding, a drummer who beats the drum, detect in their noises a personally enjoyable activity and a magnification of their own sphere of power.” Ecce the boom-car driver.
Though the boom box had historical precedents dating back to the 1920s, the loud portable radio—noise in motion—first hit the scene in a big way in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasthen that hip-hop and the boom box exploded together. Immortalized in the hands of Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
(the noise of Raheem’s boom box playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” inside Sal’s Pizzeria triggers the racial confrontation at the film’s climax), the boom box became a weapon of resistance against the system. It serves as a textbook illustration for how self-expression, when it happens in the form of noise, translates into self-assertion—which in turn threatens property boundaries. The bigger your sound, the more territory you dominate.
Boom cars first began to receive media attention in the late 1980s, when the phenomenon had already been gaining popularity for several years. Contests with names
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