Frantically, you run to the window to peer out into the night, expecting to spot an escaped pachyderm scraping gum off a hoof on your garage door. Relax. Everything's fine. It's just that blasted kid from down the street with the Honda hatchback and the car stereo loud enough to drown out land mines exploding in Beirut. Oh, and the bumper sticker, too. You know, the one proclaiming: "If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old."
ALL ACROSS AMERICA, around high schools, in shopping mall parking lots, around juvenile-detention facilities and, yes, on quiet suburban streets, there's a whole lotta shakin' going on. Blame it on rampant technology and teen-agers' perpetual need to let the wide world know they exist. New, super-powered car stereos--some packing up to 57 times more wattage than the average car radio--are the latest status symbols among today's attention-demanding teens. It's a macho, power-statement kinda thing, says Eric Stauffacher, manager of Audio Express in Phoenix, who regularly sells $900 stereos and $2,000 amplifiers to well-off 18- to 25-year-old males. There's "always one who has to have more power than the rest," Stauffacher exclaims. "It's like a contest." In other words, he who has the loudest system is the most def. (That's def as in cool, not to be confused with deaf, although the terms probably aren't mutually exclusive in this context.)
Not to be outdone by any of his customers, Stauffacher's store boasts its own mobile monster, outfitted with the absolute state-of-the-art amplifiers, boosters and woofers. "Our van puts out about 98 decibels," he beams proudly. "A normal rock concert is like 94 dB's. Sometimes," he adds wistfully, "you can actually see the glass in the windows moving in and out."
Naturally, no one arms cars with such artillery to listen to Roger Whittaker or Zamfir. So to service this growing army of volume-crazed cruisers, a whole new form of music has sprung up, extra heavy on the bass and extra grating on the nerves of harried homeowners.
Called simply "bass music" by its practitioners and devotees, this rap hybrid originated in Miami's black community in the early Eighties. There, rival mobile deejays--augmenting already beat-heavy rap records with their own secret recipes of electronic drum machines and power boosters--would stage regular "volume wars" at urban block parties. The loud, rude sound caught on with even the most whitebread kids uptown, who began buying up bass cassettes more as awesome stereo system demonstration tapes than as statements of personal taste.
"It's music you can `feel,'" exclaims Miamian Henry Stone, whose Hot Productions label has already produced several regional and national bass music hits, including L'Trimm's "Cars With the Boom," the genre's first bona fide anthem. "You can dance to it in a club, but your whole body feels it when you're in a car." Not surprisingly, bass music has begun infiltrating the rest of the country via what Stone calls "the car states. California, Texas, Arizona--states where everybody drives everywhere, you know."
This music doesn't have "legs," as show-biz industry vernacular might term it. It's got wheels. "I expect it'll really take off once school's out," says Stone, "when the kids get into their cars and practically live in 'em all summer."
That's an optimistic prediction for both the makers of bass music and Pyle Pounder Turbo 300 Amps. But it's a truly horrifying thought to the average homeowner, who already regards this onslaught of rolling Studio 54's as a suburban menace just one notch below uncontrollable swarms of baseboard-brunching termites and neighbors who fancy piling old oily Chevy parts against the front-yard hedge.
"OH, I HATE THOSE KIDS," grimaces a stylish woman in her late twenties who lives with her husband in what was once a perfectly peaceful neighborhood in northeast Phoenix. "My whole house shakes when they go by. It wouldn't be so bad if they would just learn how to use an equalizer!"
"You can't even hear the songs they're playing," complains a forty-year-old writer from Scottsdale. "All you hear is the bass. I mean, it's not even a question of whether you like the music or not. It's whether or not you like the sensation of living in a root-canal operation!"
Welcome to the last-cool-night-of-spring neighborhood barbecue blowout and bash, 1989. Gathered around the freshly mowed bermuda, sitting in a circle on a motley assortment of patio furniture (it was a BYO lawn chair affair this night), these twelve to fifteen married couples in their thirties and early forties sample light beers and trade tips on sprinkler spacing and bug spraying. And vent their spleens on that kid with the Toyota 4x4 who keeps adding inappropriate Sensurround to the nightly prime-time viewing.
