reference for a new piece I think I'll call, "the Boom Box."
I listen to an NPR podcast called Latino USA, and they did an episode on Latinos in hip-hop, which was, sadly, a little lack-luster. I mean the podcast started by talking about Mellow Man Ace (who went to my high school by the way), if that’s your opener you know you’re struggling for content. To be fair they concluded with Cypress Hill and Big Pun so it wasn’t all bad. Anyway before I got too judgmental it made me think about my own role in hip-hop, and an image from Jr. High popped right into my head.
I’m lucky enough to have been born just early enough to witness the birth and growth of not only a brand new musical genre, but the culture it spawned. As I grew, it grew. And while as a high school and college student in the late 80s and 90s my relationship with hip-hop became complicated, in the mid-80s, as a brand new teenager, it was everything I wanted to be.
For Christmas one year I convinced my parents to buy me a low-rent boom box purchased in Los Angeles’ Santee Alley. (My mom used to go to Santee Alley way before it was cool. It’s where she purchased my irregular Levis at wholesale prices and my Chucks for exactly $19.) The boom-box I picked was chosen strictly for its size. It was the biggest they had. 6-inch speakers on either side of a high-speed-dubbing, dual-cassette deck. And lights, that when you cranked the volume would blink red to let you know you were thumping. It was a monster.
On my last day as a seventh grader we didn’t have any classes because the 8th graders were practicing for their Jr. High graduation. The rest of the school just kind of hung out on some bleachers the whole day. I loaded my boom-box with a fresh new cassette I had recorded off of KDAY’s Saturday Night Mixmaster show the weekend before and took it to school with me. That day I enjoyed a popularity I never had before or since. It was glorious.
But, the image that popped into my head during that Latino USA podcast was not the one of me surrounded by my fellow 6th and 7th graders as they played spin the brush (we didn’t have a bottle) to a soundtrack supplied by me. The image I remembered was the walk home. Alone, a 12 year old boy, blasting his boom-box through a quiet South Gate street, burdened by the weight of not only the electronics but of the 10-D-cell batteries it took to power them. I remember worrying that maybe I was bothering some residents in their home as my music and I blared into their homes, but that thought was quickly eclipsed by the realization that I was actually doing them a favor.